After a summer of stunning reading successes, it's only to be expected that the streak wouldn't last. And that is what happened to me this past week. A week of DNF books. Did Not Finish. Not even close.
Now, granted, this wasn't the only thing that happened. School started, there were illnesses in the family, I had unexpected (but welcome) company. Any of these events can disrupt a reading experience. And that may be a factor.
But, let's face it, after the joy of discovering Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, the serendipity of The President's Hat, the nostalgic sense of community despite outside pressures in On Sal Mal Lane, the awareness of an important time in one's young life and not making the most of it in Harvard Square, the unforgiving land and the wide expanse of the human heart in Battleborn's stories, the whimsy and the weird in The Color Master's stories, the compelling coming-of-age story in the lovely Tell the Wolves I'm Home and the brilliant, burning passion of The Woman Upstairs. Finding just one or two of them would have made this reader's heart soar the past few months. But all of them? What treasure.
I have tried to start a few books this week but none of the literary fiction (or even middlebrow fiction) is sticking. Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child looks like a fairy tale translated into a narrative of a childless couple unexpectedly finding a little girl in the Alaskan wilderness. But the beginning is so bleak and dire (even for someone who compulsively watches No Country for Old Men every time it's on TV) that I haven't finished the opening chapter.
Owen King's brother wrote a horror/paranormal/comic masterwork of a girl growing up different and how it affects her grown-up self and her son in Joe Hill's NOS4A2. Their dad writes books millions of people adore (and someday I mean to read one; honest). And the opening pages of the younger King's Double Feature show promise. A young man wants to make a movie about his college group of friends as they make it through school and discover those good old days are past them; they're all big kids on their own now. The narrator has a sincere, yearning voice and he is thoroughly over being awed by his B movie legend of a father. Dad is one of those larger-than-life characters who are jerks to their families. But King proves once again that men who write serious fiction also write embarrassing sex scenes (especially phone sex).
I even started Philip Meyer's huge The Son, a sprawling tale of several generations in a Texas family that starts off with two boys being captured by Indians. It made me want to watch The Searchers instead, or read Glenn Frankel's nonfiction account of the making of the movie and the real-life case of Cynthia Ann Parker, who inspired Alan LeMay's novel that the movie was based on. (One of her sons, Quanah Parker, became a Comanche chief.)
I do still want to read Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and James Salter's All That Is some day. But it is not this day. I also recognize that those books are going to demand my full attention and respect. They were not made to dash through to meet a weekly Contemporary Fiction Views deadline. But I hope to talk about them with you still one day.
And there is more out there to discover. I received an Advance Reading Copy of Paul Harding's Enon. After the remarkable Tinkers won the Pulitzer, my faith in small presses and debut authors was rewarded and my faith in literary prizes somewhat bolstered.
There are also all three volumes of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy to savor -- Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and the upcoming MaddAddam, which was to be published today. Atwood's Bridesmaid's Tale is not one of my favorite books, since I'm not fond of being hit over the head with the obvious, but her Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin are precisely the big, sprawling books I love to live in.
Later this month, Jhumpa Lahiri's second novel, The Lowland, comes out in the States. It's been longlisted for the Booker and I'll gladly read anything written by the author of The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. Other big names coming out with novels this fall are Thomas Pynchon with Bleeding Edge, Jonathan Lethem with Dissident Gardens and Donna Tartt with The Goldfinch.
Meanwhile, I'm using a strategy that hasn't let me down before -- reading in a different genre. Louise Penny's rewarding crime fiction series features Inspector Gamache and the Brigadoon-like Three Pines village in the forests of Quebec. The novels have gotten increasingly layered in their depictions of the frailities of good-hearted but hardly perfect characters. The latest novel, How the Light Gets In, is poised to bring together the ongoing stories of several major characters. Chapter two has already been highly rewarding to this fan of cranky, creaky poet Ruth Zardo and nearly midway, I love her all the more. And she's not even the most important character.
The Penny novels remind me of the earlier Joanna Trollope Aga Saga novels in which the author portrayed flawed characters with compassion for their humanity. I'm getting the same vibe from The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers. Most people who know her work have read Miss Garnett's Angel; I've read her Instances of the Number 3 and enjoyed the way her characters enjoyed their French countryside setting. The Cleaner was a mix of Trollope and Kate Atkinson's early Jackson Brodie books where separate storylines converged but not in as complex and tangled a way as the later Brodie novels. Although it's well-written and is on track to be a rewarding story of redemption and coincidence, I wouldn't call it literary fiction.
What do you do when you've hit a reading slump?
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