Reading confessional 2011: January-February

[muckefuck]

So here's my first attempt to spur my pleasure reading by publicly keeping track of it. I meant to kick off last month, but as I only managed to start and finish one novel in all of January, it left me too disheartened to post. So this month I stacked the deck with some short story collections I was already mostly finished with.

Completed

• O'Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. This is the biggest cheat of all. When I first read it three years ago, I quit barely twenty pages from the end. I can't say for sure why, probably because I was enjoying it too damn much to want to see it end. Obviously, I'll have to reread it now all in one go. Oh, woe is me!
• Muñoz, Manuel. Zigzagger. Interesting stuff. He's got some real technical flair and it's refreshing to read about gay life from a perspective that is poor, rural, and Latino rather than white, privileged, and middle-class. I'll be interested to see how he matures.
• Dubus, Andre. Selected stories. Ultimately, I'm glad I picked him up. He writes solid emotional portraits of interesting ordinary people. I'm curious to see what he can do at novel length.
• O'Brien, Edna. A fanatic heart : selected stories. Amazing. She shows the greatest range of any of the short story writers in this list, everything from sordid tales of growing up in rural Ireland to meditations on the ennui of the jet set in Capri. This is who I should've been reading instead of wasting my time with Nuala O'Faolain.
• Jin, Ha. The bridegroom. A cheat that backfired. Turns out it's so long since I began this that--with one exception--I couldn't remember what I'd read before and what I hadn't, so I had to (re)read them all.

Commenced and completed

• [January] Carey, Peter. True history of the Kelly Gang. A tour-de-force. I didn't think I had a lot of patience left for the noble outlaw archetype but it turns out--as with so many things--I just hadn't seen it handled with the requisite skill before. Heartbreaking without being sentimental, which is huge in my ledger.
• Su Tong. Rice. I'm not sure why anyone writes a book purely to show how unpleasant people can be to each other; I'm even less sure why anyone reads them. I was halfway through this before I realised there wasn't even any catharsis to be had, but sheer doggedness and the propulsive melodrama carried me through.
• Lewis, Geoffrey. The Turkish language reform : a catastrophic success. Of course I found this fascinating, but I'd like to think that anyone with an interest in history and culture would find it worthwhile. I mean, how do you go about complete overhauling a language spoken by millions and what effect does that have on a society where it is the chief medium of communication?
• Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul : memories and the city. Of the three Pamuk novels I've read, the only one I thought was truly outstanding (My name is Red) was set in Istanbul and incorporated many of his childhood reminiscences. So I thought I'd enjoy this autobiographical work and I did.

Commenced

• Jin, Ha. A good fall. This hasn't grabbed me yet, but it could be partly a problem of expectations, since I didn't realise going in that all the stories are set in our Northeast rather than China's. That also makes it suffer by comparison to Dubus (who I didn't know going in wrote more about the Bay State than Bayou Country).
• O'Connor, Frank. My father's son

Comments

[mlr.livejournal.com]

[sheepishly comments]
Have you ever read At Swim, Two Boys?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I pretty much lost all interest in reading it when I found out that--the title notwithstanding--it doesn't actually reference O'Brien's work in any way. At Swim-Two-Birds is an incredible post-modern mashup of a novel with wit and exuberance to spare. At swim, two boys is, as I understand it, another conventional coming-out-and-of-age story. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[mlr.livejournal.com]

Probably not too far off there, though it did lead me to ...Birds (purchased but still unread). It has aspirations of one kind or another and seemed like an honest effort. Someone else might have found it pretentious - but I didn't. I remember buying several Dublin maps while reading it, so I would know exactly where the things were he was describing.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

What's O'Neill been doing for the last ten years? It looks as if he got so much praise heaped on him for that book ("the natural successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett"--I mean, really?) that it just paralysed him.

If I'm going to read a gay contemporary Irish writer, I'll make it Colm Tóibín. In fact, I bought monshu one of his books with the thought of reading it myself after he's finished.

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff, thanks for the notes. I now want to read...well practically all of this

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I thought about starring my recommendations, but obviously they'd be slightly different for each person I know. But it's hard to think of any list that Flann O'Brien and Peter Carey wouldn't be at the top of. A trusted coworker tells me that all of Carey's novel are brilliant in different ways; I'll have a better sense of that after I finished the book of his short fiction I bought. And O'Brien is simply a master.