I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

  

A book that I had clearly meant to read for a long, long time. Until one day I found a copy of it in our building's lobby...

It's a hauntingly beautiful, heartfelt and heartbreaking childhood tale that sadly still rings true in the context of 2023. A book that one can't put down and that can be finished in one intense sitting. 

Yet, after reading it I didn't feel the need to read the following six books in the series. I'd like to think that it's because I was intimidated by the size of the seven tomes put together and not becuase I'm a bad person who has no time for books that deal with racism, poverty and struggle, but I can't be sure.

Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders

  

The good-old-times, when neighbours left good - or at the very least readable - books in our building's lobby. 

I picked up Lincoln in the Bardo because, well, it had recently won the Man Booker Prize at the time. I was also curious to see what linked Lincoln and one of the world's most known museums. I then found out it wasn't that kind of Bardo...

I was absolutely blown away by the depiction of President Lincoln, his grief and humanity in the days of his son's death. Way, way less so by the long sections dealing with young Lincoln's life (actually, can you really call it "life"?!?) in the Bardo - mystic fantasy is really not quite my genre.

Judas - Amos Oz

  

A fitting end to the career - and life - of the greatest Israeli author (at least to my knowledge, and in my opinion). This was another book that I surprisingly found in our building's lobby, which was rather unexpected considering how few books by Israeli authors I've seen in stock in London bookshops over the years. 

Judas is a novel of secrets, mysteries, incomprehensions and unfulfilled hopes and desires. It oozes maturity and the wisdom of an old man permeates its pages, and I suspect that there is probably quite a bit of Oz in the reclusive Wald. 

A book that I decided to keep on my Billy bookshelf (despite being a rather large hardback), which is now starting to look decrepit itself and would probably deserve to be replaced.

Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner

  

At a time in which I only had a few books left on my bedside table, I picked this one up. After all, Faulkner did win a Nobel prize and I couldn't just dismiss it on the basis of having struggled with The Sound and the Fury. 

Well, I struggled just as much with Absalom, Absalom!. Though I remember its plot vaguely more (most likely just because I've read it more recently) I found again the charm of the American South to be lost on me and, even more, the prose to be often completely inaccessible. 

In the end, I've decided that Faulkner is an author that makes me feel silly as, no matter how fluent and articulate I think I am, his brand of English remains largely impenetrable for me.

Il Tempo Migliore della Nostra Vita - Antonio Scurati

  

The typical book that my family keeps aside for me because "it's on Italian Fascism". 

Problem is: half of this book is pretty much my PhD thesis (which I wrote - but not published - way before, by the way). Better written, with much more literary fluorish (though with no historical embellishment) than my work, and ultimately read by a lot more people than the dozen unlucky academics and friends who had to read my dissertation. Still, the overlap was a bit too signifcant for me to find much pleasure in the sections on Leone Ginzburg. 

And the other half was a beautiful portrayal of family life in Fascist Italy. Problem is: there are so many of them around, and I'd always pick the family lives of unknown peasants over the family lives of people who just happened to be lucky enough to have a grandson who would go on to become one of the most acclaimed Italian writers and one who (unlike me!) has actually managed to re-ignite the interest of many Italians in their country's own past. 

So, this is arguably a vanity project, but one that is extremely well-written and worthy of a read, even when half of the book doesn't reserve any surprises (for me, at the very least).

I, Claudius - Robert Graves

  

This is a book that I got out of LSE's Shaw Library - that foreign land where students go to take lunchtime naps and nobody but me has borrowed a book since 1895 - at a time of very limited reading options for me. 

It's safe to say it's my third favourite (out of three) fictional accounts of Roman emperors after Julian (Gore Vidal) and most of all Memoirs of Hadrian (Yourcenar). It's a thick, slow read that is ever so dated, no matter how much the English seem to swear by Graves and his talent. And I'll leave it at that.

The Lost World - Michael Crichton

  

Not even the best book with its title (Arthur Conan Doyle wins hands down, unsurpisingly), but I have to admit that this novel was what I believe people label - rightfully - a page turner. 

The pace is quick, the chapters short, the actions packed over the span of 24 hours (or maybe 48 or thereabouts? I've read it a while ago and don't quite remember) and dinosaurs remain fascinating creatures (though this isn't quite a Crichton invention). 

The prose is terrible, the vocabulary limited and the science (or science fiction) feels a bit too accessible for someone who only ever did a bit of basic biology and chemistry in school, but the book is ultimately a good couple of hours of pretty good low-maintenance entertainment.

The Rebel - Albert Camus

  

My thoughts about this book mirror my thoughts about The Myth of Sisyphus, but The Rebel actually gets a proper post on this blog because it's the book that got me a work iPad. 

Until a couple of years ago, I always had a book with me as I was waiting for students to see me in our open-plan workspace. I'd much rather spend 5 minutes reading a couple of pages than staring at a wall. Then one day my boss informed me that it wasn't acceptable, that if the School's director was to walk in and see me with a book she would have thought I was underworked (not strictly speaking untrue...) and that he would get me an iPad so I could do my e-mails in those lulls between meetings. Needless to say, that is the iPad on which I'm now reading a lot of ebooks...

