Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Current reading
I've fallen into the habit of reading three books at a time (not including whatever I'm reading in order to teach it; I teach freshman composition at Tennessee State University lately): one that I listen to in the car and at the gym, one in the dining room, and one in the bedroom. Right now, I'm listening to Carl Hiaasen's Stormy Weather, and reading Michael Frayn's Spies over meals and Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn at bedtime.
I'm a great fan of Trollope, although I haven't read nearly as much of his stuff as I should. Right now I'm working through the Palliser novels, some of them for the second time. But this time I'm going through them all in order. Phineas Finn is the second in the sequence, for those of you who aren't fans.
Stormy Weather is so far interesting. It's my first Hiaasen except for a couple of his columns that I read when I was waiting for the new Dave Barry to be posted (they both used to write -- Barry has just started an indefinite hiatus -- for the Miami Herald). It reminds me rather of Elmore Leonard -- not a bad thing -- but a little cleaner and a little more surreal. We'll see how it develops.
The big pleasure at the moment, though, is Michael Frayn. I'd listened to his previous book, Headlong, and enjoyed it but was not knocked out. I liked the art history but didn't get caught up in the story so much. But this one, Spies, is a knockout. It's a thin book, maybe 250 pages, but it is about memory and identity and responsibility and is also somewhat of a mystery (only partially solved at the point I've got to). The narrator comes back to England after a long absence in order to discover the meanings of a specific memory, so he's walking around his old neighborhood in the narrative present while also remembering his younger (about 10 or so) self -- in third person -- and trying to reconstruct what that boy, Stephen, knew and when he knew it. We know more than Stephen does, of course, but that only fits with the mode of the narrative. A lot of questions are not yet answered, and may never be -- for example, is Stephen unaware of his Jewishness, or suppressing it? (Or is that something that I'm projecting onto him?)
At any rate, it's not at all the kind of book you'd expect from the author of Noises Off.
I'm a great fan of Trollope, although I haven't read nearly as much of his stuff as I should. Right now I'm working through the Palliser novels, some of them for the second time. But this time I'm going through them all in order. Phineas Finn is the second in the sequence, for those of you who aren't fans.
Stormy Weather is so far interesting. It's my first Hiaasen except for a couple of his columns that I read when I was waiting for the new Dave Barry to be posted (they both used to write -- Barry has just started an indefinite hiatus -- for the Miami Herald). It reminds me rather of Elmore Leonard -- not a bad thing -- but a little cleaner and a little more surreal. We'll see how it develops.
The big pleasure at the moment, though, is Michael Frayn. I'd listened to his previous book, Headlong, and enjoyed it but was not knocked out. I liked the art history but didn't get caught up in the story so much. But this one, Spies, is a knockout. It's a thin book, maybe 250 pages, but it is about memory and identity and responsibility and is also somewhat of a mystery (only partially solved at the point I've got to). The narrator comes back to England after a long absence in order to discover the meanings of a specific memory, so he's walking around his old neighborhood in the narrative present while also remembering his younger (about 10 or so) self -- in third person -- and trying to reconstruct what that boy, Stephen, knew and when he knew it. We know more than Stephen does, of course, but that only fits with the mode of the narrative. A lot of questions are not yet answered, and may never be -- for example, is Stephen unaware of his Jewishness, or suppressing it? (Or is that something that I'm projecting onto him?)
At any rate, it's not at all the kind of book you'd expect from the author of Noises Off.
