Monday, July 03, 2006
What I Read On My Holidays
I'm spending the day moping about the house, fitting sash locks (horse bolted etc), and waiting for SOCO, the Scene of Crime Officer, to dust for fingerprints. Which gives me the opportunity to review my summer holiday reading list:
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
BSG is a very likeable, readable diary of a 13 year old boy in Worcestershire in 1982. It is quite opaquely a bildungsroman, and has a superficially very straightforward structure. With its rural child protagonist it reminded me of Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", and also of Tamara Drewe. David Mitchell positions it neatly within his canon, with explicit nods to Cloud Atlas and Number 9 Dream, but stylistically it's quite distinct. Both I and the GF devoured it avidly, but it's simplicity made me feel slightly guilty for enjoying it so much. I think it could be a big commercial hit with adults and maybe children too.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
This is another dazzling collection of short fiction pieces by DFW. They have such aggressively new structure that they hardly qualify as short stories. I've bored everyone before by pointing out how much I admire DFW, but in this collection he combines humour and intelligence with absolutely breathtaking realism. He can somehow take the most difficult implausible set-up, and spin it into a captivating emotionally rich tale. I didn't take a dictionary on holiday, and I now have approximately 100 difficult words from BIWHM to look up. I'll bore you with them later.
J-Pod by Douglas Coupland
This is supposed to be the Coupland renaissance; a return to the subject matter and form of Microserfs. I've stuck with him since the beginning, but he writes the same joyless lifeless book time after time. Nobody will be reading anything of Coupland's but Generation X in 25 years time, because they're all drivel. Seriously the denouement of this book, is that all the characters quit their jobs to go and work for the author Douglas Coupland. Save your time and money for something real.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
My father slung this my way, and it's excellent. A really brilliant first novel, about a single day in a single street in Nottingham. The text actually blends into poetry at some stages. I know that sounds dire, but McGregor's entire book is like a long gripping prose poem. Saying too much about it might spoil it, but it's a startling book about ordinary lives in an ordinary part of multicultural Britain.
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
Sebald was an octagenarian German emigre english professor at East Anglia university when he wrote this extremely digressive travelogue of his wanderings along the coast of suffolk. He constantly returns to themes of decay and the impermanence of human lives. He spends far more time discussing historical events than he does his actual travels. It's baffling, and wonderful, and full of fascinating intellectual meandering. Like a good linkblog in some respects.
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders
The UK press is piling onto the Saunders bandwagon. If you liked Pastoralia or CivilWarLand, then it's more of the same. Morbid, hilarious short stories that flit between allegory and satire. The title story is novella length, and is perhaps the least successful part of the book. The rest though, are sad and funny and true, and you can't ask for much more from a book than that.
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
BSG is a very likeable, readable diary of a 13 year old boy in Worcestershire in 1982. It is quite opaquely a bildungsroman, and has a superficially very straightforward structure. With its rural child protagonist it reminded me of Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", and also of Tamara Drewe. David Mitchell positions it neatly within his canon, with explicit nods to Cloud Atlas and Number 9 Dream, but stylistically it's quite distinct. Both I and the GF devoured it avidly, but it's simplicity made me feel slightly guilty for enjoying it so much. I think it could be a big commercial hit with adults and maybe children too.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
This is another dazzling collection of short fiction pieces by DFW. They have such aggressively new structure that they hardly qualify as short stories. I've bored everyone before by pointing out how much I admire DFW, but in this collection he combines humour and intelligence with absolutely breathtaking realism. He can somehow take the most difficult implausible set-up, and spin it into a captivating emotionally rich tale. I didn't take a dictionary on holiday, and I now have approximately 100 difficult words from BIWHM to look up. I'll bore you with them later.
J-Pod by Douglas Coupland
This is supposed to be the Coupland renaissance; a return to the subject matter and form of Microserfs. I've stuck with him since the beginning, but he writes the same joyless lifeless book time after time. Nobody will be reading anything of Coupland's but Generation X in 25 years time, because they're all drivel. Seriously the denouement of this book, is that all the characters quit their jobs to go and work for the author Douglas Coupland. Save your time and money for something real.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
My father slung this my way, and it's excellent. A really brilliant first novel, about a single day in a single street in Nottingham. The text actually blends into poetry at some stages. I know that sounds dire, but McGregor's entire book is like a long gripping prose poem. Saying too much about it might spoil it, but it's a startling book about ordinary lives in an ordinary part of multicultural Britain.
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
Sebald was an octagenarian German emigre english professor at East Anglia university when he wrote this extremely digressive travelogue of his wanderings along the coast of suffolk. He constantly returns to themes of decay and the impermanence of human lives. He spends far more time discussing historical events than he does his actual travels. It's baffling, and wonderful, and full of fascinating intellectual meandering. Like a good linkblog in some respects.
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders
The UK press is piling onto the Saunders bandwagon. If you liked Pastoralia or CivilWarLand, then it's more of the same. Morbid, hilarious short stories that flit between allegory and satire. The title story is novella length, and is perhaps the least successful part of the book. The rest though, are sad and funny and true, and you can't ask for much more from a book than that.
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