Once again I am going to answer a "Booking Through Thursday" question a little late. This time I came across it via Matt.
What's the most serious book you've read recently? (I figure it's easier than asking your most serious book ever, because, well, it's recent).
This is a good question for me, since I've been existing in part on a variety of comfort reads lately. Sometimes comfort reads are just a necessity in life, which is not to say that they are always simply mindless reads. However, occasionally a book with a little more bite, something more challenging is just what the mind and body needs as well. So, I have both types of books on the go at the moment and reach for whichever mentally appeals.
William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf is a book that I've been dipping into a lot lately. It's by no means hard going. His prose is simple yet beautiful, though the subjects he deals with are perhaps more serious than most of my other current reads and the story tends to linger in the mind longer. In The Folded Leaf Maxwell explores the friendship of two unlikely boys in a small Illinois town in the early 1920s.
I'm nearly finished reading Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret. His books are always a pleasure to read, so do they still count as serious? I consider his books to be classics of Victorian Literature. Quite often his novels are gripping reads, but he's just so good at what he does that you can't help but appreciate his talent. The Dead Secret anticicpates Collins's later more popular novels. And there is always more to the stories than meets the eye, if you're willing to dig a little.
I've also started A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which is not at all as simplistic as the title leads the reader to believe. I've always thought Byatt's prose is elegant and sophisticated and she never approaches her subject by halves, whatever it is. When she writes about poetry or literature or art you darn well know you're getting a true and accurate picture.
And if you want serious but dark, I recently read Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, which was a dark, oppressive novel of murder and revenge. Again, it's not a hard book to read, but the images were at times sordid and depressing. And there was little to make you feel good about the immorality of the characters, though in a strange way I thought it an excellent book and plan on reading more of Zola's work.
And I have a couple of serious novels lined up. I expect Dawn Powell's Dance Night to be a serious read. I hope to get started on it this weekend. I'm not sure what classic I will chose after I finish Wilkie Collins, but I am leaning towards something by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And on the reading horizon, I have in the back of my mind another long read. At the moment I'm thinking Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, as I'd like to give 'American Realism' a try (and compare to Zola, another Realist author).
So you see I don't just subsist on fairy cakes (don't you like the sound of that so much better than cupcakes?), but also fruits and veggies, too.