John Henry Days - Colson Whitehead

  

I find it funny that the Franzen quote on the cover of this book is actually an extract from a review in which he states that "John Henry Days is funny and wise and sumptuously written, but it's only rarely a page turner" (thanks Wikipedia!). I do realize it happens all the time, but still. 

But I actually liked John Henry Days in full and with few reservations: it might not be Whitehead's best book, but it deals with the American folk stories that I liked since seeing Disney's Johnny Appleseed as a child, offers some deep reflections on American society, but also the world of mass media and the ultimate, profound, loneliness of some people. 

Oddly enough, I did consider it a page turner at the end of the day.

Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck

A book that I read for my office’s book club – a clear step in the right direction, but still not a particularly good read (and the fact that I am labeling a book by Steinbeck in this way makes me want to hit myself!).

The problem for me is probably that there are so many works of fiction and non-fiction about travelling around the US that it’s so easy to make comparisons, and these don’t really favour Travels with Charley. If one sees this book as a fictionalized travel account, then it doesn’t come close to comparing to On the Road. If one sees it as a non-fiction description of Steinbeck’s travels as a self-styled bum (and I really don’t think you can consider yourself one when you are that successful and popular a writer!) then Jack London’s The Road is miles above.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m not that fond of dogs. Or that being married to a Latin American woman I’m bothered by the sub-header “In Search of America” for something that is only limited to the USA. Or even that I often found myself thinking how many of the manly men that he encountered on his journey would have voted Trump. 

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

I actually had to wait for my wife and baby daughter to be quite literally on the other side of the planet (Brazil) before I could muster the strength and courage to read this book. And to think that when I was young I thought that Capote had just written Breakfast at Tiffany’s and nothing else…

The opening chapter was, for me, by far the hardest to read – not so much because of the brutality of the scenes (I was already quite familiar with the story), but because I was almost physically sick by the point Nancy’s friend found the first body and couldn’t stop thinking of Bobby Rupp (Nancy’s boyfriend) and what he must have experienced.

The rest of the book didn’t have many surprises, but it did end with the added (and for me really unexpected) drama of the stories of Lowell Lee Andrews, George York and James Latham – and all the people they killed before joining Perry and Dick on the death row – and that so nearly tipped me over the edge.

Bagombo Snuff Box – Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t even know how I managed (or was it my wife that managed?) to get my hands on this collection of short stories, but I’m glad I did.

I was expecting science fiction, but what I got was a wide range of styles, with stories often about American suburban life (the joy!), and in which the American dream is, in one way or another, crushed time and again.

Vonnegut’s humour and irony are very much there, like in all his other works, and some of the stories (like The Package) would have given me a bit of faith in the future of mankind – too bad they were written 60 years ago and the world is still very much an awful place… 

The Great Gatsby – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I read this book at 17, an old paperback that my grandma had bought with a cheesy magazine (disclaimer: she bought the magazine to get the book as my grandma was, in her way, a good reader – and being on a budget she was the queen of discounted first issues and random promotional offers in the town’s newsagent).

And that’s where the poetry ends. Because, again, I wonder why I should care about Gatsby, Daisy, or even Nick. In all honesty, I wasn’t this critical when I first read the book, but just because I was still moving my first tentative steps in the world of the greats of the twentieth century and i thought that I should like – or pretend to like – everything that had been labelled a masterpiece. And call me naive, but I’d like to think that I would have stopped being star-struck by these rich New Yorkers way before Nick.