Random literary exploration

Setun

Some notes/thoughts on what I am/have been reading, currently working through the following reading list:

Will Ferguson: Spanish Fly
Émile Zola: Therese Raquin
Italo Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveller
Will Ferguson: Hokkaido Highway Blues
Levitt/Dubner: Freakonomics
Eggers (Ed.): Best of McSweeneys Vol II



Recently started work in a bookshop, so have started reading seriously again. Between visits to the library, or impulse buys out of boredom in the shop, I've compiled the above list. Enjoying the mix muchly

Setun

A book I was genuinely sad to finish: a fantastic story populated by infinitely captivating characters.

The story, set in the Texas dustbowl in tandem with the events leading up to the breakout of WW2, begins by following Jack McGreery, a second-generation Scottish immigrant, and his struggle trying to support himself and his father - not to mention trying to impress the daughter of the local librarian in his bleak hometown of Paradise Flats. Jack's humdrum is interrupted when a stylish swindler named Virgil and his partner 'Miss Rose' role into town living their modified all-american dream: conning, swindling, and grifting dollars out of everyone they meet.

Well worth a read if you like your fiction with a strong and well researched account of depression-era American culture. Very enjoyable, I actually looked forward to the bus journey home so I could pick up where I left off.

Setun

Late-19th Century Paris is the setting for this dark and grubby novel which tracks a laurent and therese's descent into utter madness after murdering her husband in a drastic long-term plan to allow their affair to become matrimonial. But in waiting for the right time to announce the widow's remarriage to laurent, the couple are haunted by hindsight and guilt, not to mention the ghost of their victim.

A very powerful work. I found it quite disturbing, having me on the edge of my seat a number of times throughout - which for me is very unusual for a novel.
It is an ugly and disturbing novel - and should definitely be read by anyone who enjoys classic horror.

Setun

The book is about the adventure that the reader undertakes when reading a novel. It begins by telling you how the book itself should be read, then it describes how you went into the shop to purchase the book. But when you sit down to read it, there is a printer's error, and you go back to the shop to get a replacement. But the replacement is a completely different story, another error. So the rest of the book continues with you, the reader, trying to find the rest of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Confused?

It's the kind of book that, while I enjoyed it, I feel that a re-read will be in order in the future to fully understand what it's all about.

A difficult masterpiece indeed, but very worthwhile.

Setun

Will Ferguson's hitchiking Japan memoir. He travels from Cate Soya, the southernmost tip of Japan, to Cape Sata in the north, via the cars/trucks/vans of any random Japanese willing to stop and give him a lift. Predictably, hilarity, confusion, and fantastic anecdotes ensue.

I think I prefer when Ferguson writes fiction, but nevertheless, this book is still enjoyable for someone who has visited Japan, or is planning on it in the near future. It's a better guidebook than most for starters, and you get an interesting insight into what makes the japanese tick from a gaijin who had lived there for five years. Even if he was a bit of an asshole to them occasionally