Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
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Version 0 of 1. Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week. AggieH has just read Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera: It’s so good that I can’t prove it. I couldn’t, wouldn’t tear myself away from reading to make notes. So without the aid of substantiating quotes, I’ll just boldly claim that it’s terrific. I didn’t think we needed another intergenerational story of an immigrant family, but it turns out we did. The story moves naturally between the telling personal details and the general experience of being an immigrant and being the child of immigrants. Apparently Sathnam Sanghera’s written a memoir before, but this is his first work of fiction. It’s gone straight on to my short list of mature, fully-formed debuts. Also on that: Michelle de Kretser, Yiyun Li, Eimear McBride, Chimamanda Adichie, Zia Haider Rahman, Kjersti Annesdottir Skomsvold. Read the rest of the comment here. Sara Richards has finished Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski, subtitled “Daydreaming and Smoking around America with Interruptions”: The subtitle is so ironic and so sad because Diski, a long time smoker, is now diagnosed with terminal lung cancer about which she writes with honesty in the London Review of Books. This isn’t a thick volume but it took me a long time to read because I needed time to absorb the different layers that this part travel book part autobiography and memoir presented. Diski undertook two different journeys in America in pursuit of being alone in a crowd and spent much of her time in the smoking cars, some quite seedy others plush, meeting people (“miscreants”) with whom she connected, although that had not been her intention, and about whom she writes so descriptively that I felt I was sitting with her dreading the opening of another conversation, the making of yet more unsought connections. Two quotations will give a flavour of her writing: I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling on the echo of a closing speech, living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false because there you still are, the reader, the observer, the listener with a gaping chasm in front of you left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it. Then it’s done and gone, abandoning you ... Journeys come to an end before they end, just as they begin before they begin – with the arrival of anticipation. Diski might be one of those writers about whom readers differ but I have enjoyed her work and I respect the honesty with which she writes about her very difficult young life and why she travels but doesn’t write “travel books.” Taylor Michelle Ferrara Gerard is reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: This book and Plath’s astute, social and self-observations help me to maintain my sanity in the midst and heights of the mundane. SydneyH completed A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul. It’s so good that I can’t prove it. I couldn’t, wouldn’t tear myself away from reading to make notes. @TimHannigan told me that he found it “troubling”, and I can see his point. Naipaul appears to be prejudiced to basically everyone except white males. On the question of ethics, I’m defiantly tolerant of unethical novels, provided that they are of a higher order aesthetically. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, I feel, is a great novel, so I don’t care too much that some people find it an unethical text. A Bend in the River is good, but it isn’t remarkable. I feel that the scenery didn’t lend itself to the prose in the way that A House for Mr Biswas did, though there were occasional good passages. We enjoyed a recurring topic on this blog: abandoning books. Some of the opinions were: I always used to make sure a finish a book even if it was like pulling teeth, but I realised, life’s too short and there are far too many books out there to persevere with something that you think is awful. –Perry22 There is no reason to soldier on. There are so many wonderful books out there that you will never even hear of. Search for them and don’t waste another second on this one. As others have said: life is short. –ItsAnOutrage2 Learning to abandon books liberated my reading. I’ve been known to abandon short stories. Other times, I get quite far in before losing the will. –AggieH EnidColeslaw_ praised Zadie Smith’s genius as a writer – but also as a reader: Zadie Smith is a fine writer, but she is also, and probably first of all, a reader with a keen mind. In her collection of essays Changing My Mind, she notably dissects the “gifts of David Foster Wallace” in his fiction, questions her situation as a writer and a reader between Nabokov’s idea of an authorial supremacy and Barthes’ dismissal of the author, and discusses how E.M. Forster has been terribly underrated for the past couple of decades. She also talks, more casually, but without losing her insight, of her own environment, of growing up in a biracial family and interrogates why she sees herself first and foremost as a black person. There is a lovely chapter about her father and his love of self-deprecating comedy intertwined with his pessimism outlook on life, which she sees as intrinsically British: No good can come of this. This had been Harvey’s reaction to all news, no matter how objectively good that news might be, from the historic entrance of a Smith child into an actual university to the birthing of babies and the winning of prizes. When he became ill, he took a perversely British satisfaction in the diagnosis of cancer: absolutely nothing good could come of this, and the certainty of it seemed almost to calm him. Speaking of links ... Interesting links about books and reading If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog. And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know. |