Started today: Grace, Fallen from, by Marianne Boruch.
Recently completed: The March, by E.L. Doctorow, and The Sea, by John Banville. Doctorow pulls off the trick of making General Sherman a sympathetic character and does his usual great job of juggling characters, philosophies, points of view. An engaging mosaic. The Sea was my introduction to Banville and I wondered how I missed him before. He's prolific, some 10-12 novels. I loved this book--it teems with sensuality, energy, and obsessiveness.
Upcoming: Banville's The Book of Evidence, and (yes) To the Lighthouse. I don't know why, but reading Banville's fluid excursions into and out of memory and back again made me think of Virginia Woolf, and then I remembered trying to read Jacob's Room as an undergraduate and being baffled. But years later I read A Room of One's Own and found it engaging, and then a few more years later I read Cunningham's The Hours, and I began to understand a little more of where she was coming from. Then I taught "The Mark on the Wall" in American Lit. and thought "Aha!" So now, soon, finally, To the Lighthouse. If that goes well, perhaps Mrs. Dalloway.
The best thing I've read this year, I believe, is The Road by Cormac McCarthy--relentless and grim and beautiful, and soon to be a major motion picture starring Viggo Mortensen. Not far behind is An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke--morbidly funny or funnily morbid.
No rhyme, no reason to my reading habits. In the last two years, much more history and fiction, and that's intentional. Less poetry, and that's probably one reason my own writing has--well, I was going to say stalled, but it hasn't really. Writing blurbs about baseball games (for pay) is a different, um, ballgame, but it still counts, doesn't it? Even though it's no Banville.
Reading that will never be, at least for a while, despite my wishes for it to be so: Ulysses, Moby Dick (started twice, never finished), The Scarlet Letter, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I could go on.
3 comments:
Don't feel bad, Southern Man. I was envied/admired by my fellow M.A. peers for managing to pass ALL my exams and defenses...without having ready Moby Dick. And my concentration was American Lit. :-P However, I do plan to read it. When I'm deathly bored and in the hospital with a knee replacement at age 82 or something.
I've tried to read Woolf so many times, and failed. But maybe there's hope.
And why is my word verification FXUPUFU? "Fucks up you fu?"
Oh, sorry, that was "without having read." Damn, I'm getting as bad as my students. [sigh]
And I do still want to read the book on Lincoln. I heard an interview with the author on NPR and decided it'd be a great read.
*So* many gaps in my reading: the abovesaid, plus, let's see, Tom Sawyer, and more Shakespeare than I care to admit. I never read Hamlet until I was prepping for my comps.
But in high school I read nearly all of Michener's Hawaii for a book report--voluntarily. Some 900 pages, that one. And there was a time in middle school when I read nothing but sports biographies. Ask me anything you want about Billy Martin.
The Lincoln book is worth the time. The dude presses his point too hard sometimes, but it's a good point.
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