The Road – Jack London

And exactly four months after my baby’s birth, I am now fully caught up with the books I have been reading lately. This was an old book that my mom passed onto me because they had two copies and were going to donate one to our local library if I wasn’t going to pick it up.

I had never read any Jack London (unless you count children versions of White Fang and The Call of the Wild) and The Road, in particular at the start, just blew my mind. The first couple of sections beat pretty much all the other books on American economic crises that I have read (except for Grapes of Wrath – that remains at the very top, despite the fact that I am aware of the fact that it deals with another recession).

However, after one gets the general idea, the book has a tendency to repeat itself quite frequently (I’m not quite sure how many “blinds” London jumped on in those two hundred pages!). That said, it remains an excellent read, and it is surprisingly humorous for a 19^th century collection of anecdotes about hardship and deprivation!

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

And with this I can say I have read all of the books that Eugenides has written so far (easy – they are three). This was a Christmas gift from a close friend, and it came in the weirdest edition ever – the size of a small notebook, not quite sure why Picador felt the need for that.

It was undeniably very interesting, and with a literary weight much more considerable than The Marriage Plot, but it doesn’t really come close to Middlesex. Seeing that it was divided in five chapters, I assumed each one of those was going to relate to the suicide of one of the five Lisbon daughters, but three hundred (very short, cause after all it is the size of a notebook) pages go by between the discovery of the first and second suicide.

The suburban setting makes the book an instant sell for me, the curious first-person-plural narrative works really well here, and the moment when the narrators find Bonnie’s body makes your heart drop (despite the fact that it was declared from the start that all five sisters would kill themselves). It is however a shame that, despite the mystery that surrounds the household, Lux’s character is very clearly delineated while the other sisters all blur into one. Also, the fact that the narrators are invited into the house by the last four remaining sisters before they kill themselves makes them look more selfish (and potentially meaner) than what I think they really were. 

The Accidental Woman – Jonathan Coe

And this is the last of the books that I bought myself for Christmas.

Hmpf. It was alright as a read, but that’s pretty much about it. The humour in it wasn’t lacking, it was just not particularly Jonathan Coesque. And most of all, one thing is having an intrusive narrator – but this one was just a tad bit excessive.

Apparently Jonathan Coe wrote this novel while studying for his Masters – it’s nice to see that not all British authors are already great writers since their student years and that Zadie Smith remains very much a unique case!