Summer Reading.
I don't know exactly why this should be, but I always do much less reading in the summer than in any other season. Perhaps I still have an element of that schoolboy restlessness that drives me to treat this time of the year as an opportunity to run around like a madman. I certainly have a lot more free time to pursue any interest that strikes me. When my schedule is full, and I have a set bedtime, I often give myself over to a bit of daydreaming whereby I imagine being able to stay up all night and read. But when that fantasy becomes reality, I tend to fritter away too many hours thinking about where I might go next.
A few weeks ago I started reading Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies. That book's been on my wishlist for years, and when I saw it sitting on a shelf at a friend's house I was excited to borrow it. It's a strange cross-section of sci-fi and magical realism in the gritty demimonde of an imagined urbanized Asia. Under most circumstances I believe I would have breezed through this read in a matter of days. Yet I keep drawing it out- reading a few pages at a sitting before putting it down again. I usually stick to a personal hard-and-fast rule of only reading one book at a time. But in this case I've gotten sidetracked.
I picked up the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000) at a book sale at a branch of the Carnegie Library system. I actually passed it up during my first walk-through, and then reconsidered before I left. After all, it was only a buck. It was a bit outdated, but I figured I would glean some decent suggestions regarding authors I haven't yet read. The concept of the book is interesting in and of itself. There's an awful lot of subjectivity inherent to the process of selecting a canon of "important" modern-day authors. Any avid reader is going to have his/her favorites, a few of which are going to be invariably absent. The editor (Laura Miller) selected a group of critics that write literary commentary for the Salon website. Each person constructed their own list of authors they believed should be included, and then they defended their choices. A list of 500 was whittled down to fit the 400+ pages allotted for the Reader's Guide.
So far I've made my way through almost half of the book. It is organized alphabetically, but it has no table of contents- so there are a lot of surprises along the way. I've frequented enough bookstores to be familiar with a majority of the names. But I've often wondered what these writers were all about. Who are Louise Erdrich, Peter Carey, Robert Olen Butler, Louis Begley, etc.? This is a useful guide in that it includes several convenient features that allow the reader to employ it as a handy reference guide. There are bibliographies for each entry, and essential works are highlighted. The individual critics have even taken the liberty of suggesting a single book from each author for the reader to concentrate on if he/she is only ever going to read one. While this adds another (possibly dubious) element of subjectivity, I believe that I could trust the discretion of the majority of these critics. Additionally, following the description of each author's work is a section recommending other authors that might be enjoyed by readers who are already fans.
I've found the commentary on the individual authors enlightening. Not only do these critics describe the themes and tones of each body of work, but they offer quotations that illustrate the author's writing style. And they make an effort to fit each writer into the literary scene as a whole. The criticism is learned, but not expressed in overly stiff or academic terms. This guide was obviously written by a group of people who love reading as much as they love analyzing books.
While many of my favorite authors were left out, I'm not really bothered by their exemption. Certainly a few of them had not distinguished themselves by the year 2000 (Dan Chaon, Chris Offutt, George Saunders) . Others (Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago) are absent because they didn't meet the criteria of writing their books in the English language. Either way, it's not necessary for me to read criticism about them because I've already identified their works as worthwhile. But I've never thought to pick up a book by Louis de Bernieres, Samuel Delany, or Thomas Berger- and now there's a good chance I will. If my horizons are broadened at all, then this was a buck well spent.
A few weeks ago I started reading Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies. That book's been on my wishlist for years, and when I saw it sitting on a shelf at a friend's house I was excited to borrow it. It's a strange cross-section of sci-fi and magical realism in the gritty demimonde of an imagined urbanized Asia. Under most circumstances I believe I would have breezed through this read in a matter of days. Yet I keep drawing it out- reading a few pages at a sitting before putting it down again. I usually stick to a personal hard-and-fast rule of only reading one book at a time. But in this case I've gotten sidetracked.
I picked up the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000) at a book sale at a branch of the Carnegie Library system. I actually passed it up during my first walk-through, and then reconsidered before I left. After all, it was only a buck. It was a bit outdated, but I figured I would glean some decent suggestions regarding authors I haven't yet read. The concept of the book is interesting in and of itself. There's an awful lot of subjectivity inherent to the process of selecting a canon of "important" modern-day authors. Any avid reader is going to have his/her favorites, a few of which are going to be invariably absent. The editor (Laura Miller) selected a group of critics that write literary commentary for the Salon website. Each person constructed their own list of authors they believed should be included, and then they defended their choices. A list of 500 was whittled down to fit the 400+ pages allotted for the Reader's Guide.
So far I've made my way through almost half of the book. It is organized alphabetically, but it has no table of contents- so there are a lot of surprises along the way. I've frequented enough bookstores to be familiar with a majority of the names. But I've often wondered what these writers were all about. Who are Louise Erdrich, Peter Carey, Robert Olen Butler, Louis Begley, etc.? This is a useful guide in that it includes several convenient features that allow the reader to employ it as a handy reference guide. There are bibliographies for each entry, and essential works are highlighted. The individual critics have even taken the liberty of suggesting a single book from each author for the reader to concentrate on if he/she is only ever going to read one. While this adds another (possibly dubious) element of subjectivity, I believe that I could trust the discretion of the majority of these critics. Additionally, following the description of each author's work is a section recommending other authors that might be enjoyed by readers who are already fans.
I've found the commentary on the individual authors enlightening. Not only do these critics describe the themes and tones of each body of work, but they offer quotations that illustrate the author's writing style. And they make an effort to fit each writer into the literary scene as a whole. The criticism is learned, but not expressed in overly stiff or academic terms. This guide was obviously written by a group of people who love reading as much as they love analyzing books.
While many of my favorite authors were left out, I'm not really bothered by their exemption. Certainly a few of them had not distinguished themselves by the year 2000 (Dan Chaon, Chris Offutt, George Saunders) . Others (Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago) are absent because they didn't meet the criteria of writing their books in the English language. Either way, it's not necessary for me to read criticism about them because I've already identified their works as worthwhile. But I've never thought to pick up a book by Louis de Bernieres, Samuel Delany, or Thomas Berger- and now there's a good chance I will. If my horizons are broadened at all, then this was a buck well spent.
Labels: Ryu Murakami
posted by Merge Divide at 8:25 PM
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