Once again the month is flying by, and this month I've been somewhat turned around. I was thinking it was time to pick up the next Slaves of Golconda book, W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale, but discussion is set to begin at the end of June. Of course you are welcome to join in (and I would be happy to send an invite to anyone interested in posting on the blog, please just send me your email). I had picked up the book earlier this month and started reading the first few pages but found it hard to concentrate on it--maybe it was simply bad timing. Has anyone read Cakes and Ale? What did you think? I'm looking forward to reading more of his work and hope I love it as much as I loved The Painted Veil.
So, Maugham is safely set aside for a few weeks and instead I've picked up Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong. Now, I've been planning on reading all the books I am able to read on the list, so I bought the book without actually reading the description, but I hadn't realized that the story is about (at least in part) the vivisection of a P.O.W. during WWII. I read a lot of mysteries and crime novels, so violence does come up in books I read, but this seems particularly gruesome and horrifying to me. I have a feeling this may be a difficult book to read, but I have heard many good things about the author, so I am going to push on with the story, which I started reading last night (and I thought I had another week to read it, but I've started it late, so I will not be ready to talk about it on Friday). I expect the author isn't writing about such a topic lightly and won't do it in a gratuitous way, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier.
It's so much easier when crimes occur 'off stage'. I just finished Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water, which is a most interesting crime story. There were a few moments of unease, but the crime in this story wasn't as obvious as first assumed. I'll be writing about it over my long weekend, but I can easily say I liked it so much that I've already ordered the next few books in the series. I also just finished reading Kate Simon's memoir, Bronx Primitive. I wrote very briefly about it here, but I didn't think I would write about it again. Now that I've finished I think I do want to write about it, as I enjoyed it even though it was an occasionally uncomfortable read (in a totally different way than I expect the Endo to be).
Kate Simon wrote three books of memoirs, and I have the next two ready to go, A Wider World: Portraits in Adolesence, and Etchings in an Hourglass, but I've been looking forward to reading Gail Levin's biography of artist Lee Krasner (and I should note it's a library book with a looming due date, which always means the reading stack gets shuffled a bit), so I started that last night as well. At the moment memoirs really appeal to me, so I've been dipping into Susan Allen Toth's Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood which is about growing up in Ames, Iowa in the 1950s. She also wrote three books of memoirs, as did Mary Cantwell. Guess how many books of memoirs I've got stacked up at the moment. I'll leave it to your imagination. I've been reading such a paltry number of nonfiction books that it feels good to be so interested in reading these--even if it takes me the better part of the year to work my way through them. Any suggestions for memoirs--particularly about growing up in the first half of the twentieth century are welcome. Because you know you can never have enough reading material on hand (or in mind).
As you can see I have Plenty to keep me busy for the foreseeable future, but I think this weekend is going to be given over to finishing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Can I make a confession? I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I think this is going to be the sort of book I can appreciate and admire, but maybe not throw all my heart into loving. Of course I am not quite at the midway mark, so a lot can happen still. I can see why it's an important book. The sort of book where if there hadn't been a Hemingway we might not have (well, fill in the blank here as I'm still learning). But for all it's simplicity in the way of his prose style, that doesn't make it an easy read. As a matter of fact I checked out two books of criticism to help me make sense of things. Linda Wagner-Martin, in one book, writes:
"Ernest Hemingway's 1926 The Sun Also Rises provided readers a startling example of the newly modern novel. People accustomed to fiction by Charles Dickens of Jane Austen, books in which a leisurely narrative told a recognizable story about well-described characters, found Hemingway's cryptic introduction of characters--people whose actions did not seem to be purposeful--puzzling. And for a novel said to be about people who had survived the debilitating trauma of the First World War, The Sun Also Rises contained almost nothing about that cataclysmic event. Strangely, Jake Barnes's wound, the most apparent evidence of the war's damages, seems to have made him a strong and almost wise protagonist."
"The Sun Also Rises was not the novel readers expected it to be. Its style was so unusual as to be just plain troublesome."
Well, that does make me feel better. But should I, a modern reader, still be having that same sort of response? Something to contemplate as I work my way through the story.