As for The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus, I read them at a time in which I didn't have many other options handy. I read them because I felt that I had to, and because I had loved The Plague and The Outsider. Yet, these two less accessible books proved to be a slog for me. In short: instead of reading philosophical essays, I'm much better off reading their synopses on Wikipedia!

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

  

If I was to just write about this as, well, a book, I'd mention the wonderful opening scene and how it made me appreciate magical realism for the first time since I was a teenager. And then I'd talk about how that magical realism grows stale with the passing chapters. 

I'd also talk about how the novel is a sign of an author whose life and allegiance is deeply divided between countries and cultures. 

I'd also say that, ultimately, I don't consider the book a masterwork. 

Yet, one cannot talk about The Satanic Verses without talking about how the novel changed our world and, most of all, Rushdie's own world. This was true before 2022, and it has only become more true now. We are not talking about a tasteless Italian politician showing off his t-shirt with a cartoon of Muhammad. We are talking about an author who wrote (and wrote well) dream sequences in a novel, but that also happened to criticize Khomeini in the process. And we're talking about an author whose life was then turned upside-down and threatened time and again by people who most likely didn't even read his novel.

A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz

  

I like Oz's novels, I like Oz's children books, and I was clearly bound to like his own autobiography. 

It's long, and that's undeniable. It also often repeats itself, but that's to be expected with a non-linear timeline for some 500-odd pages. Yet, it's fabulously written, and the history (both the capitalized version, and the family history) depicted in the book is obviously fascinating. I don't think I could have coped with 100 more finely printed pages, but man I'm glad that I've read this book. 

And perhaps I should watch Natalie Portman's movie version too...

Spatriati - Mario Desiati

 

Another book that I read while trying to regain confidence with (and faith in) Italian literature. I honestly thought that starting with recent winners of the Premio Strega would have been a good move. After all, it's the biggest award one can win, and I'm not necessarily opposed to reading what the big publishing companies are deeming worthy of praise these days. In hindsight, it might not have been a great decision.

Spatriati is a little story of friendship (not particularly exciting), life in the province (been there, done that) and sexual transgression (which, for me, leaves a lot to be desired). To be frank, I would have probably been happy enough to read it if it was a book I had stumbled upon by chance in a second-hand bookshop, but to think that this is could be considered the high point of contemporary Italian queer literature leaves me somewhat perplexed.

Ohio - Stephen Markley

 

Gotta love a big chunky novel about suburban America. Actually you don't have to, but I do. Actually, so few people do that the only way for me to get an electronic copy of this book was by borrowing it from my Italian e-library (arguably better stocked than the London ones) and read it in translation. 

Ohio was a great read, suggested by my mum, to whom it was suggested by one of my closest friends (why didn't he suggest it to me in the first place, who knows!). It's well-written, depressing but witty, and ultimately a very interesting portrait of the American mid-West in a community taken over by narcotics and general socio-economic malaise. 

It's also a bit too much. Every page is extremely intense. The parallel plots are one too many, as is the number of chapters. And literally there doesn't appear to be many major characters that are both alive and mentally stable human beings by the end of the book. For the sake of the people of Ohio, I hope their lives are generally a bit simpler than this.

Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

  

I wouldn't have read this book had it not been for the fact that I'm now running out of titles from the Southwark electronic library that I'd consider reading...

Maybe I'm dumb, or maybe my English is not good enough yet, but man I struggled with this book. Granted, it is, unsurprisingly, like watching a Shakespeare play for me: I understand nothing for the first 15 minutes, then slowly things start to fall in place. The problem here is that reading for me is very much a start-stop thing, in particular these days, so I never really got in the flow of the supposed-16th century prose. 

On the plus side, I checked the Wikipedia entry for the book after I finished. Apparently I got all the main points, but that's hardly a sign of success, and that's not really the reason why one reads a book in the first place.

Berta Isla - Javier Marias

  

Javier Marías is one of those authors who can get away with pretty much anything and, despite what most critics seem to think, I found Berta Isla to be quite a self-induldgent project. 

Marías remains - regardless of him pump and ego - one of the best writers in the world (one doesn't just lose talent after all!), but I found this novel to be, well, uninteresting. I can do with unlikeable and/or unrelatable characters. I mean, after all some of my favourite books are full of unlikeable and unrelatable characters. 

Then again, had I not just finished John Banville's The Untouchable, I would have probably had a lot ore time for Berta Isla.

Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge

  

This was a book I got in my last Fopp run, a couple of years ago at this point. Prices had gone up a wee bit (it was then 2 books for £7), but most of all I think by then I had read all the books that had been remaindered in the UK. Perhaps I should go back and check if the stock has changed much in recent times. 

I am yet to read a Bainbridge novel that I didn't like; though I've probably written that before. This felt like a slightly longer read than most, and the setting (the sitting Titanic) definitely felt different from most of her other novels. 

After reading it I mentioned it to someone who loves all things Titanic and proceeded to sneer at novels on the topic as the real story is itself so fascinating. Needless to say, I disagree. Not so much in post-modern terms (what's a real story?), but mostly because this is a good book, full stop.