October 2011: Nadine Gordimer

The author of the month for October 2011 is Nadine Gordimer

Born in 1923 in South Africa; the winner of 1991 Nobel Prize for literature; Booker prize for The Conservationist; Long listed for Booker in 2001 (for The Pickup)

Her books (as far as I can find - I will be updating if needed):

Novels:
The Lying Days (1953)
A World of Strangers (1958)
An Occasion for Loving (1963)
The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
A Guest of Honour (1970)
The Conservationist (1974)
Burger's Daughter (1979)
July's People (1981)
A Sport of Nature (1987)
My Son's Story (1990)
None to Accompany Me (1994)
The House Gun (1998)
The Pickup (2001)
Get a Life (2005)

Collections:
"Face to Face" (1949) - not on LT?
Town and Country Lovers
The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)
Six Feet of the Country (1956)
Not for Publication (1965)
Livingstone's Companions (1970)
Gordimer: Selected Stories (1975)
No Place Like: Selected Stories (1978)
A Soldier's Embrace (1980)
Something Out There (1984)
Jump: And Other Stories (1991)
Crimes of Conscience (1991)
Why Haven't You Written?: Selected Stories, 1950-1972 (1992)
Loot: And Other Stories (2003)
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007)
Life Times: Stories 1952-2007 (2010)

Essay collections

The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988)
The Black Interpreters (1973)
Writing and Being: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1995)

Selected books about her:
No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer
The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside by Stephen Clingman
The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: private lives/public landscapes by John Cooke
Nadine Gordimer by Dominic Head
Rereading Nadine Gordimer
From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer: Politics and the order of art
Conversations with Nadine Gordimer

So - what are you reading?

I will be reading her An Occasion for Loving. I love Gordimer's style and am looking forward to another of her reads.

Thank you AnnieMod

If I have time, with everything else I've committed myself to this month, I will be reading An Occasion for Loving. I would love to re-read The Lying Days too. It was my favourite book when I was eighteen!

I should admit that I had not read anything by her -- anything that I can identify as hers anyway. I am reading (or used to) a lot of short fiction so I most likely had met one of her stories in an anthology somewhere... but cannot remember any.

Still had not decided what I will be reading -- will be checking what is available for kindle shortly (business trip+vacation this month so paper books are a bit hard).

I probably have close to a dozen unread Gordimer books, but An Occasion for Loving and July's People are handy so I'll probably go with one of those.

I was at the Library this afternoon, and came home with A Sport of Nature

Burger's Daughter is one of my favorite books, but I haven't read any Gordimer in a long time. I have a number of her books, so I'll try to get to one later this month.

I'm about half way through Occasion for Loving. It thoroughly engaged me to start with but now my interest is waning. There's been an awful lot of analysis about a love affair between two of the characters and I am now ready to move on!

This is an early novel (1963) and I can see a real difference between the writing style of this and the more recent novel The Pick Up, which is the last Gordimer I read. The Pick Up is a much tauter read although I had been enjoying the detail of Occasion for Loving until now. Maybe I need a break!

I finished A sport of nature today. I am somewhat surprised at how well it held my interest. I did find myself somewhat irritated by the narrator's voice. It seemed not the express the feelings of the author, but was never made into a character.

I'm about to read The Late Bourgeois World which is the only novel by Gordimer I have got at home.

I've never read anything by Gordimer, and I'm afraid I had no idea where to start when I looked at the library's selections. I was lucky that my pick Something Out There: Stories has been excellent so far. I've just started the novella that ends the collection; the short stories have generally wowed me with her ability to write without wasting a word, though they are sometimes a bit on the depressing side.