To be honest, I haven't been reading a lot lately; everything from late August on has been like a boulder rolling uncontrollably downhill. How out of touch am I? I recently reviewed BACK TO BLOOD and missed out on the chance to crib from James Wood
and dub Tom Wolfe's third novel "hysterical racism." Woe is me! Now
he'll just have to live to write another one, as I dearly hope he does.
Right now I'm in Chicago for business/ personal reasons and am having a surprisingly relaxing time because most of my errands and yanking tasks are back in New York. Anyway, the only books I brought were review books or review-related, but: what are you reading right now?
3 days ago
4 comments:
I'm mostly reading pedagogical theory! But I recently snuck in enough breaks from that to read Cold Comfort Farm, and I loved it.
I'm a bit listless on the reading front lately, halfway through Gravity's Rainbow and War and Peace simultaneously, which turned out to be not such a hot idea. I'm THIS close to saying screw it, dropping everything and picking up that book about the making of Charlotte's Web.
"Hysterical racism" is a very clever term. I'm more charitable towards Wolfe than most critics, but this sounds like it may be his weakest novel yet.
Taking a page out of D.H.'s playbook, I am re-reading Cloud Atlas (for a book club) and Infinite Jest (inspired by D.T. Max's biography). Both excellent novels, but reading them at the same time is very difficult. At least I'm reading them for the second or third time each -- if D.H. is working on those two monsters for the first time, then his task is much more difficult than mine.
I appreciate you all doing the heavy lifting for me!
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