Quarterly Reading Report: Gay England, luminous seasons, baroque and twisted Japan
I just had my annual conference with my very patient accountant Lani, who can explain the soul-deadening minutiae of taxation without throwing ledgers at me. This tells me that the first quarter of the year is over and it is time for the accounting I do enjoy: the books I have read so far this year.
My personal quota is 54 books a year, or a book a week. You do not have to observe this rule, unless of course you want to. I can do it because I work in publishing so I have to know what’s out there, and also I don’t keep regular office hours so in theory I can read as much as I want to.
Even then I managed to read only eight books in three months. I have no excuse, I’ll just have to read faster in the next nine months. I read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair—masterful, if we could scrape together several million pounds, we would buy the film rights.
Then All That Man Is, a collection of stories by David Szalay that was passed off as a novel. Yes, they have a common theme—Being a man is tough (and if you think that’s difficult, try being a woman)—but I don’t buy the packaging as a novel. Still, it is an extremely compelling read, the kind for which you have to drop everything until you’ve finished it.
Ali Smith is on my automatic-buy list, and her current project is the Seasonal Quartet, which she probably intends to complete in one year. She can, too, because for all the wordplay in her books you cannot see the effort, it just rolls along. Winter, the second book, is as wonderful as the first, Autumn. It’s joyful, cozy, ferociously intelligent and you should read it.
I finally finished David Mitchell’s number9dream, which I have been reading in bits since September. I’ve had the book for years, but saved it for when I finally visited Japan. Then I visited Japan and promptly left it in the hotel (and since it was Japan, the book was returned to me).
number9dream is endlessly clever, inventive, and intense—it’s like being in Tokyo, and I could not recommend it more. Oh and I think I get David Mitchell’s fascination with Japan (He’s only set three novels in it). Read his conversation with another Japanophile, David Peace, whose latest book is Patient X: The Case Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Akutagawa is the first Japanese author I ever read, and I need to get my mitts on a copy of Patient X so I asked Juan to check out the bookstores in Hong Kong. It’s not there yet. I must get Patient X. The fact that my Tower of Unread Books grows higher by the day and haunts my dreams like Barad-Dur will not stop me.
Travel and reading are always linked in my mind. When I visit another country, I have to read a book by a local writer (or a novel set in that country). When I went to Budapest I discovered Magda Szabo and Antal Szerb—I love them so much, I wanted to change my spelling to Szafra. Paris is Patrick Modiano (and Eric Rohmer movies). In three trips to Japan I’ve amassed a dozen books which I have just started going through.
First I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. Yeah, he’s really British, but his folks are Japanese and the novel is set in Japan. And when he acknowledged a Tom Waits song in his Nobel Prize speech, I thought, “I am going to read every word you write, even if I didn’t like The Buried Giant.” Holy crap, An Artist of the Floating World is a great book. I think of it as a rehearsal for The Remains of the Day, which is perfect. Both are about fundamentally decent men who do not rise above the narrow confines of their lives. Both are very quiet and calm until the author breaks your heart with a sentence.
Then there was Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, most of them set in Japan, by Angela Carter (who was Ishiguro’s writing teacher). The style is baroque and just bleeding emotional torment, and…maybe another time, I have to be in the mood for this.
Fumiko Enchi’s Masks is a short and deeply twisted novel about the relationship between a formidable woman and the widow of her son. They are so stiflingly close that other people suspect a lesbian relationship. If only it were that simple. The mother-in-law manipulates the younger woman’s relationships with the two men who are in love with her, and when you figure out her end game you have to retrieve your jaw from under the table in the corner where it has taken refuge.
So eight books out of thirteen, a B- for me, but I’ll make it up.
What have you read this year?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
April 9th, 2018 at 01:10
I just finished Edouard Louis’s The End of Eddy, which I read in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down. It reminded me of my own childhood, growing up gay and being kinda bullied because of it. It’s a coming-of-age story of a boy who grew up in a small French town where everyone is obsessed with his queerness. If you grew up gay and didn’t have the sort of privileged upbringing that Elio or the quirky family of Maximo Oliveros, you might like this very much. But then again, it was so joyless and at times it felt like the author was so absorbed in his misery that he left out whatever joyful moments he’s had. It was exhilarating, excruciating, like reading someone who stole bits from your childhood and magnified them for maximum heartbreak.
