Johnson’s have the dual affect of making me want to read more, while making want to avert my gaze to the impending tragedies in his characters sad lives. Told with a comic touch to soften the inevitable blows.
I highly recommend Johnson’s books, though they’re not for the feint of heart.
65 stories by Nabokov in 750 pages. The stories are mostly quite short, and read as somewhat ambiguous moral tales. The book that this reminds me of most is Calvino’s folktales, so I’m using the same tactic of reading a few stories consecutively between reading other books. So far so good.
BTW – I love the covers that Vintage designed from this Nabokov series. I love the use of what appear to be shadow boxes, though are likely specimen cases – as Nabokov studied butterflies…
Click on the thumbnails for enlargements. Too bad that they didn’t do a version for Lolita as well…
I’ve read both of Bolano’s larger works (Savage Detectives and 2666) and was immensely impressed by both. The Skating Rink is the first of Bolano’s shorter works of fiction that I’ve read, and I was pleased to find same mastery at work in it.
A Note on Translations:
I was initially concerned that Bolano translated by a different translator might make a significant difference. Savage Detectives and 2666 are both brilliantly translated by Natasha Wimmer. The shorter fiction coming out of New Directions Press are translated by Chris Andrews. I was happy to find that Andrew’s translation was as fluid as Wimmer’s.
I’m a little picky about translators… especially with authors I admire. A good example is Marguerite Duras. Richard Seaver and Barbara Bray are both excellent translators of Duras’ writing. In recent years I’ve read a number of Duras books by other translators, where Duras’ writing felt flat and disjointed. An entirely different experience – tho it has occurred to me to blame the author herself…
This is not the sort of book I would typically read – for starters, I have no interest in Mormons or polygamy… I picked this book up because I’d read somewhere that David Ebershoff had worked as an editor with David Mitchell and I figured that was as good a recommendation as any. I was fortunate that my fuzzy reasoning panned out – Ebershoff’s blending of contemporary and historical first person narratives (a little like DM) kept the book dynamic and interesting. I wondered at one point whether reading the two narratives separately would have been as interesting. Likely not – or not in the same way.
The Parker Series by Richard Stark
“I wouldn’t wait for him if he was my Siamese twin…”
Bit of a guilty secret of mine. Richard Stark’s (aka Donald Westlake) old school hard boiled crime fiction – with a twist. I love Stark’s/Westlake’s use of structure – really something unusual, though rigorously adhered to within the series. And while Parker is a dark character with sometimes very dark deeds, the novels are strangely light – though nowhere as comical as Westlake’s Dortmunder books.
Some more covers for the Parker novels – these from the recent University of Chicago Press reissue of the entire series, wonderfully designed by David Drummond.
I
A few of the many recent books I’ve read include:
Remainder by Tom McCarthy; Ghostwritten and Number9Dream by David Mitchell; Blasted by Kate Story; a couple Lew Archer by Ross MacDonald; and the non-fiction The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy.
I listened to the audiobook version of The Hilliker Curse narrated by Ellroy – quite an experience that.
Italian Folktales, Selected and Retold by Italo Calvino, Translated by George Martin
A highly enjoyable (and scholarly) collection of folktales retold by the inimitable Italo Calvino. As there are 200 tales – my strategy has been to read a few stories between reading other books. As with any collection of folktales – there are plenty of kings, princesses, beheadings and maiming – morbid but almost always with a happy ending. Each story is preceeded by a brief description of the story’s sources, influences and an explaination as to how Calvino decided to synthesize various regional versions in his transcription. Some note worthy titles: “Quack, Quack Stick to My Back”, “The Chicken Laundress” and “Three Tales by Three Sons of Three Merchants”.
You can read some excerpts on Google Books.
2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer
The Cheese Monkeys & The Learners
by Chip Kidd
Fun reading – especially for anyone who has ever been to art school or worked in advertising. Not often you encounter a passage on time sheets, billable and non-billable hours, or a pitch in a novel…
The Informers
by Bret Easton Ellis
I originally read this book of interconnected stories a quite some time ago. I was surprised as I was rereading that I was able to recall some of the stories quite vividly – and others not at all. While I’m hesitant to recommend anything by B.E.E. simply on the grounds that it’s likely to offend – I found this book to be a very enjoyable reread.