Day - Michael Cunningham

It had been years since I had read anything by Cunningham and I was very excited to read this book. Too excited, as it turned out. 

I am now honestly wondering if The Hours and A Home at the End of the World were really so ground-breaking, or whether I had simply read them at a time in which gay American literature was a complete unknown to me. 

I found this book to be of a borderline astounding banality (hey, most likely I didn't get its meaning!), but I felt that the pandemic was just used a useful literary tool, the characters were not just unlikeable (which I can live with, we don't always need to love a novel's characters) but also unremarkable. And seriously, when the great idea is interrupting the narrative and only looking at one day in a number of consecutive year, there must be something wrong with your work (I mean, if David Nicholls, with his mass-appeal and lack of pretence, had done it better, you must really go back to the drawing board!). 

Expo 58 - Jonathan Coe

Yet again a novel that was suggested to be by my mother, and one that I didn't find particularly exciting at the time (and, oddly, one that I thought was surprisingly non-comical despite being by Jonathan Coe).

I read it a few months ago, and I already remember very little of its plot (a main character who is torn between his routine British life and the excitement of the Brussels Expo, some relatively low-level spying over ill-thought-out projects, and a fairly predictable love triangle). 

What has stuck with me, though, is the general hopeful mood of the era, at least in Western Europe, and that is really something we could do with these days. 

 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace

 

OK, I felt like at some point I had to read something by David Foster Wallace to understand what the fuss is about. I couldn't start with Infinite Jest because, you know, it's 4 trillion pages. And I couldn't start with The Pale King because it felt wrong to start "from the end". 

Instead what I picked is a book that I had heard about and assumed was going to be a light read. And what a light read it was. Just a series of anecdotes stating the absolute obvious about the world of cruise ships, something that has a little less than zero appeal for me. 

I do understand that most of the material was initial written for Harper's, but I'm quite positive I'd find it all rather underwhelming, trite and, crucially, supposedly funny but really rather banale. Sitting in the dentist's waiting room, I'd pick up an old copy of Grazia over this every day of the week.