Sickbed reading round-up

Friends, I am so damned sick! I have been mostly housebound for almost a week and am reading tonnes but don't have the brain or stamina to write full reviews of what's gone by. Welcome the hopefully brief return of the mini-review! I'm eating some restorative chickpea noodle soup as I write this.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

This novel is So. Damned. Good. I am tremendously sad that this is the only thing di Lampedusa wrote, because I think he may have been a genius. Also, his translator (Archibald Colquhoun) is/was a genius - this English version read more smoothly than probably any other translation I can remember encountering; I kept forgetting that I was reading a translation. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Also, I believe that in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell re-wrote a key scene from The Leopard - I immediately thought of Jacob's death scene when I read the Leopard's. No one can do literary homage (and kill their teacher dead) like David Mitchell can.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Thank goodness Dorothy Sayers didn't die young, for it means there are more books and I have much to look forward to. Gaudy Night is also So. Damned. Good. It's one of the best books I've read this year. It made think I made a wrong turn in life by not reading mysteries almost exclusively, like my friend Sarah does. But then, they can't all be this good, they just can't.

Reading Gaudy Night also made me wish I'd been born in England, at the beginning of the last century, so that I could have been a lady scholar at the lady's college at Oxford. I would have rowed, and scholared, and been unbelievably dry and witty, and maybe also have solved mysteries alongside extremely hot, rich British types like Lord Peter Wimsey.

The only bad news: this edition, published by New English Library, is filled with a shocking number of ridiculous typos. Avoid this publisher!

An Excellent Mystery by Ellis Peters.

During the worst part of this wretched winter affliction, I had to go back to my reading equivalent of a favourite blanket - Brother Cadfael. An Excellent Mystery is the 11th of Ellis Peters's medieval whodunnits and it was as lovely and satisfying as the previous ten have been.

AND, I solved the mystery, which I very rarely do, and very early on to boot. This didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book at all; indeed, it increased it, because I knew what was at stake! I was on edge a lot, and also, as always, surprised and humbled by how humane and good Peters's characters are. Really, no author I've come across has made nice characters so interesting. Love!

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

The third installment in the Regeneration trilogy, The Ghost Road didn't really satisfy. The writing is very good, of course. But two things bugged me: 1) Dr. Rivers's flashbacks to his time as a missionary doctor in the South Seas just didn't make for good reading - and also didn't comment so profoundly on Europe's false sense of itself as civilized as I think Barker imagines it did.

2) Wilfred Owen was totally wasted in this one, being present only, it seems, to forebode Billy Prior's death a week before the end of the war. I thought making Siegfried Sassoon a major character in the first book was both gutsy and well done; he had life and energy which both added to and supported what is known about him. Owen in The Ghost Road was less than two-dimensional. Disappointing.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I really didn't like this book. It had some good moments and the writing was fine but if I were hell-bent on winning the Booker, I'd try to write a book like this. It's witty and gritty and it tells the "truth" about how shitty it is to be poor in India. It also blames poor brown people for keeping poor brown people down. Or, at least, the narrator does; I have no idea what Adiga thinks, but I'm not sure he's a good enough writer (yet?) to make distinctions between author and narrator clear in a first-person narrative.

I do know that I found The White Tiger profoundly irritating and not a good enough read for me to quibble less about its seemingly problematic politics. Thankfully, it was short. And I borrowed it from the library. And I have a public blog which my family and friends read, so they'll not buy me anything else by this guy.

No love

WARNING: I have nothing good to say about Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, so if you love it and feel personally involved in how others feel about it, you probably want to stop reading now.

I haven't enjoyed Italo Calvino at all in the past, but I decided to give Invisible Cities a try for several reasons:

1) A few people I really like and whose reading tastes I respect recommended it highly.

2) I was trying to be open-minded because, after all, tastes change. I read Mr. Palomar and thought it was the most boring shit I'd ever read but that was 10 or more years ago; I thought that maybe I'd been too young to appreciate it and figured this would be a way to find out if my tastes had changed in favour of Calvino. (It's true that I've tried approximately 5 times to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and can't get past page 15, but I generally love Orhan Pamuk and yet can't get page 10 of The New Life, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.)

3) I liked the idea of this book, of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sitting together and discussing the cities of the world, all of which turn out to be Venice.

I must not have been thinking, for if I'd considered more seriously what the book's premise implied, I probably could have guessed that this novel would be too preciously post-modern for my tastes. I should have guessed that it would be exactly the kind of book that I hate. And hate Invisible Cities I did. It was only 165 pages long and yet it seemed interminable. It was just so earnest and "deep" and humourless that it made me want to tear Calvino's hair, and rend his cheeks, and make him gnash his teeth. (Yes, I know he is dead. Just go with what I'm trying to convey here.)

