Hello NYRBs. How have you been? I know you have sunk to the bottom of my reading pile. I've literally lost sight of you since not only did you sink to the bottom, but you were pushed to the back pile. Out of sight, but I swear not out of mind. And now that you have been joined by August's selection, Zama by Anotonio di Benedetto, I swear I am going to offer you special attention now!
The great reshuffle of books continues. My own enduring problem when it comes to books is how to stay on task and avoid distractions. Of course the idea of staying on task makes it sound like work, and reading (for me anyway) should never be about work. But I tend to flit from one story to the next. Sometimes, as is almost always with NYRBs, books require more careful attention and longer reading sessions in order to really absorb what an author is trying to do.
So, once again I am rethinking my reading and am going to clean up my reading piles. I have already gone into my library account and moved almost all my book requests from actual requests to my virtual 'save for later' list. Most of them have lines of readers waiting for them. I have a very few library books checked out (mainly older titles or story collections), so my focus is going to move again back to my own stacks. It's fine to notice all the nice new books and make note of them, but I have piles of old and recently acquired books of my own that I see every day and can no longer ignore.
Back to the books (my own books) for fall! Students are going back to class this week and at my university students are moving back into their apartments on campus. Classes begin next week (and for me back to yoga, which I am greatly looking forward to), so it is the perfect time to reassess my own reading. And then Colorado is right around the corner and I have already decided I will be drawing from my in progress piles (yes, pilesssss) and will allow myself the choice of one new read to go along. Likely one of the books will be a NYRB.
Yes, those lovely NYRBs are stacking up and one of my few goals this year was to keep on top of my monthly subscription read. But I have now fallen four months behind. As I try and 'right' the rest of my reading, I am going to try and catch up as best I can with the last four months of books. To start I think I'll work on the oldest and newest books. May was Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi, translated from Russian. I wrote about it here.
August is Zama. Di Benedetto is an Argentinian writer and the book has been translated from Spanish. The novel is just under 200 pages and is set in four distinct years--1790, 1794, 1799. The writing style according to the description (I am just now reading the introduction) is "both precise and sumptuous".
"Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good."
June's selection is Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, translated from German, which a number of other readers I know have read and loved. As is almost always the case with these classics--I hit a glitch and just need time and effort to get past it and back into the story. July's book, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, by British author D.G. Compton, was actually quite enjoyable (along the lines of a Philip K. Dick novel or the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood), but when you never reach for a book you are never going to make any progress in it.
August is going to be all about my reaching for my NYRBs. It will be like holding certain yoga poses. I will feel like my body cannot bend in quite that way, but if I just let my muscles relax and let my mind go, I will feel so much better after. Maybe I will be revisiting these books a lot in upcoming posts. Anything to stay with the books.
I always feel just a little bit neurotic sharing my reading misadventures. Please tell me I am not the only reader who not only obsesses but cannot keep my reading under control!