Books I've finished reading this month:
- The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom, Alexander McCall Smith.
Rating:
Lent to me by a co-worker, this is an omnibus edition containing three books about a ridiculous German professor of Romance phililogy . It was the first bit of purely comic writing1 I had read in a long time, so although it took me a while to realise that each book was just a collection of little stories (and so none of the isolated weird occurrences were setups for eventual, devastating punchlines) it was fairly enjoyable. - Non-Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk.
Rating:
Disclaimer: aside from Fight Club, I am yet to like any of Palahniuk's novels. I suspect that he only has one real thing to say, and Fight Club allowed him to express it most purely; puerility and an unpleasantly overplayed cynicism drag down his other excursions into fiction. In Non-Fiction I found more or less the same thing to be true, in that the most compelling pieces examined human (and especially masculine) isolation and alienation, while the rest tended to rely on shock value or simply fail to be anything but dull. - Hunters in the Snow, Tobias Wolff.
Rating:
A random selection from my housemates' bookshelf because I hadn't gotten around to getting a library card yet, this collection of short stories was affecting but somewhat unrewarding. I can't love a collection of stories about people being selfish and hypocritical without redemption or consequence. I just don't understand the point of it, unless it is to depress the reader. - The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon.
Rating:
This book was recommended to me by the co-worker who lent me The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom, and it completely exceeded my expectations. There was not a single thing about it I didn't like2, and there was so much to love. Note-perfect dialogue, noir-flavoured humour amongst drama with real emotional weight, all against a fascinating backdrop of Jewish culture. And beautifully written - sometimes great writing is great because it gets out of the way and you never notice it's there, but I loved the way The Yiddish Policemen's Union kept making me stop and think "Wow". - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami.
Rating:
This was my third attempt at reading Murakami, and if it didn't work out I was going to give up on him altogether. Unfortunately, I am still undecided; I feel a strange mix of interest and repulsion when I read his work, and while Hard-Boiled Wonderland was by far the most interesting instance so far I would still hesitate to recommend it to anybody. His dialogue never rings true for me3 and his characters have no emotional life that I can discern, but on the other hand he takes bizarre fantasy worlds and integrates them perfectly into stories that are matter-of-fact and down-to-earth. I blame postmodernism.
I have also been reading a great many non-book things, as usual, but would like to make particular note of Who Sent The Sentinels? by Andrew Rilstone, which would probably be even more interesting to anybody who knows more than zero about comics.
I would also like to note that I have reached my self-imposed target of 52 books for the year (just a little bit early). I think I will use that as an excuse to abandon this monthly-ordered-list format, which I don't like as much as I did in the beginning, but I will continue to write at least something about each book I read. It feels like a valuable exercise and I enjoy doing it even when I don't enjoy doing it.4
- That being said, one chapter early on made me thoroughly, pathetically sad and that took quite a while to wear off. [↩]
- A rarity. I even liked the way it ended, which almost never happens. [↩]
- To be fair, it's hard to know whether to lay the blame for that at the feet of the author, the translator, or simply my lack of familiarity with the way Japanese people talk to one another. [↩]
- If you know what I mean. [↩]
