Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee
I took this book and Disgrace out from the library at the same time, unsure if I would read both. I still didn't have any of my holds in when I finished, so I started this one immediately afterwards. It was interesting to read the two so close to each other. There are a lot of thematic similarities in the stories, even though they are so different: Disgrace is set in modern times, while this book is set in an archaic era out in the farthest reaches of a vast empire (at least, I picture it as vast).
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Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
I've been wanting to read something by Coetzee since he won the Nobel Prize in 2003. I guess it took an open reading slot and a wander around the library to make it finally happen. This book is sparse in the way it's told but incredibly nuanced at its heart. While the story is simply about an older professor who disgraces himself through a not-entirely-consensual relationship with a student, the threads tangle deep into the shifts of power in post-apartheid South Africa.
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You Shall Know Our Velocity
Dave Eggers
I got this book when McSweeney's had their big sale last year. I never read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I never read this one even after I bought it. It happened that when I was unpacking my books, I was a week into a misguided mission to read Roland Barthes' Image, Music, Text.
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Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
While Lolita holds fort as Nabokov's best known novel, Pale Fire rates vaguely higher on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Comprised of a 999-line poem in four cantos by a (fictional) famous American poet, John Shade, as well as a foreword and extensive commentary by his friend, Professor Charles Kinbote, at times it reads very much like a scholarly examination of a poem.
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The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
I read this while I was in the UK, and it's now several weeks since I got back, so details are already getting a little fuzzy. These three books, technically separate but subtly threaded together, have been on my list for a long time. Ostensibly detective novels at the start, each one devolves into surreal and existential mysteries of an entirely different meaning and those threads of similarities start to weave the narratives together in odd ways that sometimes don't seem physically possible.
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Though I started this book with the news that many people find it just a little too long, knowing that must have helped, as I was not overwhelmed by the length at all. Though everything is drawn-out in this book — like this sentence at the beginning of chapter five, as the students are walking to chapel for vespers:
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Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O’Nan
A little novella about endings and regrets for what maybe never could have been, dressed in the ill-fitting hopes that anything is possible. You can feel that tightness and slack in all the wrong places.
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Two Serious Ladies
Jane Bowles
This is one of those books that I didn't know anything about when I started, and now that I've finished I have since been reading up about it and Jane Bowles and still feel like I missed something. I heard this mentioned on Show Me Your Titles film podcast as a suitable pairing to the movie Daisies. Thinking about the two together is the only thing that has made the book make any sense.
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A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon
I couldn't quite figure out sometimes if things in this book were supposed to be funny or not and having to think about it got a little annoying. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was so good, and this is entertaining enough.. But something felt missing in this one.
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