I've finished several books recently all that I have enjoyed very much, I've got a nice, healthy pile of in progress books and I have several new starts as well as a few waiting just in the wings. So many, I am not sure where I should even begin in order to tell you about them.
The finished books, one more nonfiction, a mystery, a Virago Modern Classic and a reread are all books worthy of posts of their own so perhaps I'll save those and try and spread them out a bit and tell you about them in the coming week. For some reason the idea of writing about a book in a review sort of format always feels a little overwhelming to me, though in the end I usually find more to say about it than I think I will. So, tomorrow one of those.
As for in progress books, let me just mention a couple. I have been dithering about choosing a classic. I have no idea why the choice has been so difficult, but in the end and purely on a whim (I'm not even sure what finally compelled me to pick it up) I started reading James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Maybe it is the French setting? Or the fact that it is a modern classic? It is also a fairly short book. I've owned a few books by Baldwin, but I have avoided reading them. I am such a predictable reader--almost exclusively books by and about women and nearly always British or American authors, though I try hard to read works that have been translated into English. One of the themes this year I am thinking about reading is diversity in literature.
I guess I hesitated with Baldwin thinking I might not have much shared common ground. A male author, African-American and gay. Not things I know a whole lot about perhaps. But why do I read anyway? I know my own stories and comfort reads are wonderful, but I read, too, to learn about lives I wouldn't normally otherwise be privy to. And amazingly, lives I think are so very different than my own, and here is the beauty with literature--really good books--have aspects to them that I completely understand or can sympathize with. No matter how different we are, we still might feel the same things. And I have discovered that James Baldwin is an amazing writer--beautiful prose, so I don't even care if we don't live similar lives. I'm glad we don't. I want to know and understand his. I want to read everything he has ever written now.
From the very first page, the first paragraph, the reader realizes from the start that something awful is going to happen. David, the young man telling the story, tells it from the vantage point of hindsight. He is both waiting for an awful event and telling us what led up to it. The why, the what exactly happened is what forms the bulk of the story. I won't go into details now, but David is a young man, conflicted by his sexuality and struggling with his relationships. He goes to France and meets a man he falls in love with. And well, here I am both racing to the end and fearful of picking the book up not wanting to know the awfulness of the truth.
And then there is Peyton Place by Grace Metallius. Maybe this is my anti-classic read. Talk about potboiler. How long have I owned by copy anyway? If you look up melodrama in the dictionary I wouldn't be surprised if the cover of the book is displayed on the page. The story is set in a small New England town and it has a cast of many--all the town's residents from both sides of the tracks. I was afraid I might have a hard time keeping track of everyone but the story flows along quite nicely. Maybe not 'nicely' but dramatically. Quite the steamy story and it must have raised a few eyebrows and caused a few blushes and how many young adults swiped their mother's copies to read clandestinely? I don't think I will read the sequel but I might have to watch the movie adaptation.
I've just picked up a few new books and have started reading. I am finally on the fourth of the quartet of books by Antonia White about Clara Batchelor. I wrote about the first, not much about the second, and will soon tell you about the third. And now I have started Beyond the Glass and wonder how much, how far into Clara's life we will get. I can see why Virago chose to begin their publishing with Antonia White's work. She is pretty amazing and there is so much there to think about. Best save more reflection on the books for a proper post.
I love Katharine McMahon's books. She is one of my 'I must read everything she has ever written' authors. I mentioned at the start of the year that I would be doing some rereading and I have started with her Crimson Rooms. I wrote about it somewhere the first time around and will do so again, but mostly my reread was in anticipation of starting the sequel and McMahon's most recent novel (though now a couple of years old--I think she might be publishing something later this year?), The Woman in the Picture. I loved The Crimson Rooms as much the second time around as the first and am very eager to get going on the sequel. While she is a comfort read author for me, she is unpredictable, and I mean that in the best way. There is 'romance' (note it is romance and not Romance I mean) in her stories, that is not the main focus. For me, I think I'd raise her into the more literary category, but she knows, too, how to tell a thumping good read.
And my other new addition to the night stand is Angela Thirkell's Wild Strawberries, one of the Barsetshire novels, which I have been collecting and not reading and hope to rectify that this year. The series starts with High Rising, then Demon in the House, though it has been longer than I care to admit that I read either book. Looking back over the two previous stories, this one seems to center on a different Barsetshire family, the Leslie's of Rushwater House. I forgot how much I enjoy these books and what fun the stories and characters are. This definitely falls into the comfort read column. A country house romp should see me through the rest of winter, I think.
Three more quick mentions of books I hope to start in the next few days (optimistically thinking I will be cycling out a few night stand reads soon as I finish books). Two are library books. I have been conservative on my library book borrowing in the last year. I have this tendency to request pell mell, drag armloads of books home only to return them all unread. So, now I am much more discerning. If I bring a book home, I very much try and read it so I have been cautious on requests.
I think it was Iliana who first mentioned Meags Fitzgerald's Photobooth: A Biography. It is a graphic novel and sounded like so much fun that I had to get it through interlibrary loan. I just brought it home this week and have only flipped through it a few times. I really like graphic novels and this will be the first nonfiction graphic novel I read. And a complete impulse choice. Michael Grant's Front Lines crossed my desk at work and I was so intrigued by it--an alternate history/speculative fiction YA novel about young women who are subject to the draft in WWII. I lucked out with another impulse YA read last year, I couldn't pass this one up. If I like Front Lines, I will be in luck since this is the first of a projected series of stories.
One more. I have been making my own little 'literary fiction of recent years I really should read' list. Those books that show up on prize lists or that friends read and rave about and that I mean to read but never get around to (keeping in mind these are not exactly books I feel like I should read, but rather books I feel like I should read and that I want to read). First up is Anne Tyler's Spool of Blue Thread. I have never read Anne Tyler (and I know I have lamented that fact more than once here) and I want to, so I am. Whew. Sorry. That was longer than I planned.