Before that, I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I had such a craving for haunted houses stories after reading Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (which was brilliant), which led me to David Mitchell’s Slade House, which was spooky. Gonna read more Shirley Jackson.
I also just finished The Stranger’s Child. I didn’t love it :( It was funny, very clever, and exquisitely written, but I wish it didn’t stray too far from Two Acres! It seemed to be satirizing the literary establishment’s obsession with dead writers. I read it a month ago when I was in London. The bookstores were amazing.
I just got home from Kanchanaburi, a province in West Thailand. Saw a secondhand bookstore and bought a James Purdy short story collection. John Waters wrote the intro and endorses the author by calling him a pervert. I just started reading Ian McEwan’s In Between the Sheets. I’m on the second story, the one about urine and asparagus. Mukhang puro kahalayan. I like it!
April 9th, 2018 at 01:51
Admittedly I’m behind on my reading (and even movie-watching) this year due to work and some travel, though I’ve managed to squeeze in a few here and there. Latest: The Armed Garden and Other Stories, by David B. Absolutely fascinating, imaginative, and also disturbing.
Meanwhile: I am now intrigued by Masks because of your commentary above. Biblical Noemi and Ruth were the first ones that came to my mind when I read “mother-in-law,” “widow,” and “lesbian relationship” – but of course it could be way different. I am curious about this end game, so now I may just find the time to squeeze this one in soon.
April 9th, 2018 at 06:38
From you, I learned the tip of reading a book set in a city when traveling. Thanks! It made my travels more meaningful and added an extra dimension to it, like a secret insight into a building or street.
I don’t have a reading list, and setting a quota frustrates me. But I read what I can. Since I year had started, I finished books published as diaries. David Sedaris’s Theft by Finding is an honest, witty, hilarious piece of work that inspires me to observe others during long commutes and maybe write about them in my tiny notebook. The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old by an unknown author gives me an idea of what the old think and feel. My parents are getting older, so this is a glimpse into why people get grumpy when they become geriatric. I also like old people hanging out with their friends.
I love that you have Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World in your reading list this year. It is one of my favorites. I love its subtlety and calm. And I agree with you: a sentence interrupts the prose with a punch, and one doesn’t see it coming. It is aspirational for me, too: one day, I hope to be somehow like this man. Wise but not entirely circumspect.
April 9th, 2018 at 09:57
lestat: I’ve loved Shirley Jackson since I read The Lottery in high school. The ordinariness of the settings and the casual tone only magnify the horror.
Had the same experience while reading The Stranger’s Child. The Sparsholt Affair is much more eventful.
I love the Ian McEwan of Enduring Love and so on, but I sometimes miss the nastier early McEwan of the short stories. Enjoy In Between The Sheets! Then read The Comfort of Strangers, which will make you itch to go to Venice, and when you get there, make you paranoid.
Happy reading year!
April 9th, 2018 at 10:01
allancarreon: David B also wrote Epileptic, which is well-loved. I wish more French comics were available in translation.
You’ll love Masks. The characters are doing research on spirit possession. And there’s a secret twin…
April 9th, 2018 at 10:07
bottledbrain: The Sedaris diary was my favorite read from last year. You can see how, even before it occurred to David S to be a writer, he already had an absurdist way of seeing.
You might enjoy William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, where the elderly narrator muses on his mistakes but regrets nothing.
I think I will read The Remains of the Day again.
April 9th, 2018 at 10:10
lestat: What would you say are the great queer novels?
April 9th, 2018 at 11:26
It’s a basic choice, but Call Me By Your Name is truly tremendous. I’ve always thought of gay novels as belonging to a niche genre, but Andre Aciman made it universal, in my opinion. I feel like there’s always going to be a struggle in gay love stories, but in CMBYN it’s only hinted at (it’s more about kilig, finding out who and what you are), and it mattered more that they can’t be together because it just wasn’t the right time. It’s such a fantasy, but basically it’s two gay guys who, despite their privileged status, can’t be together for reasons other than that they’re gay (although it’s a huge part of it). And the supporting characters (Elio’s parents, Marcia) aren’t one-dimensional contrabidas.
Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man gets a lot of things right about the tormented, melancholic gay. It captures what every adult gay guy thinks about and fears about life at a certain point: losing your partner of many years, the inevitability of alienation, and growing old and dying alone. But it’s not all misery and suffering. The Line of Beauty is great, my favorite Alan H (although I’ve only read that, The Spell and Stranger’s Child). I liked the the Price of Salt because it’s one of the rare gay stories with a happyish ending. But I may be biased since I like Patricia H.
April 9th, 2018 at 14:51
lestat: Great. I’ll read CMBYN. Feel like something swoony and not tortured.
April 9th, 2018 at 17:46
I read The Remains of the Day right after Ishiguro won the Nobel. What surprised me initially were the comedic bits in the early chapters consisting of Stevens overthinking butler-appropriate banter with his new master. I liked how the story was structured such that Stevens’s journey to meet Miss Kenton is also his journey into painful self-realization. In dribs and drabs, almost imperceptibly, his reminiscences build to a devastating exposition of the true nature of the novel’s three main characters. I love the discipline behind the slow reveal, the way Ishiguro wrote Stevens’s memories as though they were quietly being pried loose from his mind as he neared his destination, each one more damning than the one previous. As to the author “break(ing) your heart with a sentence”, this one did for me: “And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had.” (Miss Kenton to Stevens at the pier). It had the same impact as that scene in Never Let Me Go where Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield emerged from the house of Madame, knowing their fate was sealed.
Next, I read The Castle because I wanted to know what “Kafkaesque” meant. It wasn’t an easy read, admittedly, and with every frustrating turn of the page showing that K was no nearer to meeting Klamm or gaining entry to the castle than when he first arrived in the snow-blanketed village, silence or elusiveness meeting him at every turn, I got the point. By the time I got to the bizarre ending with the landlady showing K her dresses, I thought, right, that’s how it ought to end.
The first chapter of McEwan’s Enduring Love should get a prize for best first chapter ever written. It is so thrilling, so riveting, so cinematic, and such a specimen of the writer’s breathtaking skill, I regretted only having read Atonement years ago. At times, I felt he was just showing off. But, hey, if you’re that good, you can’t hide all that talent under a bushel.
I shall read An Artist of the Floating World next.
April 9th, 2018 at 18:32
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
– Exquisite storytelling. Was supposed to write a glowing review for your blog but will ony be adding to the torrent of glowing reviews already written for the book. Her sex scenes are not distasteful.
Penance by Kanae Minato
– Four women live their lives in atonement after their friend gets raped and murdered. The victim’s mother has cursed them to atone “in a way I’ll accept” if they can’t find the murderer. The book is driven by the distinct voices of these women. After a while, the reader will no longer be so fully invested in finding the killer. One becomes more interested in the lives of the survivors, who, after all, suffer too.
I have to look up her debut novel, Confessions, and its film adaptation.
The Rim of Morning by William Sloane
– Two stories of cosmic horror, To Walk the Night and Edge of Running Water. Reissued by NYRB with an introduction by Stephen King. (Need I say more?) Sloane mixes occultism and science in a way that recalls the numinous as mysterium tremendum et fascinosum.
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
– Had to read the book right after seeing the downloaded movie. Then had to watch the movie on the big screen. Both media are beautiful. I don’t want to judge one being better than the other because I feel like they’re separate independent entities, although there’s no movie without the book of course. In the book, Elio is more pensive–his voice is more ruminative but this is just natural in a book that deals with first love and all the confusion and pain it brings. I didn’t want the movie to end which is why I read the book promptly after seeing it; that being said, I am not looking forward to a sequel (which the movie people have already planned). Stop ruining beautiful things!
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
– Sonchai Jitpleecheep should be played by a blond Mario Maurer. That’s all. (I have the other Bangkok novels hoarded and hauled from the recently concluded Big Bad Wolf Book sale but I’m sure my book adultery will get in the way.)
Others:
Jason Gurley’s Eleanor (what starts out as family drama interestingly becomes fantasy fiction about time, life, the Big Questions)
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (being in Eileen’s head is also both fascinating and repulsive: “I’d always believed that my first time would be by force. Of course I hoped to be raped by only the most soulful, gentle, handsome of men, somebody who was secretly in love with me.” Her disquisition on constipation has me cringing and laughing at once.)
