For my list I wanted to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' because it's one of those books that everybody has read and I don't even know what it's about - I've not even seen the film. But I enjoy reading so this year I am trying out new things, new authors, new genres, and I thought it would be handy to keep a note of them as I go along.
World Book Night: Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Back in March it was World Book Night where 1million books were given away, 40,000 copies each of 25 books, and I wish I'd got around to applying to be a giver-awayer, but I didn't, but someone from tango did and was giving away the books at the tango festival. And I can't resist a book (and this one has a nice smell, v traditional bookish). I started reading it on a train and the first line was one of the most beautiful first lines: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." I'll admit that I didn't immediately make the connection between almond scent and the fact that the guy had killed himself with cyanide, but it just struck me as such a genuine sentiment, relating a smell with a feeling because it's hard to describe the feeling of unrequited love but smells do evoke memories of emotions in a person. Also, with an opening line like that the book promised to appeal to the senses. I'll also admit that I lost patience with Florentino Ariza at times, he seriously just needed to get over her, and he got up to some naughty stuff and had weird ways of justifying some of his questionable conduct. I know unrequited love can consume you, but at some point he needed to let it go and get on with life and stop being so creepy and obsessed. But it was also engaging and compelling right up to the end.
April 2011
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
This isn't a true first read, because I started reading it in my first year of uni, but finishing it will be a first since for some reason I didn't finish it last time, distracted by the myriad diversions of being a student I suppose. Anyway, I started it this week and am immediately caught up by the sheer energy of it, there's such a rhythm to Kerouac's writing that it almost sings.
I've finished it now - it's been so sunny I've been able to sit out in the park and read in the afternoons - and I really enjoyed it. Someone said to me that they think the story is trite and the writing juvenile, but I didn't feel that, I thought that the story has possibly lost some of its impact because it must have been such a reaction to the America of the time, but it still speaks so much. Yes, at times they seemed juvenile, but mostly they just seemed to not really fit in to the picket fence ideal and not to want to, and to be seeking more truth in life and there was incredible sadness in quite how conflicted Kerouac seemed to be - looking for something more but at the same time really also looking for a relationship and marriage and family, and sadness in how Dean Moriarty was going crazy and people were at the same time concerned and scared of him. And the style of writing was so rhythmic and instinctive and even though it might not have been perfectly eloquent in places, it was so 'in the moment' that it really gave the sense of how hard he was trying to just live. Anyway, I'm clearly not an expert in literature! and I don't really know how to write about books, but those are my thoughts, and the more I'm reading the more I'm seeing references between books. I'm not going to go as far as the Dylan quote on the back cover and say that 'it changed my life like it changed everybody else's', but it is a book that I feel has changed me a little, if nothing else it gives a voice to the doubts that you have about life.
And then I also read Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and it made me cry - I was surprised that something that is only a few pages long can say so much and go straight to the heart of things, and it is devastatingly sad in places, so I haven't read the rest of the poems in there - I need a rest!! It has made me think that I should give poetry more of a go - it has always seemed like something slightly inaccessible, like a secret language that only experts have the key to, but now I've got the feeling that poetry perhaps has the power to say much more in far fewer words, because as well as words and images it has rhythm that creates a sense of musicality that speaks in another emotional dimension, so I'm going to give more poetry a go.
I've just started William Maxwell's 'So Long, See You Tomorrow' and I'm not sure I like it. I got it because I saw it was one of the Vintage/Orange Inheritance books, and the introduction by the woman who nominated it made it sound interesting with a lot of insights. But it feels like the polar opposite of On The Road - that was all about living in the moment and this is all about trying to hold on to a moment from the past. I'm not saying that it's a bad book, it's just that the desire to live in a previous moment and the grief in it are just not where I want to be. If I was having feelings like that and wanted to work through them then it would be the perfect book, but it just feels so intense and inescapable that it will create those feelings in me, and I don't want to go there at the moment - there will be enough times in my life when I'm feeling loss and trying to hold on to something and then I will read it and indulge those feelings. But for now I want to carry on feeling the excitement and sense of possibility and endless potential that came from On The Road - after all, my 30 list is not about trying to hold on to being young, it's about making sure I am living my life. So this is going on the shelf for now, and I'm going to read Breakfast at Tiffany's because Truman Capote was critical of Kerouac (apparently he said that On the Road was not writing, but merely typing) so I want to see what he is like. And that's only short so then I'll come back to more Kerouac and The Dharma Bums.
