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Wednesday! A Reading Meme
Aug. 23rd, 2017 07:15 amWhat I’ve Finished Reading
Tenth of December, a short story collection by George Saunders. Comedies of redemption, mostly, told in a style that’s meant to riff on middle-American business jargon and horror-muffling cliché. This style can get a little repetitive if you make the mistake that I did and read the entire collection in one sitting.
Unfortunately, or however you want to take it, noticing that Saunders' style can get a little repetitive is no armor against 1) laughing like a drunk hyena, or 2) sobbing helplessly into my shirt.
They are stories about hapless losers who manage to do the right thing at enormous personal cost, and sometimes also about hapless losers who are too afraid of losing what little they still have to do the right thing by some other hapless loser. It might be good or it might just be telling me what I want to hear. I’m in no position to judge. George Saunders really seems to like people, for all we can't get it together, and I don't quite trust how much I like George Saunders. I worry that I'm just allowing my sentimentality and shallowness to be expertly pandered to. If I were a little smarter and a little less self-absorbed, I keep thinking, I would have no patience for this wide-eyed we're-all-in-this-together business. But I'm not. I like us, too, for all the good it does anyone.
(I ought to have quoted a passage or something, but I made the wrong choices and now I'm running late for work, so maybe later).
What I’m Reading Now
Freedom Riders begins with an account of the first interstate bus desegregation test ride and prototype for the 1961 actions, CORE’s “Journey of Reconciliation” in 1947, which I will admit right now I didn’t know existed until I bought a giant book about a different bus desegregation test ride.
So far we’ve met a few of the leading CORE activists, including the headstrong and likable Bayard Rustin, who was expelled from Wilberforce College in the 1930s for homosexuality and pacifism, and will later travel to Montgomery during the bus boycott to hector Martin Luther King into giving up his gun.
Plus: Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym. Even though this was shelved in the “mystery” section of the bookstore, I think this is going to be a very mild academic satire with no murders in it, in which the only mystery is the human heart and possibly also “what’s the deal with anthropologists?” The latter is still up in the air. Most of the characters are anthropologists in a college program, but even though they do a lot of talking about anthropology, it never gets beyond the general. I think they’re only anthropologists for the “who observes the observers” factor. As readers we’re supposed to enjoy the realization that we are the superior-feeling outsiders to these superior-feeling outsiders.
But the satire is so mild that none of this really gets off the ground, and it settles into a cozy vagueness in which we all have tea in the library and a barely-there love triangle disappoints all of its participants in slow motion. I’ve also realized that I tend to automatically sort any description of a college into the “satire” box of my brain, so it’s just possible that this very gentle and semi-specific satire is not intended as one at all.
What I Plan to Read Next
Room at the Top, finally! And then maybe some more Henry Williamsons, or something else from 99 Novels. I’ve done hardly any this year; too focused on trying to clear my bookshelves.
Tenth of December, a short story collection by George Saunders. Comedies of redemption, mostly, told in a style that’s meant to riff on middle-American business jargon and horror-muffling cliché. This style can get a little repetitive if you make the mistake that I did and read the entire collection in one sitting.
Unfortunately, or however you want to take it, noticing that Saunders' style can get a little repetitive is no armor against 1) laughing like a drunk hyena, or 2) sobbing helplessly into my shirt.
They are stories about hapless losers who manage to do the right thing at enormous personal cost, and sometimes also about hapless losers who are too afraid of losing what little they still have to do the right thing by some other hapless loser. It might be good or it might just be telling me what I want to hear. I’m in no position to judge. George Saunders really seems to like people, for all we can't get it together, and I don't quite trust how much I like George Saunders. I worry that I'm just allowing my sentimentality and shallowness to be expertly pandered to. If I were a little smarter and a little less self-absorbed, I keep thinking, I would have no patience for this wide-eyed we're-all-in-this-together business. But I'm not. I like us, too, for all the good it does anyone.
(I ought to have quoted a passage or something, but I made the wrong choices and now I'm running late for work, so maybe later).
What I’m Reading Now
Freedom Riders begins with an account of the first interstate bus desegregation test ride and prototype for the 1961 actions, CORE’s “Journey of Reconciliation” in 1947, which I will admit right now I didn’t know existed until I bought a giant book about a different bus desegregation test ride.
So far we’ve met a few of the leading CORE activists, including the headstrong and likable Bayard Rustin, who was expelled from Wilberforce College in the 1930s for homosexuality and pacifism, and will later travel to Montgomery during the bus boycott to hector Martin Luther King into giving up his gun.
Plus: Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym. Even though this was shelved in the “mystery” section of the bookstore, I think this is going to be a very mild academic satire with no murders in it, in which the only mystery is the human heart and possibly also “what’s the deal with anthropologists?” The latter is still up in the air. Most of the characters are anthropologists in a college program, but even though they do a lot of talking about anthropology, it never gets beyond the general. I think they’re only anthropologists for the “who observes the observers” factor. As readers we’re supposed to enjoy the realization that we are the superior-feeling outsiders to these superior-feeling outsiders.
But the satire is so mild that none of this really gets off the ground, and it settles into a cozy vagueness in which we all have tea in the library and a barely-there love triangle disappoints all of its participants in slow motion. I’ve also realized that I tend to automatically sort any description of a college into the “satire” box of my brain, so it’s just possible that this very gentle and semi-specific satire is not intended as one at all.
What I Plan to Read Next
Room at the Top, finally! And then maybe some more Henry Williamsons, or something else from 99 Novels. I’ve done hardly any this year; too focused on trying to clear my bookshelves.
