What's everybody reading?

[FilmFan720]

I'm a double dipper pretty regularly, usually because I have one thing on my desk at school that I can read during the student's silent reading time (right now: Aristotle and Dante Discover The Secrets of the Universe) and one thing at home (A Little Life). Even then, many times I may have 2 books going at home. I'm like that!

[flipp525]

Apart from my college years, when I had separate piles for Books I'm supposed to read and Books I want to read, I've been strictly a serial monogamist re: books. Nonfiction would be the only sort of book I'd even consider reading in installments; for any novel, even a pulp one, narrative build-up/payoff is such an integral part if the work it would feel unfair to the work to break it up -- like watching the first act of a play one week and seeing other plays in between before returning to the second act a week later.

I'm with Tee on being a serial book monogamist (I like that term). For the most part. At one point during A Little Life, I did take a small break to read a slim collection of Lorrie Moore short stories (Bark), but that was mainly because I was literally having nightmares and just needed a couple days away from the book (which anyone who's read it would understand).

I'm currently reading Wally Lamb's We Are Water and Jon Krakauer's Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town simultaneously. I'm only "double-fisting" at the moment because I was so bored (and unimpressed) by the Lamb, that I picked up the Krakauer which is much better (and non-fiction so not something I need to keep the momentum going for necessarily).

So, I just basically said I was one thing and then showed two examples where I haven't done that thing. (Just call me a GOP Presidential candidate.)

[Mister Tee]

Apart from my college years, when I had separate piles for Books I'm supposed to read and Books I want to read, I've been strictly a serial monogamist re: books. Nonfiction would be the only sort of book I'd even consider reading in installments; for any novel, even a pulp one, narrative build-up/payoff is such an integral part if the work it would feel unfair to the work to break it up -- like watching the first act of a play one week and seeing other plays in between before returning to the second act a week later.

[dws1982]

How does everyone read? What I mean is, do you do the traditional route of reading one book at a time, or do you keep a few books going at once?

For years, I was pretty strict about doing one book at a time, but I was also really bad about starting books and never finishing them. Back in the spring time, a friend who gets through a lot of books told me that he tends to keep several going at a time. At first I did three books at a time, usually a chapter or two a night, but since then I haven't been as rigid about that. Sometimes I'll do that, but sometimes I'll read on one book for a day or two and then put it up and read another one for a day or two.

Now that I've started doing several at a time, I'm surprised at how much I've gotten through this year. I'm at 14 and counting so far, and I've even kept up since starting grad school this fall.

Not many of the books I've read would be of much interest to many here--right now I'm in a phase of books that relate to the Protestant Reformation and Reformed Theology--yep, Calvin's doorstopper magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion is one of the next on the list.

Here's the list though:
Pictures At a Revolution, Mark Harris
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland, Jan T. Gross
Silence, Shusaku Endo
Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
All Quiet On the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare
The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Counterculture, David Platt
Troubled Minds, Amy Simpson
Knowing God, J. I. Packer
Five Points, John Piper
The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul
The Five Points of Calvinism, David Steele

Currently going through A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and Great War by Joseph Loconte, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, Chosen By God by R.C. Sproul, and To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson by Courtney Anderson.

Trying to decide which novel I want to read next, but I've got Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow and Leif Enger's Peace Like A River sitting on the coffee table. Also got dozens unread on my bookshelf in the other room.

[Okri]

Well, you all have convinced me to order A Little Life, although unlike Mister Tee, there is no way I will be able to get through a 700 page novel in two weeks. (I also just got Mark Harris's Five Came Back, and may tackle that first, but we'll see.)

Not knowing the pace you read (and the busy-ness of life), I will say that I started on Sunday and will probably finish tomorrow or Friday.

[The Original BJ]

It's actually a good time to read Five Came Back -- a quite worthy book -- because TCM throughout September is showing the war documentaries with which the book deals.

That was actually what inspired me to get to it right now. I had heard Mark Harris talk about the book on a panel at the LA Times Book Festival back in April (also when I stopped by the autograph booth to have him sign my copy of Pictures at a Revolution!), but that was a big weekend for book-buying and it just slipped my mind until I realized the opportunity to read and watch the films (some of which are virtually unavailable) was too good to pass up.

[Mister Tee]

Well, you all have convinced me to order A Little Life, although unlike Mister Tee, there is no way I will be able to get through a 700 page novel in two weeks. (I also just got Mark Harris's Five Came Back, and may tackle that first, but we'll see.)

It's not my norm, either -- it took me a month or two to get through The Goldfinch (even though I liked it). This book just compelled me to keep reading.

It's actually a good time to read Five Came Back -- a quite worthy book -- because TCM throughout September is showing the war documentaries with which the book deals.

