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 great Great American Novelists, fantastic short stories to read out loud and odes to music in written form.
SydneyH has finished The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner:
The first thing I’ll say is that Stegner can write. I like him more than Pynchon, Delillo, Roth, any number of reputable American novelists. His first person is a bit like VS Naipaul’s in the sense that it is gentle and elegant, but he searches for brilliant metaphors in a way that I think isn’t present in Naipaul’s work. The novel isn’t what you would expect. If you have heard of Stegner being described as a major Western American writer, it might surprise you that a significant part of the novel is set in Denmark. I don’t want to say too much about it, because it would spoil the experience for people who are planning to read it. I’ll just say that I’m planning to read more by him – he may become my go-to writer this year, which John Banville was about this time last year – and I’ll leave you with a sentence I was taken with. Joe Allston’s experience of revisiting old memories is “a little like taking the top off the jar and letting the tarantula out”.
Sometimes my wife and I read to each other. Tonight was The Music Teacher by John Cheever.
Pure and simple, an absolute master of his craft, Cheever takes you to the edge of the cliff and when he pushes you over and down into the dark, dark void you willingly succumb because his gift as a writer is so quietly overwhelming. Yes, there are other great short story writers, but there is none better. I believe The Stories of John Cheever is the only book to have ever won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. If you don’t have this book in your collection you are missing something very special.
A joyful book, a little bit all over the map, but it reads as a romance to music and its power to transform. A little bit memoir, psychological treatise, cultural study, braggardly name dropping ode to music and music theory. As with David Byrne himself, the book seems to pull in myriad influences from the most unexpected of places, but again like the author, it gets synthesized into something unique. I would have preferred to hear more about his writing process or how he went from noodling to creating, but the digressions were almost as interesting. Byrne certainly has retained the open-mindedness that characterized his music, he halts at passing judgement where others fail to do so.
It does take quite a bit of getting into. It starts with two murders and a brutal beating, so I thought If it carries on like this then I’m not going to read much of it (it doesn’t - well, not entirely). It’s very dense and stylistically challenging to read but is more than worth the effort. I can fully understand the praise it’s got as it’s a dazzling and fearless rollercoaster ride through the street-life of Jamaica. I’m only just about two thirds of the way through but it’s already very high up on my list of favourite reads. Highly recommended!
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