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What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
On vacation last week, I elected to reread "The Stand" by Stephen King, which is a book that I love. It's incredible to me that the unabridged version, which runs about 1100 pages, is something that I can run through in a week of relatively light reading. This is one of the books that is a great example of what I love from King - a great concept, gritty storytelling, and a solid set of characters muddling through a set of terrible circumstances. M-O-O-N, that spells delighted, and that's what I was at the end of my read. Now I'm watching the recent TV adaptation - I'm pretty happy with it thus far.
I'm going to try to dive back into Brandon Sanderson when I'm done. So many people love his books that I really have to figure out how to dive into them and give him another chance.
Earlier this week, I read Yelena Moskovich's Virtuoso. I found it beautiful and moving, both thrillerlike and meditative at once. The structure of the book was enrapturing, with the callbacks and callfores and the refusal to witness an event from a single perspective. The discussions of violation felt a little over the top, or at least went over my head, and the racial elements felt shoehorned. But in such a short book, I really came to care for Aimée, Zorka, and Jana.
End of Virtuoso quasispoiler question
What happened to Amy? I'm fully lost in those last few pages, and am, honestly, a little afraid of defogging them.Then, having been a little teased by a comparison of Moskovich as an "eastern european, lesbian Cormac McCarthy" and not quite getting that, I picked up Outer Dark. This is my third book of his, following The Road and The Orchard Keeper. Compared to his first novel, this was a hundred times more readable, and the plot, even if oddly shaped and obtuse in its own right, infinitely more interesting. While parts of me miss the jangling sonorous passages of McCarthy's imitation of Faulkner, I'm glad there was something to actually sink my teeth into with this one. Pardon.
Thematically though, this book is darker, by far, than the Road. The tension in scenes is only let off by the sheer idiocy of some characters, and at some point that stops being funny.
Spoilers for Outer Dark
I can't help but feel this was a story of a man, refusing to sleep in the bed he made, and in so driving away each and every opportunity for peace, before being confronted with the only remainder: the three. Rinthy's victimization is nearly total, but Culla is constantly thinking "someone should tell that old man about the swamp" while waiting to see what happens if he doesn't. The fate of the child was grim enough, but that final scene drove home that Culla, our supposed Adam, is fundamentally incapable of good.With those two bundles of joy behind me, I decided to give Nabokov's Pnin a go. It's a lot more fun, but, frankly, who cares about a campus novel? I'm following through on the reading for the simply delightful word-by-word prose. The way that Nabokov performs verbal acrobatics, with internally rhyming sentences and unprovoked spoonerisms all over this otherwise straightforward story is wonderful, I just wish the plot felt like it was going anywhere.
Finished Pnin. I'm not sure why, but I'm appreciating it a lot more in hindsight than I did in the moment. Something about Pnin's dedication to his own lens came through in those last chapters, maybe.
On to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by Joyce. I picked it up a few months ago, and really struggled getting through the first chapter. The stunted sentences kept catching in my head, the conventions regarding time jumps didn't convey the intention, I'm not sure. This time though, I got a lot more out of it. I'm excited to finish the book now.