Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Nick Hornby, Slam
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures in Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale
Eduardo Martinez, Memoirs of a Medico
Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co and Puck of Pook's Hill
Books attempted and failed:
Javier Marias, Tu rostro manana
D.F. Wallace, Infinite Jest
yes yes yes i'm behind, whatever, get over it. I'm still reading, it's just that it gets too painful to admit to the rest of the world that a) I spend so much time rereading children's books when things aren't going well (it helps me to sleep, what can I say) and b) when I do read adult books, I can't for the life of me think of anything intelligent to say about them. I am reminded of Sarah Vowell's frustration trying to write a music review at one point: she listened to the album she was supposed to be reviewing, decided she 'quite liked the ballads,' wrote down that she quite liked the ballads, and then thought, crap, I have to come up with another five hundred words worth of stuff to say.
I'm disguising Infinite Jest as being by "D.F." Wallace, rather than "David Foster" just so you think it's a whole new book that I got stuck on. Hopefully it'll fool you.
Javier Marias was a recommendation from my sister's boyfriend, and I made the cocky mistake of thinking that I could read just fine in Spanish, thanks very much, and it turns out his prose is just slow moving enough that the addition of my slow reading, (combined with trips to the dictionary, or more usually, skipping over of words I don't know) makes the project look, well, doomed. It's still next to my bed, but I'm not holding my breath.
The first childhood-regression, insomnia-battling books were the Kipling (which I'm not going to talk about except to say that they hold a completely peculiar hold over me, like nostalgia for something I never experienced - is that possible? somehow I feel it was simply an oversight on the part of Fate that I didn't actually attend a boy's boarding school in Devon around the turn of the century. I should have. I would have been fine. Cigar smoking and pantomimes and evil games masters and all. I would have ate it up. (Totally coincidentally, I was given an actual cigar the other day by a proud new father, which left me quite nonplussed. Are there any female family medicine doctors who smoke cigars? If so, I would like to meet them. I gave it to a male family medicine doctor who apparently does smoke cigars.) Next the J.K. Rowling, which I am also not going to talk about, except to say that I now class Harry Potter in the same category as the Beatles, in that I can't even think about whether objectively like them or not, they are just sort of absorbed into my consciousness because I have used them as insomnia-battlers so many times. It's a little embarrassing, so we'll move on.
Much less squeamish talking about the Arthur Ransome books - so, so, so lovely. I didn't like them particularly when I was little, and I can't remember quite why - did I not get all the references? did my father fall asleep half way through sentences while reading them to us? (yes)
were they insufficiently dangerous? (probably). The thing that's nice about them is that they consist of plausible adventures that normal kids could have that do not involve losing parents in tragic accidents/smugglers/spies/saving the planet at the end of the day. They go camping, they accidentally hit a rock and sink their boat and all their stuff gets wet, their mum lets them continue to camp in a cave they find nearby, their uncle helps them repair the boat, they have tea. You feel as if it wouldn't be all that difficult to pull off, and yet it's all just adventure enough that you think, yeah, that would be fun to do that! I'd like to go sailing and then have tea and crumpets!
The Elif Batuman book is quite fun, although I will say that a) the cover is misleading, and makes it looks like a laff riot, which it is not and b) you have to cross over to the dark side and Believe, as all literature majors seem to, that Obscure Literary Topics have real meaning and weight in the world today, and that the symbolism of garden spades in Chekhov's writing during the time period January 1891 to April 1892 is a Totally Reasonable thing to write a 300+ page Ph.D. about. That said, she's appealingly goofy and seldom takes herself too seriously, and the book zooms around between her disastrous love life, her disastrous academic career, and her disastrous dayjobs that she does to support numbers one and two.
Most recently, I read my great-uncle's memoir of his career during the Civil War in Spain with bits of WWII thrown in for good measure. It was interesting, up to a point: his daughter had recently published a biography of him, touting him as the latest unsung WWII hero for having helped establish an escape route through Spain for war refugees escaping from France, as part of his work as a secret service agent for the British M6, (and the snippets of her book which I read were so painfully badly written I couldn't get beyond halfway through chapter 1, so I'm not counting that), but the story itself sounded interesting enough to be worth reading a (slightly) more literary and hopefully less biased account of it, so I found his book online and ordered it. At least as a young man, he seems to have been quite open to different grubby experiences (at one point he volunteers in the coalmines, helping keep the fires or something going in support of the striking miners so that they won't have too much work to do when they go back to work), and mucking about in boats in his native Galicia, but a tremendous portion of the book is dedicated to how incredibly important he is, and what a famous surgeon he is, and how many people are so tremendously grateful to him, and how buddy buddy he is with the Spanish royalty, etc., which gets seriously icky after a while. The part that takes place during the Spanish civil war is also massively uncomfortable to read; his sympathies are quite clearly with Franco's government (representing order and civilization) and against the Republic (wild-eyed communists who rape/pillage/burn/destroy everything they come across) and it was uncomfortable on two counts: one, that someone I am related to could be so right-wing and two, that there must have been at least a small amount of truth in some of the incidents that he describes, because he was, after all, there: the republicans probably _did_ do their fair share of raping/pillaging/burning/destroying, and just because history has chosen to remember them as the virtuous losers and Franco as an evil git, doesn't mean that the republicans didn't behave badly at the time. If nothing else, the book is a lesson in how not to write a memoir, anyway: if you tell anything but horrible stories about yourself, you come off sounding completely conceited, and if you tell horrible stories about yourself, you come off sounding completely conceited anyway because chances are it's probably false modesty. I mostly ended up feeling sorry for my great-aunt and my mother's cousin, who somehow bought in to the whole facade of what a Great Man he was, and you just think, oh dude, get over yourself. We're none of us that special. And even if the queen of Spain did think you were the cat's meow (which she probably didn't, she was probably just being polite), guess what? She's not actually that special, either.
Anyway. Enough ranting and raving from the proletariat. It's time for this pleb to have a bath and go to bed.
