It’s been a good few months for my fiction consumption. After losing interest in science fiction after high school, and getting really into non-fiction, I haven’t really read much. Vacations are good for my intake, and so is riding transit to work. I’ve had a bit of both in 2006, and so far I’ve made it through the following books, fiction and non-fiction:
- Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland
- The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
- A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami
- The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
- The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
- Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte
- The Lost Painting, Jonathan Harr
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
… plus the recently mentioned Paris 1919. By my recent standards, this is a redoubtable feat: two books a month! (Even if 40% of those were still non-fiction…)
So, are you going to tell us of any of them are good? Curious minds want to know
Oh, right. I suppose that would be part of it. Of the lot, I liked Disgrace best. It’s a South African book, Nobel prize winner actually, with an academic protagonist who gets entangled in an affair with a student, and retreats to the countryside in disgrace. What appealed to me was the way it indirectly dealt with the guilt and attitudes of an older Afrikaaner – the character is an English professor, with no patience for modern approaches to the subject, for political correctness, or for black ambitions in his country. He is not directly a racist, but you can see evidence of his attitudes through his relations with others. The cynicism is unappealing, but very compelling reading.
The Murakami book was probably the next best – a typically dreamlike book from a great Japanese writer. The first half was great, but it petered out a bit near the end. A.H.W.o.S.G. was good, but suffered a similar fate – a fantastic start, but anticlimactic as it reached the conclusion.