Clearing the decks and caveats: 20 Books of Summer 2019

Clearing the decks

We are less than a week out from the start of 20 Books of Summer, so of course I’m in the middle of a bunch of books. I’m trying to clear the decks so I can start my first book, Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, with a clear schedule (see my full TBR here). Here’s what I have to deal with first:

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

For Mel’s Read Around the World Book Club, which I am taking part in for the first time. Reading an author I’m familiar with, and who lives in my hometown, seems a little contrary to the spirit of “reading around the world”, but I’m glad to finally take part. Mel is a favourite on Booktube, and recently made a video just for me, after I publicly announced my incompetence when it comes to video editing. The book itself is a tricky one: I DNF’d it a few years ago, and this time around, I was well past 100 pages by the time the story started to click. I would recommend Son of a Trickster over this one.

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20 Books of Summer 2019

Cathy of 746 Books has been running the 20 Books of Summer challenge since 2014, and after watching the first five rounds from afar, I’m jumping in.

The idea is to read *and review* 20 books over the summer (June 3 – September 3). Cathy is quite reasonable about swapping out books if needed, adjusting targets etc. That said, I shall try to stick to the list below, which was created with a random number generator and a list of my physical TBR (currently sitting at 80 books), and some executive decision making – I stacked the deck in favour of Women in Translation month in August. I may substitute library ebooks or audiobooks for the paper copies, but will try to stick to the list and read in order, too.

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Literary Smut: An appreciation and some recommendations

Inspired by some recent racy reads, I made a video about smutty literary fiction (as opposed to smutty smut). I’ve blogged about sexy times in books a few times here on Reading in Bed, but talking about it with my voice (and my face!) is another prospect, and a little cringey. I’m glad I did it though, because I got some great recommendations for further highbrow smuttery in the comments. I’d like to share them with all of you, and of course, ask you for even more – I’ll update the post.

There’s not much Franzen in this video, this was just the best default thumbnail option and I’m too lazy to make my own

The books I mentioned are:

  • Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce (trigger warning for everything)
  • Smut by Alan Bennett (wonderful!)
  • The Bride Stripped Bare by Anonymous (an oldie but a goodie)
  • After Claude by Iris Owens (more trigger warnings!)
  • Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas (this one wasn’t great, nor is it literary fiction. In case you don’t make it that far in the vid)

The books other recommended to me are:

  • Stranger by the Lake (a movie, but including it, why not!)
  • Love Life by Zeruya Shalev
  • Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
  • “Housewife” by Jenny Diski (in the collection The Vanishing Princess)
  • Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
  • House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
  • Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke
  • The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
  • The Pisces by Melissa Broder
  • Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes
  • Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger
  • The Change Room by Karen Connelly

Send me some recs, and let me know what you think of explicit sex in lit fic.

How weird is too weird? Commentary on random pages from Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue

I’ve read some weird stuff since getting into literature in translation last year. That’s part of the appeal, right? Translated lit is an easy way to find something different, something experimental, maybe something surreal and dreamlike. Last year, I discovered László Krasznahorkai and his intensely weird story collection The World Goes On. I didn’t really “get it,” but I liked it. I also discovered Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Man Booker International Prize with a novel that defies genre. She calls her writing style a “constellation” and I don’t know if we really have that in English. I just finished an odd little book called The Order of the Day, also a prize winner, that is classified as a récit or an “account” rather than straight up non-fiction.

I could go on: a novel told in Facebook-status-like headlines, a speculative fiction about a world where only the elderly are healthy, whatever the heck Comemadre is about.

But now, I think I’ve hit my limit. I’ve found a translated novel that is too difficult to classify, too unmoored, too opaque, just too weird: Love in the New Millennium.

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Blurbing the Blurb: A recommendation of Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont

During my hiatus, I wrote a “recommend” for Canadian literary website 49th Shelf. Songs for the Cold of Heart has been on my mind lately, as various translated book award long and short lists are being announced. I was hoping to see it crop up – but alas, no Canadians at all are in the running for either the Man Booker International Prize or the Best Translated Book Award. Let’s take a moment and appreciate the book and the blurb, in both official languages. 

I am a blurb skeptic. Blurbs are, at best, the most biased form of literary criticism. Just check how often a blurber’s name appears on the acknowledgements page. At worst, blurbs are clichéd, or taken out of out of context, or of dubious veracity (did Gary Shteyngart really read all those books?).

The blurb on Songs for the Cold of Heart got all my skeptic senses tingling:

“If the Americans have John Irving and the Colombians Gabriel García Márquez, we have Eric Dupont. And he’s every bit as good as them.”—Voir

Like most Canadiens anglais, I didn’t hear of Éric Dupont until this English translation hit the Giller Prize longlist in 2018. I wondered if he was really as good as Irving and Márquez, two luminaries of world literature (and longtime personal favourites of mine). Or was this blurb just another bloated piece of hype?

