(What is RSS?)last night (after a brief affair with Forever) i finished #9:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
i have no idea what to say about this book. i think i should leave it a few days first, before i say anything at all.
but, anyway! 4 down, 21 to go.
ok, getting back on track with these lists! it makes me feel productive to tick them off (even though really i should be getting a job and keeping on selling my life on ebay instead of napping in the afternoon and reading this much.) oh well. onwards!
today i zipped through #23, Forever by Judy Blume. it’s inclusion on this list seems very suspect to me but alright, i’m willing to concede that it’s basically about sex and therefore could have a place here. also, moving through books like this with such celerity (done in under an hour) makes a welcome breather from harder tasks (i’m nearly, so nearly finally finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami, also for this list.)
and yes! it’s a teenage classic! the cover of the book tells me this twice. it seems odd that i haven’t read it before, but i suppose if i was a little bit older than i am (look, i turned 5 in 1990) i’m sure i would have read this sooner, along with all the other judy blume / paula danziger / babysitters club / sweet valley whatevers i consumed so feverishly in the early 90s.
i always find her stlye quite flat to read and very typically-teenagerish (and i have read a lot of teenagerish books, believe me) but credit due to ms blume for being the first to talk to teenagers in such an open and honest way. the characters seem really young for their ages (the lead is seventeen) but maybe i matured at a different rate to her: interestingly, in the book the 17 year old Kath makes a comment on the behaviour of a 15 year old, about how quick younger kids are growing up! haha. i’m obviously guilty there.
for the most part it seems quite realistic (although it always feels weird to me when American teens are driving around in cars) but for someone so tense and worked up about losing her virginity, she sure does manage to come a lot. but even with all the touching and coming and head-fucking – really, sexy? it’s not sexy. it’s not even sexy when they are HAVING sex.
and her boyfriend calls his penis RALPH. gross.
3 down, 22 left.
(i just typed this up for another one of my book lists and suddenly though – “oh wait, i wonder if it’s on the playboy list?” i didn’t find it sexy at all, but oh well!)
“Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.”
today i finished #16: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. for some reason it seemed to take me forever to read this book – i’m not sure why, it just felt my progress was really slow, even though i enjoyed the book as a whole.
in particular, i think she has a certain skill for one-liners (“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man”) and a pithy, self-indulgent writing style (at least in this book) which i enjoyed, whilst hoping i was not at all like the central character, Isadora. although often overly dramatic, it was inspired and insightful in some places (and did make me realise that i have some of those same stupid issues as the lead character, annoyingly.)
not one of my favourite books ever, but i’m very glad to have read it. i do consider that it was probably a more culturally important text at the time it was written and wish i could have read it then (not that i was born then!) saying that, i have not read a book written recently that has been so honest about sex – and i don’t mean crude, or overly informative, but just honest – even to the point of idiocy. it does feel like Jong was writing about herself entirely, but i do not think this is a bad thing. (i have looked her up on the internet and discovered that the men in the main characters were the stories of Jong’s real husbands.)
one of the quotes in the book was D.H. Lawrence and i’m paraphrasing here, but it was something like “The hardest thing for a woman to to live up to a man’s description of a woman.” this seems to sum up the book as a whole for me and also her reasons behind writing it. i understand why (mostly) women chose this book as a part-representation of women authors.
2 down, 23 left. :)
well, that wasn’t sexy.
better than i actually expected, though. i’ve always assumed roth was utterly awful and to find he’s just an agreeable minor author, whee.
five down; twenty to go.
how could i resist this one? like tom said: “it seems they’ve confused ‘sexiest books’ with ‘books about sex’.
oh dear, only one read before starting this list:
11 Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
1. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland
2. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
3. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
4. The Story of O, by Pauline Reage
5. Crash, by J.G. Ballard
6. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
7. Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
8. The Magus, by John Fowles
9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
10. Endless Love, by Scott Spencer
11. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
12. Carrie’s Story, by Molly Weatherfield
13. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
14. Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious
15. Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
16. The End of Alice, by A.M. Homes
17. Vox, by Nicholson Baker
18. Rapture, by Susan Minot
19. Singular Pleaures, by Harry Mathews
20. In The Cut, By Susanna Moore
21. Brass, by Helen Walsh
22. Candy, by Terry Southern
23. Forever, by Judy Blume
24. An American Dream, by Norman Mailer
25. The Carpetbaggers, by Harold Robbins
