Reading List 10

35 books completed again this term, making a neat 70 for the year.

George Eliot

Adam Bede — George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss — George Eliot
Silas Marner — George Eliot
Romola — George Eliot
Felix Holt, the Radical — George Eliot
Middlemarch — George Eliot
Daniel Deronda — George Eliot

The genius of animal similes: “hardly more in need of salvation than a squirrel”.

And so wise: “he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out.”

Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream — William Shakespeare

The Shakespeare read-through continues at a stately pace.

Algeria

Harraga — Boualem Sansal
The Last Summer of Reason — Tahar Djaout
The Fall — Albert Camus

Harraga was great fun. Not great literature, but amusing and perceptive about … local issues.

Gutenberging

The Heart of England — Edward Thomas
The World’s Illusion — Jacob Wassermann
In Pursuit of Spring — Edward Thomas

More enjoyable books from Edward Thomas this time, though he does tend to repeat himself. In Pursuit of Spring mentions rookeries 19 times, and tells us of 15 different chiffchaffs. Wassermann was very highly wrought.

Other Literature

The Magic Flute — Alan Spence
Moon Tiger — Penelope Lively
Canal Dreams — Iain Banks
A Death in the Family — Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes
Day — A. L. Kennedy
MaddAddam — Margaret Atwood
The Four Books — Yan Lianke

Knausgaard was brilliant — so good I could almost overlook the comma splices. The Four Books — terrifying and funny, as were (in slightly different ways) The Sense of an Ending and Day. I was very glad to put the MaddAddam trilogy behind me.

SF/F

The Eyre Affair — Jasper Fforde
Lost in a Good Book — Jasper Fforde
City of Saints and Madmen — Jeff Vandermeer
The Player of Games — Iain M. Banks
The Quiet Woman — Christopher Priest
Gifts — Ursula Le Guin
The Owl Service — Alan Garner
A Tale of Time City — Diana Wynne Jones
The Sandman Volume 2 — Neil Gaiman
Escape Plans — Gwyneth Jones
Anima — M. John Harrison

Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison are both masters of the non sequitur: Priest in his whole plots, and Harrison in his descriptions and dialogue:

She craned her neck to stare at the other passengers — men with the soft brown eyes, dark moustaches and apologetic gazes of drunks….

‘Are those Hungarians?’

‘No’, I said.

I was enjoying it less than Isobel…. I had flown before, in aircraft which did not have such obvious rivets.

‘They’re people who’ve just failed job interviews in Bolton.’

Non-fiction

By Hook or by Crook — David Crystal
Essays — Wallace Shawn

Next semester: all of Du Fu (in a recent complete translation by Stephen Owen, bizarrely made available absolutely free here). Generally fewer and bigger books — I’ve started Alan Moore’s spectacular Jerusalem, and I need to read some poems. I might even get round to those Germans.