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (when I get rich I want to open a bookshop too. With the obligatory ghost as well. Hello, Mt. Cloud?)
April 10th, 2018 at 00:22
Call Me By Your Name set the theme (?) for the first few books this year. It’s as beautiful as everyone said, but I think I’m in the minority who liked the ending. I like the heartbreak. Elio’s point of view might be one of the most beautiful points of view I’ve read.
Moved on to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, because one of my friends is obsessed with it. Read the play when I finished watching Part 1, with Andrew Garfield in the lead. Surrealism, delirium, and heartbreak during the AIDS crisis! I was floored. I regret not reading/watching this when I was younger. It’s one of my favorite works now.
Next in line was Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. I have a current fascination with Lost/Person of Interest actor Michael Emerson, and I’ve been looking for this play ever since I’ve read that his big break was playing Oscar Wilde in the original production. It might read as a dry trial transcript at times, but Wilde’s wit shines in this, and it’s both to his advantage and disadvantage as his detractors close in on him. I also found a bootleg audio recording of a repeat benefit reading in 2015, and like in Angels in America, the delivery is everything, and Michael nails it.
This lead me to reread an uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I must’ve been such a sheltered kid, because how did I not notice that everyone was very gay for Dorian? Sometimes it’s not even subtext.
Taking notes of the books in this entry and comments, they all sound interesting. Thanks!
April 10th, 2018 at 11:42
avignon2018: The James Ivory (na naman! CMBYN link) adaptation of The Remains of the Day is faithful to the text while giving Miss Kenton more spine (Emma Thompson). My sister and I saw it at the cinema, and during the tram scene we were leaking tears and snot because Stevens couldn’t. Ishiguro’s prose is so tightly controlled that you are lulled into a state of calm and then you get defibrillated. It’s genius.
Kafka’s novels are an obstacle course. I enjoy his short short stories. Prague and Kafka are the perfect match.
Hey, Enduring Love was my entry into McEwan’s work, too. I started reading it in a cafe in Melbourne when we went to see the Australian Open (I always remember where I read my favorite books), and it was a Sunday so the bookshops were closed and I seriously considered stealing the book. I like the review where someone pointed out that Atonement is a chronological pastiche of English literary styles. Weird that he was given the Booker for Amsterdam, not his finest.
April 10th, 2018 at 11:47
balqis: In lieu of a review, why not a compilation of the best literary sex scenes? We know most sex scenes are terrible, where are the good ones? (Sal-ter! Sal-ter!)
Why has there been no movie adaptation of the Sonchai books? Or Alan Furst’s WWII spy novels, which are ready for the screen, down to the descriptions of the curtains.
Let’s start that haunted bookshop! The salesperson could be that old lady Allan met in Siquijor who went up to him, took his hand and said, “Hijo, may pulso pa ba ako?” (Son, do I still have a pulse?) And then added, “Joke lang!”
April 10th, 2018 at 11:51
amypond: Fine, I’ll crack open my copy of the Aciman since everyone is waxing lyrical about it.
The real Roy Cohn is one of Trump’s idols.
There’s an Oscar Wilde movie with Stephen Fry as Oscar and Jude Law as Bosie.
Well, you were young. After Noel saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s he told his mom about it and she said, “Ah, yung masamang babae si Audrey Hepburn?” That’s the only time he realized how Holly Golightly made money.
April 10th, 2018 at 12:39
Read CMBYN last year and I just wanted to add my voice to everyone who said good things about it. Perhaps what I found most extraordinary about it was finding out that Aciman is actually straight. (Not that I think straight people can’t write about gay love, but you know what I mean).
As for books I’ve read, I must admit that the to-read pile is greater than the read. I’m in the last 50 or so pages of Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks” and I freakin’ love it. I’m trying to complete his entire oeuvre and so far I think I’m only missing “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.”
I read “number9dream” a couple of years ago, off and on, and while it’s not my favorite (I think it’s hard to top “Cloud Atlas”), I see what you mean about kind of like being in Tokyo when you read it. What’s your favorite from Mitchell?
Picked up a dozen new books from all the book sales the last couple of months, including Alan H’s “The Line of Beauty,” Marlon James’ “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” an art book about Mark Rothko, “Simon and the Homosapien Agenda” (from which the upcoming movie “Love Simon” is based) and a bunch of others I can’t even remember. But I’ll get ’round to them soon enough (I hope).
