What are you reading?

I haven’t posted here in a while - since I started The Dispossessed a while back - I enjoyed it very much. There are some things Le Guin does astonishingly well, and she’s wonderfully imaginitive.

Somehow I am reading like four books at once now - that happens to me sometimes, as I have one or two audiobooks going, something in paper, and something on Kindle. So here’s what’s going on now:

Stein on Writing, Sol Stein - I’ll probably finish this today and it will be tempting to go right back to the beginning and start over. There are parts I have questions about, or would like more elaboration on, or examples that I don’t think are great at showing what he’s citing them for, but those are few and small compared to the great wealth and inspiration I’m finding in the book. It makes me want to dive into my manuscript and start FIXING THINGS.

1Q84, Haruki Murakami - I decided to reread this after talking about it with my niece. It’s a big commitment for a reread but I enjoyed it so much the first time, and Murakami is so respected as a writer, that I thought I might learn something from reading it again with attention to technique craft. What I’m finding is that I’m not enjoying it as much as the first time - and I’m surprised by how flabby and repetitive some of the writing is.

Through a Glass Darkly, Helen McCloy - I learned about Helen McCloy when hunting around for midcentury American writers whose work would be useful research for me. This one was published in 1950 and has indeed been extremely helpful for dialogue and colloquialisms. McCloy wrote quick little mystery and suspense novels. This one is not perfectly crafted by any means but it’s fast and very enjoyable. I picked up two more of her books this morning, because they are available in inexpensive little kindle editions.

Tell Me A Riddle, Tillie Olsen - And, more midcentury American fiction. I evidently read these stories, or at least the title story, in school but I have no memory of it. It’s very like Grace Paley, whose first collection of short stories I read a month or two ago. Olsen, like Paley, writes about womanhood and motherhood in an oppressive midcentury landscape. It’s as voicey as Paley (though the voice is somewhat different) and less overtly sexual, but still they reside near one another in fiction-space.

mccardey said:

Just finished Sarah Krasnostein's wonderful book - The Trauma Cleaner. Trauma cleaners go in to clean up after murders, suicides, deaths, and when squalor or hoarding has necessitated some external action. Krasnostein has managed something of the same work in this beautiful, tender affirmation of a quite extraordinary life. Oh, I just loved it.

Click to expand...

This sounds utterly fascinating and weird.

I finished Helen McCloy’s Through a Glass, Darkly, and continued my perusal of midcentury drugstore paperbacks with Vin Packer’s The Evil Friendship, a pulpy take on the Parker-Hulme murder that shows signs of psychological insight but never really runs with them due to constraints of form and length. That took about 30 seconds to read so I then started on Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man, which started with a terrific epigraph from WH Auden:

Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

The prose in this book is dense and sticky, however, so I haven’t gotten very far.

Of the other books I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve finished up the Stein (loved it); still picking through the reread of 1Q84, with the understanding that it’s the story keeping me going, and not at all the writing or even the characters; and still working on the Tillie Olsen, though I’ve only one story left.