Normal people, people who haven't been misled by a faulty college education, do not read novels for words alone. They open a novel with the expectation of finding a story, hopefully with interesting characters in it, and, with any luck at all, an idea or two.
           -- John Gardner  
So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a "good book," because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces, but of something which the most thorough assimilation ... would not enable him to discover.
                --- Proust

 

What I've Been Reading Recently

Lee Lady

This list of books read over the past few years (plus a list of priorities intended to be soon read) is quite misleading. My reading is not usually nearly as highbrow as it has been for the past couple of years. It seemed at first that this was just a phase I'm going through, but it does seem to be continuing. The Shakespeare and other antique stuff is mostly a result of having recently read Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon and Northrop Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, and consequently wanting to go back and re-read a few of the works they discussed.

Having sat in on a course in French literature (in translation) during the fall semester, 1995 from Professor Emily Zants resulted in yet more serious reading (Stendahl, Flaubert, and Proust). I had a sense of accomplishment in just realizing that I'm still capable of doing that kind of reading. And Proust's concern with memory and trying to find the shape and meaning and one's entire past turned out to fit in quite well with the state of my own mind much of the time these past few years (as reflected elsewhere on this home page).

Another thing I've been doing is re-reading a lot of the books that were important to me in my teens and early twenties: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, J.P. Donleavy, Iris Murdoch, among others. I'm rather surprised to find that my impression of these books now is remarkably unchanged from the time when I first read them. I still find that I am strongly drawn towards the world portrayed in The Sun Also Rises whereas A Farewell to Arms leaves me cold, and the early novels of Iris Murdoch are absolutely magical. In reading Henry James, I still find the same fascination with his conversations in which certain things absolutely must be communicated but absolutely must not be said; I find my ability now to figure out just exactly what his characters are really communicating to each other to be just about the same as it was in my teens and twenties.

The various writing workshops I've taken in the past few years have inspired in me a desire to get an impression of the current literary landscape. At first, contemporary literary short stories made no sense whatsoever for me. (I still find a lot of the stories in The O'Henry Awards, for instance, pretensious and self-indulgent.) Then I went back and reread The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro very carefully in order to write a review of it for a workshop I was taking, and I saw what the point of these stories was, and realized that I liked them a whole lot. From there I went on to Alice Adams, who I read originally simply because she's a San Francisco author, and who I also liked enormously. Then I made another try at Ann Beattie, whose first book Distortions had left me completely bewildered the first time I read it. ("Why does she write this stuff? Why do people read it?") I tried reading some critical works on Beattie, and these were helpful only in that they made me realize that there wasn't some deep, hidden meaning in her stories that I was missing. The criticism (much of which I consider really stupid) made me realize that I could only understand her stories by looking at the stories themselves. And when I did that, and started just taking her stories at face value, I wondered how I could have ever failed to appreciate them the first time around. (A couple of interviews I read with Ann Beattie were also very helpful to me.)

For a few of the books listed here, there are links to reviews by me. Otherwise, indicated links point to other websites with information about the author or book.

 

RECENTLY READ:

 

 

Sometimes just the name of a writer is so marvelous, one knows their books have to be wonderful. I only wish that such writers always lived up to their names.

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