(Also, really good to see you at the NBS-Euro authors event last week)
April 10th, 2018 at 15:35
hellokevin: Andre Aciman is straight?? (Married with three children; here’s the ghost of Jun Encarnacion saying, “Ano, ako na naman ang example ng baklang may asawang babae?”) That does it, I’m reading CMBYN right now (I can always return to Lola Ursula’s Orsinia). Jomari says his other novel The Enigma Variations is also about gay love. Remember Ishiguro saying that “Write what you know” is the most useless advice. On the other hand, some research is always helpful…
Yes, Cloud Atlas is still David Mitchell’s best. One Xmas I gave everyone hardcover copies of Jacob de Zoet from the National Bookstore warehouse sale. Let me see if anyone hasn’t read it so I can take a copy back and give it to you.
You’re going to enjoy The Line of Beauty. I always remember the party where the narrator is stoned out of his mind and asks Margaret Thatcher to dance.
I want to see Love, Simon. After I see A Quiet Place because I love the Blunt-Krasinskis, i.e. the last hope of love surviving in this world.
Will alert you for our next lunch/dinner!
April 11th, 2018 at 10:53
So far, the most notable book I’ve read this year is F. Sionil Jose’s Po-on. My reading choices are not makabayan so he must have done something great in this book for me to say that. I was going to read the rest of the books in the series but I was sidetracked by graphic novels. I’ve finished Peplum (Blutch), Here (Richard McGuire), and now reading Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons). There’s also Daytripper and Persepolis on the bedside stack.
I’ve yet to finish The Goldfinch. 2/3 into it but I’ll definitely pick it up again after this graphic novel binge.
Chiming in the CMBYN reco. Read it a couple of years ago but I could still feel the tension between the two characters. The scenes I’ve created in my head had been altered (a bit) by the film but that’s okay. I’ve pictured Oliver as someone who resembles Armie Hammer anyway.
April 11th, 2018 at 13:20
have read principles by dalio—good first half. second half has un-actionable rhetorics, but i see his earnestness throughout. considering that im always skeptical of all self-help book, this one is worth the money and time bottomline. you cannot ask the author the classic, “if you know all this step-by-step, why arent you rich?” question. he has all the results and cred needed to write a step-by-step.
then sapiens and call me by your name in kindle and audiobook combined. (amazon’s setup of turning to the page where you left off in audiobook—and vice versa—is truly useful). both are fantastic books. sapiens would be a fantastic textbook in kasaysayan1. not one boring chapter. deserves all the praise.
i got into cmbyn after hearing james ivory’s oscar speech— “whether straight or gay or somewhere in between, we’ve all gone through first love and hopefully come out the other side in tact.” (i googled and copy pasted this). i think ivory indeed nailed it with this praise on the story. and it did not need so many pages to tell an authentic story of first love. the self-consciousness, obsession, and everything are all there. the prose is lyrical and stylish to me (blurbs call proustian but i havent read any proust). and armie hammer is a good reader (bonus na lang siguro ito).
April 11th, 2018 at 20:24
I’ve read 32 books so far but most of them are short books/comics/graphic novels! Is that cheating? Haha.
Had a bit of a horror reading spree since the Philippines is a terrifying otherworld already.
The Amityville Horror and The Exorcist kept me up all night, especially Jay Anson’s book. It came to a point that I have to read it while someone is in the room. Don’t fuck with demons.
I also had a Lovecraft reading spree (and had to confront his racism) so I read S.T. Joshi’s The Annotated Lovecraft. The annotations were mostly disruptive and often talked about stories that weren’t in the collection. I ended up buying the massive The New Annotated Lovecraft by Leslie Klinger which had annotations on the side and gorgeous illustrations/photographs.
(I also have a theory about how my interest on Lovecraft is linked with my newfound nihilist tendencies, which was sparked by the horrors of this era of hate-filled politics. Great Asteroid 2019, come thru!)
Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone,” a chronicle of how the ebola virus first spread to the US, is more terrifying than all the horror books combined. The first chapter almost made me vomit.
Read Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, which was so kilig I finished it overnight. It doesn’t help that Simon is already Nick Robinson in my head. Reading Rainbow Rowel’s Carry On and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante next for more gay YA.