[The Original BJ]

Well, you all have convinced me to order A Little Life, although unlike Mister Tee, there is no way I will be able to get through a 700 page novel in two weeks. (I also just got Mark Harris's Five Came Back, and may tackle that first, but we'll see.)

[Mister Tee]

A Little Life is a major piece of work. Elegantly written, covering an enormous amount of ground despite being largely centered on four characters in a single setting (New York City). I found myself simultaneously wanting to keep reading and to slow it down, to stay within its covers for a longer time. And I found much of it emotionally overwhelming (partly because of elements of my own life that have equivalents in the book).

Being me, I of course have some quibbles, but they're probably better saved for another thread, to avoid spoilers. What I'll say here is, this a hugely ambitious and successful novel, and I recommend it highly.

[flipp525]

If anyone is reading A Little Life, you might also want to follow it on Instagram (@alittlelifebook). There are passages from the book paired with commissioned photography and it is quite beautiful. The Instagram account is also co-run by the author which is an exciting direct conduit to her. Yanagihara found out about my book club cookies (via the bakery actually) and posted a picture of them to Instagram with a caption about what a wonderful tribute they were to her book. This was obviously very thrilling for me being such a huge fan of her novel.

I'm reading E.M. Forster's A Passage to India right now and I'm finding it a very luscious, almost daring in spots, read. After not having seen the film in quite some time, I'm marveling at how much Lean's film captures that initial scene between Dr. Aziz and Mrs. Moore meeting in the mosque at night which is one of the scenes etched in my memory. It's such a moment.

[flipp525]

So glad, Okri. I'm excited for you (and Tee and whoever else) to read it so we can open up a discussion about it here.

For my book club meeting of A Little Life last night, I commissioned a local baker to recreate (this won't mean anything to you if you haven't read the book yet and is totally non-spoilerish) the bacteria-shaped sugar cookies that Jude makes for Harold and Julia when he's working at a bakery called "Batter" during his law school days. It's a small moment in the novel, but I thought it was very emblematic of the character. My friends loved it. And the woman who made them for me was a double chemistry/biology major in college so this was totally in her wheelhouse. I'm seriously a nerd, but I had to do something special for such a special book.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[Okri]

Flipp has convinced me to purchase A Little Life.

[flipp525]

So, flipp, you're at the crest of a trend.

I was pretty sure that The Goldfinch would be the best book I've read in the past five years. It's excellent and very absorbing and very beautifully written. I liked how ultimately the book is about grief. Theo is essentially suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder thoughout the entire novel and the painting itself is a MacGuffin.

But that changed this summer. A Little Life is challenging and surprising up until the very last page. I won't get into specifics because I wouldn't want to ruin anyone's experience of reading this novel, but I found it an utterly transformative experience. Jude St. Francis is an instantly iconic American character who I'll never, ever forget. And, without sounding too hyperbolic, I don't feel like the same person (or the same writer) that I was before I read it. I look forward to hearing your thoughts after you take it on, Tee. There is a lot to discuss. (By the way, I would only attempt to read this book if you're in a stable emotional state.)

From an article about A Little Life in The Atlantic called "The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here" I found this really interesting: "To understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera."

I think this really is the modern "Great American Novel," gay or otherwise.

[Mister Tee]

And, for the record, my niece posted on Facebook tonight that she wanted to put up a Do Not Disturb sign until she was finished reading A Little Life.

So, flipp, you're at the crest of a trend.

[Mister Tee]

flipp, I’ve taken a look at A Little Life, and it seems very interesting. The 700 pages make it a bit daunting, but it’s on my list for the quite near future.

Speaking of daunting: I’ve been meaning to respond to flipp’s post for weeks, but decided I’d be obliged to summarize some of my own current reading when I did, and, since it’s about two years since I posted here, that list was long. I’ve finally got around to short takes on some of the books I’ve read since last time:

Russell Banks’ The Lost Memory of Skin is an unsentimental but heart-wrenching look at a young man labelled a sex offender and forced to live (in a vaguely futuristic world) as vagabond. You’d hardly call Banks an unsung writer, but I don’t think he gets as much attention as he deserves; this is really fine work.

& Sons – which got great reviews but sort of faded -- is about a narcissistic, Salinger-like writer and how disappointing he often is in terms of family and friends. A quite solid read, with unexpected narrative turns.

The Son, a Pulitzer runner-up a few years back, is some sort of Texas epic, covering a century or so by following members of one family in assorted time frames. Much of it is compelling, and it gives some understanding -- to those of with far different upbringings -- of where many Texas attitudes come from.

Two quite good books on lefties in the blacklist era and beyond: Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens had a great deal of personal pull for me, as it’s set in basically the neighborhood where I grew up (the characters get off at my subway stop, though they walk a few blocks in the other direction). It’s a wide-ranging look at the effect a politically-obsesssed person can have on family and acquaintances. Even better, Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist – a Zuckerman book (surprise!) which manages to both look askance at more doctrinaire party members and come down hard on those who sought to expunge them from successful society. The best novel I’ve read on that period.

