Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including two great books about very different big cities, very very French novels, a reader who is going through all of Nabokov chronologically in 2016, and excellent reads for the rainy days of early spring.
paulburns finished EL Doctorow’s World’s Fair:
A wonderfully evocative book about a Jewish childhood in New York between the wars. Doctorow’s superb sense of place re New York reminded me a little of James T Farrell’s sense of place of Chicago in the Studs Lonigan books, though, in this book anyway, Doctorow is a much gentler writer. That’s three of his books I’ve read now and am determined to get some others. To date I have found Doctorow a very easy read.
... a book that is so French it it had me grinning ear from ear! And wanting to immediately watch a Louis Malle film. I thought a lot about why I liked this so much, and I came to the conclusion, in a hairs-raising-on-the-back-of-my-neck kind of way, that it was a rather macabre interest – a dawning sense of recognition of girls I used to lust after as an arty farty teen, and into my twenties, and, shame-facedly, beyond. Thank god I left those days behind. Anyway, a light read – great for a single sitting in a cafe/bar – about relatively unlikable self absorbed bourgeoisie playing games with each other.
This year I’ve set myself a project of reading most of Nabokov’s fiction chronologically from the beginning with Brian Boyd’s great biography as a companion. Over the years I’ve read Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin each at least twice as well as a couple of his other novels, but realized I hadn’t read any of his early works written originally in Russian or his short stories.
So far I’ve gotten to about 1929 and it has been a real pleasure. I just finished The Defense (which was marvelous and a clear leap forward in his stylistic development) after previously reading Mary and King, Queen, Knave, all for the first time. I’ve also read the first 350 pages or so of the biography and the stories written along the way (which have been uneven, to say the least), which have included a few gems such as An Affair of Honor and A Guide to Berlin.
I, City by Pavel Brycz is a wonderful little book from Prague based Twisted Spoon Press. It is an engaging series of vignettes narrated by the city of Most, an industrial centre north of Prague. Through tales about its people, that city comes alive, in the author’s attempt to render poetic his hometown which is no Paris or Vienna (but wishes it was). Most has medieval roots, but situated on lignite deposits, it has been mined for its low quality coal. Under the Communists in the 1960s, it was decided to destroy the old town to access the resources, so the people were relocated to housing constructed of pre-fabricated concrete panels. All that remains of its heritage is a castle and a Gothic church. To save the church it was moved 183 m away from the new mining site – on 52 trucks and a system of rails!
My other recent read was Olivia Laing’s new book, The Lonely City. This essay/memoir is an account of a couple of years she spent in New York City following the break-up of a relationship. She explores the loneliness of the big city through a number of artists including painter Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol among others. I loved her earlier The Trip to Echo Spring which examined the relationship between alcohol and writers in the form of a road trip through the hometowns and lives of five major American authors. I deeply related to this new book, it really spoke to me.
Idly dipping into James Salter’s Light Years, a book I frequently revisit for the almost heartless brilliance of the writing, I came upon this wonderfully tender passage which will surely resonate with book-loving parents everywhere:
And he reads to them as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet ... What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice that protects, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognise it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it. Instead, in his even, sensuous, voice he laves them in the petty myths of Europe, of snowy Russia, the East.
Such yearning in that voice – I’m quite choked up.
“The world is a hellish place,” Tom Waits said, “and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
Thanks Jenny Bhatt for the rec.
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