The only good thing that I can say about Invisible Cities is that it was so uninteresting that I won't be plagued by memories of its details; I found it to be so forgettable that I've already forgotten most of it and I finished it 20 minutes ago! Indeed, I forgot most of the chapters immediately after reading them which was sort of a blessing but also made continuing even more painful than it already was, for I knew with increasing certainty that the book wasn't going to all of sudden surprise me with some awesomeness.

So, I now have come completely to terms with the fact that no matter how many people I like love Calvino, and no matter how much I might like the ideas behind his books (as ill considered as that admiration may be), I can't stand the execution. Calvino and I just were not meant to be friends, which is okay - both of us have lots of other friends to keep us happy.

A motley crew of two

Because it's still summer-, summer-, summertime
I know I said a while back I needed to take a break from Wodehouse because I'd been overloading on him a bit - I was worried I was going to stop enjoying his stuff for treating it rather too much like a rock star I was stalking and with whom I must eventually become disillusioned.

But I just couldn't resist picking this one up the other day when Toronto was experiencing yet another of this summer's fairly common homages to the sub-tropical deluge/thunder and lightning extravaganza. I honestly haven't seen this much rain and lightning since travelling through rural Cambodia in the back of a pickup truck (which was, indeed, terribly exciting).

Most of the lightning in Summer Lightning was of the metaphorical stamp but it crackled nonetheless. I think this is one of Wodehouse's best (in my extremely limited experience of him), up there with the incomparable Leave it to Psmith. Brilliant writing, charming and hilarious turns of plot, and a more energetic approach to the romance comedy conventions than the last few of his books I've read. Perfection.

I felt tremendously happy reading this book; it also gave me some good advice on how to deal with any difficult people I might have to deal with at my new editing job: "It is foreign to the editorial policy ever to meet visitors who call with horsewhips" (p. 149). Yes, I'm nerdy enough to have made this quotation into the scrolling marquee on my computer and to have printed it off in fancy cursive and taped it to one of the walls in my office.

Because I'm nothing if not persistent
I think I actually began reading Primo Levi's posthumously published short story collection A Tranquil Star before we went to PEI in June but I just finished it last night. I read the first story which didn't grab me at all and let it gather dust for awhile. Then, out of guilt, I began picking it up every once in awhile between reading fat, delicious novels.

The stories in this collection are pretty uneven in terms of quality (for example, "The Girl in the Book" is pretty good, while "Censorship in Bitinia" is mediocre at best and often irritating); none were even close to being sufficiently show-stoppingly amazing to make me sit up straight and fan myself vigorously.

Indeed, most of these stories walked the fine line between experimental and gimmicky and strayed far too often onto the wrong side of said line. I sadly felt that if Levi hadn't established himself later in his career with things like Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table these stories would have gone the way of the minor characters he cleverly (but not brilliantly) discusses in "In the Park" - i.e., oblivion.

Because I can't stop fiddling with my blog layout
On a note unrelated to either of these books, check out the new pic behind my blog title and description - it's a snapshot of one of my many, many bookshelves.

50. The Adventures of Pinocchio

I picked up a lovely bilingual edition of the 19th-century original Adventures of Pinocchio (before horribly bastardized by Disney) at The Almost Corner Bookstore yesterday and I'm about halfway done - nominally written for children as it is, it's a very fast read. I stayed up late last night reading it but am carrying the Livy around with me during the day.

Livy is still going well - I just read his version of the events of Coriolanus's life, which are considerably tamer than what Shakespeare imagined when he wrote his play!

I am totally exhausted and feel best when sitting in a piazza somewhere perusing a book - guess what I'm going to be doing for my 11 days in Florence (where I'm heading on Tuesday)! I'm going back out into the beautiful sunshine now.

48. At Swim-Two-Birds and 49. The Early History of Rome

The other day, I found a lovely little bookstore in Trastevere (my favourite part of Rome, hands down) called The Almost Corner Bookstore and, helpless in the face of its great collection, bought myself Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.

I arrived in Italy armed with four unread books plus the Wilkie Collins tome I began on my way to Europe; I was hoping not to buy too many books over here. Such measures rarely prove useful to me though and I didn't even try to resist the O'Brien purchase. Anyway, I read At Swim-Two-Birds over about a day and a half and it was immensely enjoyable; I spent a great deal of time laughing aloud and so cannot regret it.

