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Actually On Wednesday Reading Wednesday
Jul. 17th, 2019 06:22 pmOk, so it's not "tomorrow" anymore, but it is technically still Wednesday!
What I've Finished Reading
Since it took me a month to read The Lockwood Concern, I decided I had to catch up on some 99 Novels on returning home, so I went to the library and got The Late Bourgeois World, The Vendor of Sweets, and The Last Gentleman and read them all in about 4 days. This was a serious mistake, because they're all good books, and now I'm going to short-change them by rattling them off in a careless way.
Jagan, the titular vendor in The Vendor of Sweets, is an extremely loveable crank who runs a sweet-shop. He doesn't eat sweets himself, because he has a meticulously cranky Gandhian diet program that cures all ills, but nevertheless believes that those misguided people who want to eat sweets should have the best sweets possible. His no-good son goes off to America and returns with an American wife and a scheme to sell fiction-writing machines, guaranteed 50x more efficient than getting stories from your grandma! From there, things slowly get weirder.
There are no sci-fi elements in The Late Bourgeois World, which is a story about unhappy white liberals in apartheid-era South Africa - just lots and lots of morally untenable situations neatly packed into a small space. Gordimer's prose isn't so much a razor as a finger gently and insistently prodding a nasty bruise.
The Last Gentleman is the oddest and the most ambiguous of the three books (and twice as long as the other two put together), and I'm still not sure what I think of it. The main character is a hapless young man from the South who goes North and gets himself mixed up in a family of rich existential-crisis-prone Southerners who might have been kicked out of a Flannery O'Conner novel for not being loathsome enough. You can see why Walker Percy liked A Confederacy of Dunces so much (though this one might be a little more durably funny and sad): he and Toole clearly share a love of unsatisfiying picaresques and the unbelievable ways people really talk.
What I'm Reading Now
Giles Goat-Boy is an experiment that I may have been born too late to appreciate. It's nuts, but so far not exhiliratingly nuts. It concerns a young man raised as a goat (and subsequently suffering an identity crisis) in a world where the microcosm of the university has metastisized into a regular-cosm (in much the same way that everyone in the generation ship eventually forgets it's a ship and gets angry if you try to talk about "outside"). People use "Flunk you!" as a curse and sing hymns about the distant joys of Graduation, and so on. But this is only page 50 or so of 710, so we'll see how it goes.
I might give up on The Stone Raft; I haven't decided yet. Saramago's writing style (or the translation thereof) is getting on my nerves.
The Ups and Downs of Living in an Age of Abundance
This morning I went through some of my books to see if there were any I could give away to a prison books distributor, and sent a few emails to check if certain things were wanted. I found a few, but unfortunately my buying patterns don't align very well with their needs. I have way too many hardcover books and books that were in bad condition when I bought them. Happily, poetry is in demand and I have a decent number of good-condition paperback poetry collections to send.
Yesterday, I took a couple of books to the library free shelf to give to fate. Most of the books on the shelf were not too tempting, but I did take away a small Pelican paperback called Music 1950:
What I Plan to Read Next
I got a few more of the 99 Novels from the library - and when I'm done with this batch, I'll have only nineteen left to go! And while some of them, including the current Giles Goat-Boy, are very long, none of them are 15-novel sequences in disguise.
What I've Finished Reading
Since it took me a month to read The Lockwood Concern, I decided I had to catch up on some 99 Novels on returning home, so I went to the library and got The Late Bourgeois World, The Vendor of Sweets, and The Last Gentleman and read them all in about 4 days. This was a serious mistake, because they're all good books, and now I'm going to short-change them by rattling them off in a careless way.
Jagan, the titular vendor in The Vendor of Sweets, is an extremely loveable crank who runs a sweet-shop. He doesn't eat sweets himself, because he has a meticulously cranky Gandhian diet program that cures all ills, but nevertheless believes that those misguided people who want to eat sweets should have the best sweets possible. His no-good son goes off to America and returns with an American wife and a scheme to sell fiction-writing machines, guaranteed 50x more efficient than getting stories from your grandma! From there, things slowly get weirder.
There are no sci-fi elements in The Late Bourgeois World, which is a story about unhappy white liberals in apartheid-era South Africa - just lots and lots of morally untenable situations neatly packed into a small space. Gordimer's prose isn't so much a razor as a finger gently and insistently prodding a nasty bruise.
The Last Gentleman is the oddest and the most ambiguous of the three books (and twice as long as the other two put together), and I'm still not sure what I think of it. The main character is a hapless young man from the South who goes North and gets himself mixed up in a family of rich existential-crisis-prone Southerners who might have been kicked out of a Flannery O'Conner novel for not being loathsome enough. You can see why Walker Percy liked A Confederacy of Dunces so much (though this one might be a little more durably funny and sad): he and Toole clearly share a love of unsatisfiying picaresques and the unbelievable ways people really talk.
What I'm Reading Now
Giles Goat-Boy is an experiment that I may have been born too late to appreciate. It's nuts, but so far not exhiliratingly nuts. It concerns a young man raised as a goat (and subsequently suffering an identity crisis) in a world where the microcosm of the university has metastisized into a regular-cosm (in much the same way that everyone in the generation ship eventually forgets it's a ship and gets angry if you try to talk about "outside"). People use "Flunk you!" as a curse and sing hymns about the distant joys of Graduation, and so on. But this is only page 50 or so of 710, so we'll see how it goes.
I might give up on The Stone Raft; I haven't decided yet. Saramago's writing style (or the translation thereof) is getting on my nerves.
The Ups and Downs of Living in an Age of Abundance
This morning I went through some of my books to see if there were any I could give away to a prison books distributor, and sent a few emails to check if certain things were wanted. I found a few, but unfortunately my buying patterns don't align very well with their needs. I have way too many hardcover books and books that were in bad condition when I bought them. Happily, poetry is in demand and I have a decent number of good-condition paperback poetry collections to send.
Yesterday, I took a couple of books to the library free shelf to give to fate. Most of the books on the shelf were not too tempting, but I did take away a small Pelican paperback called Music 1950:
A comment on outstanding events and a general picture of what has taken place in the musical world during the last year. All branches of the art of music -- aesthetics, history, technique, and criticism -- are discussed by leading critics. An annual publication which succeeds Penguin Music Magazine.
What I Plan to Read Next
I got a few more of the 99 Novels from the library - and when I'm done with this batch, I'll have only nineteen left to go! And while some of them, including the current Giles Goat-Boy, are very long, none of them are 15-novel sequences in disguise.