Read the rest of my recommendation on 49th Shelf, as well as those of other luminaries, including Karen Hofmann, whose debut I reviewed five years ago and who since wrote another great novel with a very meta title: What is Going to Happen Next.

Thanks for indulging me with this mini-post while I try to get back in the swing of things! Let me know if you generally believe the blurb, or if you side-eye them as much as I do. Sadly, Shteyngart Blurbs is no longer updating, but I maintain that he must have been bullshitting at least some of the time.

2018 Year in Review

As I prepare to go dark at the end of this week, here’s how the year stacked up. I’m taking some liberties with a few books that I’m not quite finished, but certainly will be before Dec. 31, including the Short Story Advent Calendar.

Books Read

every boy

My Goodreads Challenge got arrowed

About the Author

  • 56% female, trans, or non-binary
  • 64% person of colour
  • 24% Canadian, 31% American, 29% European, 5% Asian, 4% South American, and a couple from the Middle East, Caribbean, and Africa
  • 54% originally written in English, 14% in French, 8% in Spanish, and a few each in the following: Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Danish, Italian, Latvian, Greek, Korean, Norwegian, Iraqi, Hungarian, Polish, and German.

bla

I basically speak French now

Blog Stats

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(Taking a) Break (from) the Internet

douglas-coupland-i-miss-my-pre-internet-brain-800x800

From Douglas Coupland’s “Slogans for the 21st Century”

This is a self-indulgent post (“as opposed to what?” you may well ask) meant to solidify my plans and give myself a little accountability, but it could be used it as a guide or jumping off point for anyone looking to take a break from the internet.

Yes, let’s go with that.

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Novellas in November 2018 Round Up #2

And wrap up, because it’s over!

Novellas read: 13
Goodreads Challenge: momentarily caught up, already behind again
Five-star reads: 2

Since my last update, I read eight more novellas. In the spirit of #NovNov, here they are, very briefly reviewed:

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

I thought this was a book about race, but it’s really about the relationship between religion and race and America, all in about 100 pages. Continue reading →

Classics Club Spin #19

spinning-book

…or in my case, Classics Club Spin #3, because I’ve only done this twice before.

I’m a delinquent Classics Club member at best, preferring to stick to my trusty 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list than put the effort in to curate and maintain a custom list and track it over five years, as per the rules. This spin is calling to me, though.

To participate in a spin, you’re supposed to make a list of twenty books, and read the one corresponding to a randomly selected number. Simple enough, but the theme of this 19th spin is “chunksters,” and the theme of my own reading year is “no white people writing in English,” and December is traditionally my month of rereading, so I’m pretty darn limited in what books I can include.

chunk.gif

Only 80s kids will remember this Chunkster

I can only think of five books that: are on the 1,001 Books list, are over five hundred pages long, I’ve already read, and are written by a person or colour and/or translated:

  1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (536 pages)
  2. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (706 pages)
  3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (838 pages)
  4. The Idiot by Fydor Dostoyevsky (667 pages)
  5. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1480 pages)

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Ten Rules for the Reader of Novels

Franzen serious

Franzen and I are judging you

With apologies to Jonathan Franzen and, to a lesser extent, Teddy Roosevelt and Lynn Coady.

  1. The author is not a friend, an adversary, nor a performer. I mean, they might be dead, for one thing. But a book can be a friend. So can other readers.
  2. Fiction that doesn’t inspire a reader’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth reading (unless you’re in the mood for something other than a personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown, in which case, go for it.)
  3. Cultivate a literary pet peeve. When you see it, underline it and write “UGH” in the margin. Mine is misuse of “begs the question”.
  4. Read The Catcher in the Rye and other first person coming of age novels while you’re young. Those stories won’t be as interesting when you’re older.
  5. Wikipedia rabbit holes are fun, but remember, novels are fiction. Even historical novels. Even novels that seem to portray real people.
  6. You can find yourself in a novel by matching up the author’s or main character’s socio-demographic profile to your own, but try to read novels that “find” you in places you’ve never been or experienced, too.
  7. You read more sitting still than chasing after. Unless it’s an audio book and you’re involved in a car chase?
  8. Reading and the internet go together in ways that are difficult for some to imagine. But for real, put your phone away after 9:00 pm and read for the rest of the night.
  9. Don’t discount novels written in simple language as simple, or assume a novel written in complex language is complex.
  10. You have to love an author before you can relentlessly make fun of them.