I'm doing 29 things
I set the bar low this year at 52 books; last year I set out to read 365. In a year filled with turmoil and stress, it wasn’t possible. So, this year: 52, one for each week, and if I reached 52, I’d try to read more.
I tracked the books I read in a notebook with titles and authors. Reading over the titles I feel encouraged and warm. Some of the books I read were challenges: books I had had on “To-Read” lists forever, and hadn’t got around to reading. Some were old friends on repeat. Some, books picked out at random at the library, drawn by a title or a cover colour or an author.
A few standouts I would recommend to anyone, in the order that I read them. I list nine because I ran out of time to type the 10th. :D
1. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler. This book is in my opinion Chandler’s best work, has been my favourite since I first read it at 14, and it was the start of my exploration of Chandler’s books, stories and letters in January.
2. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende. After sitting on my bookshelf forever (a gift from a friend), I got around to reading this in February. It is charming, evocative, and rich.
3. Good Bones – Margaret Atwood. This collection of short stories contains some of my favourites from Atwood. I would recommend it to anyone.
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick. The basis for the movie “Blade Runner” is different in many ways from the movie (whose dark tone I love.) It portrays much more intimately the crumbling, desperate humanity of the inhabitants of Earth in a desolate future.
5. Equus – Peter Shaffer. I have unfortunately never seen the play, but reading it was startling, shocking and moving.
6. The Tent – Margaret Atwood. Another book of short stories by one of my favourite authors, I savoured this collection and found it much too short.
7. Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi. Another book that has been on my “To Read” list for ages, the crumbling copy at my library was a testament to its many readers. I read this in two afternoons, although maybe a better word is “devoured”. Mostly, I empathized with the characters in the memoir – mostly young, intelligent women who love and discuss Austen and Nabokov and Fitzgerald and James, while never quite adapting to the pressure to live dual lives, private and public, under the repressive theocratic regime in Iran in the 1980s. This book covers everything: the 1960s in the US, war, parenthood, books, teaching, Iran, film, friendship, loss, religion, exile. It is amazing.
8. Sweetness in the Belly – Camilla Gibb. This book is a rich story of a woman’s journey through life, focusing on two periods: the early 1970s in Ethiopia, and her later life in her “native country” of England, where she fled as a refugee along with many other Ethiopians during the 1970s. Throughout, the protagonist’s personal growth and caring for those around her are remarkable and bittersweet, as she is adopted by first a Moroccan Sufi community, an Anglo-Muslim writer, and Ethiopian communities in Harari and London, only to find the members of the families she builds for herself slipping away from time, distance and revolution.
9. Irving Layton – Lovers and Lesser Men. This collection of poems from the early 1970s I found to be a mixed bag. Witty and sensual at one turn, dull and hysterically and deliberately provocative at another, on the whole it made me want to read more of Layton, and understand why he’s considered a genius and inspiration to poets like Leonard Cohen. I have to admit, I found some of the poems boring. I guess putting the word “cuntjuice” in your poems isn’t bold anymore, so some of the verses can seem a little passé in an age where the subject matter isn’t a shockingly filthy salvo against the literary establishment, courtesy of a bohemian wandering poet… but it certainly captures a moment in time and art. The poems are clever and a little egotistical (and why not?) and I found Layton was best at his most acerbic.
