Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs

Joan Mirò painting while hallucinating and starving is art, Burroughs picking up a pen (or a typewriter) and rambling on a page while under the influence of all sorts of substances, in my opinion, is not.

Why should Naked Lunch be considered a seminal book in 20^th century history, I don’t know. Why couldn’t Burroughs just stare at a wall, or smash some things while high as a kite? The fact that he dared to write in those conditions is clearly not something condemnable, but there is a middle ground between that and being praised and hailed as a great writer for it. He had every right to write this book, but after 20 pages I really didn’t feel the need to read it (despite the fact that I did, because I have issues with closure etc.)

What I found even more frustrating was the fascinating final (relatively sober) report on various drugs and detox methods. 20 pages that, while maybe not a word of art, stimulate intellectual curiosity and can actually be read. More of that, or a novel factually based on that, would have been much appreciated.

Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

I was in love with this book the moment I realized that this is where the Tom Joad of the Bruce Springsteen album is from (the album is really quite average, but it’s still Bruce Springsteen). I was surprised by how I could get captured by a book in which so little actually happens. I mean, at the end of the day they “just” go west looking for jobs.

This book is about the destruction of the American dream, a lost battle between men and machines (well, tractors), family, and supporting each other in troubled times. So many pages in this book gave me goose bumps, from the first lines about men not breaking while “women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole”, to the actual moment in which men start breaking and it’s mother Joad who has to lead the family.

And no matter how memorable the characters of Ma and Tom Joad and the preacher are, the one who has stayed with me the most is the immature Rose of Sharon, and the absolute beauty (both from a literary and a human point of view) of her act at the end of the novel.

White Teeth – Zadie Smtih

This is the book that started my love-hate relationship with Zadie Smith. Seriously, if you are 25 and have a degree in English literature, you should be worried about making ends meet, not getting stuck in a dead-end job and making sure that your flatmate has left you the money to buy the kitchen foil, instead at that age Zadie Smith had just finished writing one of the best British novels of the last 30 years!

Archie’s family is really interesting to begin with, but Samad’s is even better. Probably I’m saying this because I’m an immigrant myself and have questions about my roots, but the upbringing of Magid and Millat is somewhere between hilarious and astonishingly fascinating. And I can absolutely relate to Samad completely disregarding so many Bangladeshi customs yet constantly defending the memory of his supposedly glorious grandfather.

The last few pages, summarizing the lives of the main characters after the epic FutureMouse conference, give the reader hope for the future of Willesden/London/the UK/humanity as Alsana and Clara join their husbands at O’Connell, a place that in my mind is so seedy that it’s actually kind of charming.

A Room with a View – E.M. Forster

I read this book really rather distractedly because the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of it is one of my favourite movies, one that I watched countless times, and extremely faithful to the book, so the novel had very few surprises for me. I also met Julian Sands (George) at the Met in New York – he pretended not to notice me when I called him. No matter how much you are bothered by fans (and if you have been involved in the remarkably low number of acclaimed productions that Sands has over the last 20 years or so, the fans who recognize you are probably not many), I still think that if you don’t say hi in a (for once fairly empty) museum you are just an ass.

A Room with a View is a wonderful novel and, for once, one whose romanticized pictures of Italy and whose stereotyped portrayals of the Italian people don’t bother me (or not excessively, at least). Stories of similar forbidden loves have been told and re-told for centuries in faintly different versions, but Forster writes this one so beautifully that it is still, after more than a hundred years, a pleasure to read (probably also because of its shortness, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed 400 pages of this).

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

I have read somewhere that, alongside In Search of Lost Time, Joyce’s Ulysses is the book that most people claim to have read without actually having done so. Why reading Joyce is something meant to be so cool that you should lie about is just beyond me.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is now a century old, and it feels that way. What do we need to read this book today for? Bore us to death? Possibly. Tell us Catholic life could be grim and miserable? Seriously overdone.

I’ve read this book less than a year ago, and all I seem to remember is (in alphabetical order): Apathy, Boredom, Catholicism. Maybe I’m not enough of an aesthete, but I wonder what’s the point of this book nowadays. In order to be considered one of the greatest writers ever, shouldn’t your masterpieces be, erm, readable?!?