Previous to finding The Almost Corner shop, I ambitiously purchased Livy's The Early History of Rome (which comprises Books 1-5 of his History of Rome from its Foundations) in the Forum gift shop - I say "ambitiously" for this is the kind of book I tend to buy and then let sit unread for years.

Well, I picked it up this morning to give it a shot - my fear of carrying it around for the next 5 weeks for nothing weighing heavily on my mind - and found myself immediately enthralled. I actually haven't really been able to put it down and so I've spent the day wandering slowly from place to place in Trastevere with my nose in Livy while the rest of me enjoyed soaking up the gorgeous fall sun.

I'm actually starting to feel kind of relaxed!

41. The Moon and the Bonfire

I ordered The Moon and the Bonfire through www.bookmooch.com as part of my project of reading more Italian authors. I found Cesare Pavese on a list of Italian authors somewhere on the internet and this was the one book of his available on Bookmooch.

I started reading it the other night when I couldn't sleep (one of the many nights these days, *sigh*) and now I'm about halfway through.

I have to say, I'm disappointed and bored. Pavese is supposed to be one of the best modern Italian writers but I'm finding the book consistently underwhelming. I'm sure the translation isn't great, but no translator could hide this book's almost complete lack of substance.

I would like to tell you what's happening but I can't because almost nothing is. All I can say is, the narrator, who grew up in a small village in northwestern Italy returns there after many years in America making his fortune. He's spending all his time wandering around thinking about how things have changed, but in such a disorganized and uncompelling way that I don't care at all. I'll be sending this one back out into the world via Bookmooch once I'm finished with it.

37. I'm Not Scared

I'm halfway done Werewolves in Their Youth, but decided to stop briefly to read this short novel by Italian novelist Niccolo Ammaniti, which I recently received in the mail via www.bookmooch.com.

I'm going to Italy for 6 weeks starting at the end of October, and felt like I should start collecting some Italian literature, as I'm not very familiar with it (except, of course, for Dante, Ovid, Castiglione, and Petrarch; but reading them in advance of the trip would be like work, which is the antithesis of the point of going to Italy).

I found a website listing Italian authors and I just started plugging their names into Bookmooch until I found books that were available. This is the first one to have arrived; I've got some others coming, including one by Primo Levi who I somehow didn't even know was Italian.

I'm Not Scared is okay; it started off slowly and is getting better. It's about a boy who discovers another boy being held captive in an old abandoned house near his village. He starts bringing him food and trying to figure out what's happening from the boy, but what with being tied up in a hole, he's starting to go crazy.

Just now, though, Michele (the 9-year old narrator) has discovered by accident that his own father is involved in the kidnapping and he's trying to figure out what to do, his plan of telling his father about the boy he's found understandably evaporating. I suspect this isn't going to end well for the kidnapped boy, as Michele's father is threatening to cut off his ears and send them to his mother...

As for the writing, it's not great, but I don't know if it's that Ammaniti isn't a very good writer or if this just isn't an excellent translation. I think I'll finish this either tonight or tomorrow and then I'll get back to Chabon.

15.The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I started this hefty tome yesterday and am about 65 pages in. The main character is an antiquarian bookseller, Dottore Bodoni, who's had some kind of incident involving memory. He can't remember who he is, anything of his history, or anyone he knows, but he can remember every book he's ever read (which is a lot - he has 5,000 books in his home, never mind in his shop. You know that sounds like heaven to me. Maybe I should become a bookseller! Becoming independently wealthy would also allow me to have 5,000 books in my home at any given time; I'll have to work on that too).

I know from the dust jacket that Bodoni will eventually start trying to reconstruct his memory of his experiential past through his books, but right now he's just trying to figure out how to move forward (both literally and symbolically) without knowing where he's come from. I also know that this book has reminded me that my notion of myself as well-read is a false one - I'm not getting even half of his literary references. I'll have to keep reading I guess!

I haven't read anything else by Umberto Eco, but like many people I know I've tried and failed to get past the first 50 pages of Foucault's Pendulum.

NB: I thought I didn't like hardcover books, but this is in hardcover and I think actually increasing my pleasure in the reading experience. I'll have to amend my complaint: I don't like thin or small hardcovers; but a large, fat hardcover is always good - it feels like a serious read.

(PS-If someone knows how to post images to a blog entry, please contact me. I keep trying to post cover photos of the books I'm writing about but nothing happens when I click the add images button. And it's not my pop up blocker that's causing the problem.)