Had a Philippine comics spree and all of them are must reads: Dead Balagtas, Melag, Sandali, the duology Light and Lost, the first Tabi Po book, Hari ng Komyut, and the very funny Ugh by Hulyen. (It’s Komikon this Saturday!)
I dropped reading Ready Player One because the writing is heinous (stopped after page 74). The film is much MUCH MUCH better.
And finally, after six years of having the box set gather dust, I read Chris Ware’s magnificent and depressing Building Stories. Not good reading material if you’re already sad and despairing.
April 11th, 2018 at 21:26
Angus: Your constitution is stronger than mine.
In my opinion Alan Moore’s work answers the question of whether comics are literature.
Maybe The Goldfinch would go faster if you imagine Dane DeHaan as the protagonist. (In my head it was Ezra Miller.)
Oo na, I’m reading Aciman. It’s like falling into a swoon, not that I’ve ever swooned. (The closest I got was when water intoxication caused my brain to swell and shut down. According to a witness I tried to warg into a cat.)
April 11th, 2018 at 21:30
turmukoy: Self-help books don’t count, only books read for pleasure. All hail uselessness.
Sapiens is very engaging, though I found some of his conclusions facile. But it makes one think.
Yeah, I don’t regard CMBYN as a gay novel. Works for everyone.
April 11th, 2018 at 21:40
geeksturr: That’s not cheating, many comics are literature.
You remind me of that Susan Sontag essay about how we watch disaster movies because we survive them.
Lovecraft creeps me out. When will Guillermo Del Toro do At The Mountains of Madness? I prefer to listen to Lovecraft read aloud, in a well-lit place full of people.
I admit my knowledge of gay YA is nil, but I will see Love, Simon.
My Building Stories box is also covered in dust, waiting for me to be so happy nothing can depress me.
April 12th, 2018 at 21:21
Ooh finally! A list of books!
Like I mentioned before, I finished Proust this year. That was in the middle of February. After that there’s a mix between fiction and non-fiction:
1. Proust’s Way by Robert Shattuck. Just to see how much of Proust I understood. Turns out I did quite well as I got more than half of the things that was going on.
2. How Fiction Works by James Wood. Fun little book about characters, plot, narration, etc. I’m going to read it again someday.
3. What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell. Beautiful prose but sad ending. This and Call Me By Your Name’s ending made me a bit angry so I wrote about it. Read if you like: https://medium.com/@allanrayjasa/lets-stop-the-fetish-of-sadness-in-gay-fiction-53b73dcec7ca
4. Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Such a comforting book especially since I’ve been unemployed for far too long now. It’s about his time in a Nazi concentration camp and how we can find meaning in our suffering.
5. A Guide To The Good Life by William Irvine. A book about stoicism. I think this one changed me.
6. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. So I’ve been looking for gay books with happy endings and this one came up in my search. It won a ton of awards that the seals cover 1/4 of the cover. I hated it a bit while reading it and then the ending came and I was blown away, and I understood why the narrator is like that. He sounded a lot like Holden Caulfield with smaller vocabulary.
7. Moonglow by Michael Chabon. I love the Kavalier and Clay book so much (thanks for the recommendation; I’ve read it twice and I plan to read it again), and then when I saw this book at the bookstore, it had “International Bestseller” at the cover, I thought it would be another K&C book. Not quite, although it’s entertaining. 3/5 stars.
8. The Outsider (L’Etranger) by Albert Camus. So refreshing to read after Chabon’s palabok. Straightforward and short, although I had to google what that ending meant.
The next on my list are:
The Trial by Kafka
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Proust by Benjamin Taylor
April 16th, 2018 at 03:44
Hubby went home to pinas for a short vacation and I asked him to buy a few books as my pasalubong :-) He got hold of Ambeth Ocampo books, but I made sure he gets a couple of your books. He found a copy of Geeks and Jocks and I did enjoy it! Nadal fan here, but I love your admiration for RF. And yes, I believe he is the GOAT. I agree, Marat Safin is still the hottest :-) Your Game of Drones was good. We have the same wish. Point at some politicians and say “Dracarys”.
Thanks to your book, I learned how selfless the players of the Philippine Volcanoes were!
I am reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.