A Freeque Bookvocate's arbitrary reading who has no exciting reading goals but nevertheless still likes to read Thread

So far in 2016 I've read David Plante's superb short novel The Accident. It was one of those random finds I picked up recently on a whim at a thrift shop. Coincidentally, I'd been reading Stephen Spender's literary biography, Eliot, concurrently with David Plante's novel, and being so enamoured by it, went a Googling for more info on this author previously unknown to me and discovered that he, David Plante, and Stephen Spender, had once had an interesting and personal connection, via this intriguing Guardian review.

This weekend I've been re-reading The Recognitions. As awesome as it is, I'm not sure I'll stick around for all of its phenomenal 956 pages.

>1 absurdeist: Ooh, The Recognitions. Yeah. That's ambitious.

And, reading goals? What's a reading goal? Ha!

Happy New Year! I hope you guys came out the other end of the holidays relatively unscathed. I know they're hard.

Thanks, Becky, we made it through okay. You should check out my blog post on Megs if you haven't already.

I'm glad, btw, you've had this Reading Diary group going since 2014. I much much prefer it to those bigger groups whose members, inevitably, drop by w/no intent of joining or contributing to your group except to hint hint that there's allegedly some better group out there we could join. But there isn't. Been there done that and I'm never going back.

>3 absurdeist: I just read your blog post about Megan. Words fail me. Thank you.

Thanks, Becky. Along w/a slow read of The Recognitions ongoing, I've also been picking away at Leena Krohn: The Collected Fiction, an omnibus of the thirty-plus year career of this remarkable but largely untranslated-into-English Finnish author of the Weird and Fantastic. First impressions after reading several of the interconnected short vignettes that make up her first novel Dona Quixote and Other Citizens (1983) is that she's similar in style to Borges' abstracts and in content to like some sibling rivalry between the whimsical allegories of a Rikki Ducornet and the severe austerity of an Anna Kavan. She's great, whatever she is, and my impressions are subject to revision as I read deeper into this gargantuan omnibus.

>5 absurdeist: Ach, you always had lofty authors and titles to my maybe-someday-I'll-read list. Leena Krohn sounds fascinating. I've read Borges and some Ducornet. Not Anna Kavan, though. Oh, Brent...

That's what I'm here for, Becky. Why not Anna Kavan? Don't you want to spiral into a bleak depression? Or pick a book from David Bowie's Library....

>7 absurdeist: Oh, Bowie. So sad to lose a great reader. And, oh yeah, a great musical talent as well...

I'm reading Russell H. Greenan's first novel It Happened in Boston? (1968). He's 90 now and has continued publishing into his late 80s. His first novel has been reissued a couple times, and become a cult classic. He's better known and a lot more popular in Europe these days. His website has an excerpt of the bizarre opening of It Happened in Boston. One of the strangest, most oddball narrators I've had the pleasure of reading in a long long time.

You know, you really have a knack for discovering the unjustly obscure. It kills me that after all my years in bookselling you consistently read books by authors I've never heard of.

Oh don't feel bad, Becky, by the time you got into bookselling (in the early 90s was it?) Greenan had been out of print for more than a decade.

Another lesser known writer (Charlie Smith) I'm reading at the moment is thankfully still in print. He's also a poet. The novel I've just begun is Chimney Rock: A Novel (1993). I've seen it described as a southern gothic set in Hollywood — http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/09/books/holywood-gothic.html?pagewanted=all — and it's been a riveting read so far, and apropos on the cusp of the Oscars.

I've been away for a while. But I'm back.

I finished L.R. Wright's first mystery The Suspect and I have to say it just might be one of those rare perfect novels. I didn't give it five stars, though, only 4.5, because I'm not completely convinced that the forensics depicted in the novel were adequately elaborated upon and fully considered. But maybe in 1984, in a backwoods town on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia reachable only by ferry, the crime was investigated as thoroughly as it could have been back then. In real life, would there have been enough evidence to convict the suspect? Maybe not. Maybe L.R. Wright thought up the perfect scenario for a perfect, if unplanned, murder. Whether 100% plausible or not, this is a perfectly sad, melancholic mystery. Wright never overstated a clue even once, but let it up to you, her reader, to deduce and decide. What amazes me most, I think, is that Wright did indeed make convincingly plausible that the divorced detective on the case, Karl Alberg, would by the end consider the man whom he knew beyond any doubt had committed the murder (he just couldn't find enough evidence or establish any corroboration to arrest him) considered him, nonetheless, the murderer, a true friend. This is an emotionally powerful novel, one I'll never forget, and may return to again and again. . . .

George Wilcox has just murdered his eighty-five year old neighbor Carlyle, an "old acquaintance" he'd of mentioned Carlyle as to anyone at most (certainly not spoken of him as his friend)—though he's much much more than a mere acquaintance we'll eventually find out—when we first meet him in just the second sentence of The Suspect. L.R. Wright gives away the who-did-it? right off the bat, providing the reader with more intimate knowledge of the grisly details of the crime than any other character except our out-of-the-blue murderer, George Wilcox. And what a disturbing way to meet someone, even for a fictitious character, our eighty year old "suspect" of the novel's title. In two previous (non-mystery) novels I've read that opened as violently—and I'm just talking about violence against animals here (i.e., Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and Ron Loewinsohn's Magnetic Field(s), I've found it difficult to continue reading. But that was not the case with The Suspect, because unlike the other novels, and for reasons I do not yet completely comprehend, I cared about this very believable, complicated man, riddled by guilt and one too many demons. Chalk it up, I suspect, to Wright's extraordinary penchant for existing inside her characters' heads to such a degree that what drove and informed their lives coming up off the page attained a level of authenticity rarely seen in literature. Yes, I said literature, as The Suspect transcends the mystery genre. No real surprise there, being that Wright's first three novels are described in multiple reviews as literary fiction.

L.R. Wright, btw, beat both Ruth Rendell and Paul Auster for the 1986 Edgar Award, the only Canadian author, in fact, who's ever won it before or since. Highly recommended.

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And btw, Becky, I'm almost finished with Marlen Haushofer's hauntingly beautiful novel The Wall. More on that later....

>13 absurdeist: Have you read The Dog Stars? If not, it's a literary p-a I think you'd really like. Heller's relationship with and ability to write about the outdoors is breathtaking.

I haven't. Thanks for the rec, I'll have to check it out. Among other things I'm reading The Doomsters right now.

Ah, Ross MacDonald. I've only read one by him, but Pete LOVES him. I love that his wife, Margaret Millar, was an excellent--and very successful--mystery writer as well.