I also read an older Roth, Letting Go, which goes on a bit too long, but is a fascinating plunge back into early 60s academic and sexual politics.

Two by Elizabeth Strout: The Burgess Boys (focused on sons whose lives seem to be going one direction but end up in quite another), and Olive Kitteridge, which I read prior to the (extremely faithful) HBO version. Both books are quite good; I’m on board for anything she writes next.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, a William Kennedy novel that’s been on my shelf for decades, reminded me of how much I liked Ironweed back when I read it. Kennedy really captures the feel of a corrupt 30s Albany; every moment feels authentic.

I’d really enjoyed Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy years ago, but somehow hadn’t read any others prior to Someone. Perhaps you have to have Long Island Irish in you to really respond to it (my mother grew up in Brooklyn at almost the same time as the main character), but I thought it was a just about perfect book – specific in its detail but capturing something universal about the span of life.

If you read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I recommend not even looking at the book jacket: it gives away, as a premise, something that isn’t revealed till, I’d say, 20-30% of the way in, and which came as complete surprise to me (I’d been sent it on Kindle, so never saw the jacket till I looked at it in a store later). The book is about a lot more than its premise – it’s a fresh, moving story about family and everything that flows from it – but not having that premise spoiled is a big bonus.

The Orphan Master’s Son won the Pulitzer despite being set almost entirely in North Korea (the Pulitzer guidelines still say something about dealing with American life, don’t they?). It’s a fascinating look inside a totalitarian society, with extremely surprising plot turns that make it great fun to read.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is centered on grueling material – Australian WWII POWs being forced to build a railway for the Japanese – but, by weaving in events both prior to and after this period, it manages to not become an endurance test. I don’t think the book quite makes the coherent statement to which it seems to be aspiring, but I found it engaging along the way.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour may not be, as the blurb suggests, “the Catch 22 of dentistry”, but it’s an extremely funny, risky novel that takes on themes as diverse as Internet stalking and Orthodox Judaism and goes wild with them. Joshua Ferris is a writer to contend with.

Two Murakami books: 1Q84 seemed, despite its length, more commercially-aimed than other Murakami efforts: the book seems a blend of sci-fi and destiny-romance. I enjoyed it well enough, but preferred the shorter, lovely Colorless Tsukuru Tazaka and His Years of Pilgrimage – a delicate piece about what happens to split apart a group of high school friends.

Redeployment is a set of varied, offbeat stories from the Iraq war. (Written by a guy who went to the same high school as me – something I realized from his description of returning to his alma mater.) A very young writer, one to watch.

OK, I’m tiring out, so, even more briefly: The Circle is fun in a fairly trivial way. The Goldfinch (which I assume most of you have read) is a satisfyingly immersive novel – not as good as the great Secret History, but far better than Tartt’s second effort. The Stone Diaries is an absorbing chronicle of 20th century life. Measuring the World is a fascinating look at important but obscure figures in the area of historical research (I like this writer’s other book, Fame: A Novel in Five Chapters, even better).

A couple of “I don’t get it”’s: I can’t say I was crazy about The Luminaries – I got to the end, finally unraveling the complicated narrative, but didn’t feel it added up to much. (And the whole astrological thing just went right by me.)

Contra the Pulitzer committee, I’m not much a fan of All the Light We Cannot See. It’s quite readable, but not especially deep – kind of on the level of The Book Thief (I only saw the movie there, but you know what I mean).

And, OK, I’ll out myself as a philistine: I really had trouble getting through McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Right from the start I hated the ostentatiously obscure vocabulary – I’m an educated man, but there were, conservatively, several hundred words I didn’t know and hadn’t missed (and they were so laboriously flaunted, it felt like William F. Buckley had done the final draft). The plot engaged me for a while, but after a certain point it just got to feel like one grisly killing after another, with no point beyond the frontier’s utter indifference to human life. When I read academics calling this one of the greatest American novels, I feel like literature departments are just another racket.

So, for refreshment: a few lightweight entertainments -- The Girl on the Train, my attempt to be au courant (it’s a perfectly solid mystery, but not one with any hidden depths); Station Eleven, basically an upscale version of The Stand, very enjoyable; and several books by Tana French, who I think is a terrific writer who happens to work in the mystery genre. The Likeness starts from a far-fetched place, but finds unexpected undercurrents. And Faithful Place is flat-out terrific – as brutal a dissection of Irish family life as you’ll find.

I’ve also, after a lifetime of hearing about them, finally read a collection of Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories – which are often hilarious, and venomous toward the idiot rich.

That’s it for now. Currently doing Camus’ The Plague, with a long list in the queue. It never ends.