Summer reading in the heatwave and beyond
If you haven’t heard much from me, I’ve been living it up in the real world, suffering through the extreme heatwave, and then kept the heat going with a little summer cold of my own, so all I’ve been doing for the past week or so is reading. I realised some time ago looking at my list of reads this year that I’d mostly read book by men - I mean, by a really large margin - so I tried to branch out a little bit and expand my horizons, make it 50-50 or so, by number of books if not by page count. I read a lot of classic and 20th century modernist fiction, and for some reason male writers tend to write much longer books than women. I don’t mind the occasional tome, indeed, I enjoy it, but sometimes it can get a bit one-note and turgid. I was looking at the 700 pages I have left of Solenoid and thinking, OK, in the time I read this I can read like 4 different books, maybe Solenoid can wait until the autumn. Until then, here’s some books I really liked:
Agóta Kristof, The Notebook Trilogy
Crisp, perverse, simple, brutal, to me this is perfect writing. The first two books especially.
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Nonfiction, an interview conducted in the 1920s with Cudjo Lewis, a black man who had been brought from Africa as a slave to the US on the last slave ship to ever arrive, detailing his long life and his memories of his childhood. I found this so unique and fascinating, I tore through it in a single day. I have to read more by this writer.
Linda Yablonsky, The Story of Junk
Heroin memoir of the 1980s, very funny, sad, and real. 1970s-1980s underground New York is a special interest of mine, and I really enjoyed trying to figure out who was the real person behind the various alibis.
Story of O, Pauline Réage
For me reading isn’t just about pure enjoyment, but about filling in blanks, pieces in a gigantic puzzle of references and connections. What surprised me about Story of O is not the explicit sexual content (I think pornography is generally tedious, even if I’m fascinated by sexuality and eroticism) but certain details, the attention paid to the internal life of O. Now that I think back on the book, I remember a kind of existential uneasiness, the details of gowns, furniture, and drapes. I never did find the controversial “final chapter”, of which there are apparently two versions, but I think the elliptical vagueness where it’s only described is somehow more fitting. I like it when writing breaks down, as if it can’t contain itself, leaving even itself to the imagination of the reader.
Speaking of leaving you to your imagination —
(*) the exception being I guess Middlemarch, which I’ll try to read once the hype dies down and my bookstore can get me a used copy cheaply, and I’m sure there’s plenty more, but I’m making a generalisation here. If you know of any tomes by women, feel free to email me and let me know.