February Reading Update

 If you ever peek at my other blog or at my Instagram feed, you might already know that I was at a veritable Book Mecca last week, when I spent some pleasant and tempting hours at Powell's Books in Portland Oregon

 Rooms and rooms filled with stacks and stacks of books new and used. . . .

I did not leave empty-handed. . . .

 But before I dive into that pile, time to up-date here on the blog. I'm enjoying my new approach to recording and sharing my reading. Jotting down a few notes as I read or finish each book seems more immediate and minimizes the dangers of procrastination. Similarly, the ease of posting a photo of a book cover or page on Instagram requires so much less work than writing a post here.

As I've said before, however, I still value very much the community that we've built here, and I think this platform might be better both for sharing your recommendations and for finding each other's recommendations later.

So with the aid of my little notebook, let me catch you up with my reading, and then perhaps you'll tell me about yours. (I do realize that this notebook approach means that my comments on what I've read will tend to be more fragmentary, but at least this way I might end up posting more regularly.)

 N.K. Jemisin's Fifth Season  is the first volume of her Broken Earth trilogy, which I gave Paul for Christmas (don't worry, I waited for him to finish it before I borrowed it ;-)

Transcription: Fantasy -- post-apocalyptic/dystopian. Cohesive imaginative world. Great characters.

Actually, this is perhaps more science fiction than fantasy -- Speculative fiction?
It's frighteningly easy to imagine this as a post-apocalyptic Earth, although the orogenes and stone-eaters might be an extrapolation too far. They work so well as analogy, though, and allow so much to be explored re race and class and caste, individuals and communities, power, politics, respect for the environment, what survival means and what values survive the focus on survival. . . 

Also, the layers and layers of history, the regular annotations from the books that lay down foundational stories, rules for survival etc., And then the stories (written and oral) that question or counter these . . . 

Gender, sexuality, erotics -- imaginative and credible. Horrifying control of "Breeding" but/which applies to both genders.

 6. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard -- about which I wrote a fair bit, in green ink you can see above and below.  After a very brief synopsis of the novel -- a modern classic about the effects of Italian unification on Sicily, through the eyes of a Sicilian aristocrat, Don Fabrizio Corbera--I've copied a few passages that seemed worth considering.

 I also posted favourite passages from the book on Instagram: here and here and here.

 7. I returned Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1  to the library yesterday, and I will admit with only the teeniest bit of shame or regret that I returned it without having read the last 400 pages, stopping at around 470 pages.  The book has a fascinating structure, tracing four possible lives of a single protagonist growing up in post-war America in a non-religious Jewish home. We realize at a certain point that new chapters might locate us in a different life, so that some re-orientation is necessary, as I explain briefly in my notes.

 I also comment on the sentences -- their length and energy are astonishing, impressive, admirable, although they sometimes require a deep breath beforeheand.

And as you'll see, above, on February 13th I admitted that I'm not going to finish the book, and below I declare that decision was made without regrets. Hmmmm.

 I apologize for the pink ink and readily concede that it's not legible enough. Let me know if you'd like me to transcribe a particular passage. . .

8. Philippe Georget's Summertime: All the Cats Are Bored is the first in a French noir series I highly recommend (I'd love to be able to find at least one of the series in the original French and will keep an eye out when I'm next in France; our library doesn't have a copy, although it does keep a decent French collection).

and then
9. Anna Burns' stunning Man-Booker-prize-winning Milkman
I recommend this highly. An amazing tour-de-force,  a sort of misbildungsroman, if you will. (A country/community/culture like the one depicted in this novel -- clearly Northern Ireland during The Troubles, although identifying names or landmarks or military forces are never given except in generalities such as "the country across the water" and "the country across the border" and "the state" and "renouncers of the state" -- is not capable of "bildung" -- of "building" or "educating" its young to adulthood). The young female protagonist is the most compelling mix of perception and naïveté and humour and impetuousness and caution and mutism and resistance. . .

And the writer -- wow! -- stylistically and structurally this book invites analysis and deserves marvel. Her mastery of long divergences that prove themselves inarguably relevant, and the litanies, catalogues, pilings-on of analogies in the protagonist and her community's attempts to get closer to saying what they mean (in a culture with a disposition to use language well, to tell stories, but in a time and place where muzzling is a dominant force, gossip a terrifying and potent discursive element).

 This section below, when the narrator's mother inquires if her daughter's been "fecundated" by the eponymous Milkman -- and then goes on to offer alternatives to that "singular" word. . .

and
10. I've just finished Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries: A Memoir to the library where there were 14 people waiting for a copy (and 65 copies out being read -- and it deserves all that attention, this brilliant, lyrical, searingly honest, beautiful, painful memoir about a First Nation (Coast Salish) woman who breaks away from the poverty and family dysfunction that are a direct result of colonialism -- but, in breaking away, in making a place for herself in the academic world of creative writing, also struggles with mental illness, with motherhood, with negotiating a healthy relationship with the man she . . . nope, no spoilers here. This one you will want to read for yourselves.