Summer Reading I

I've already gotten started, although I've hit a bit of a wall. I need to get more serious about this summer reading nonsense.

So far I've read two books, if you count the book I read during finals week to keep me sane, both by the same author. Daniel Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, has a number of novels and short stories for adults. During finals week I read The Basic Eight (1999), which almost defies explanation. I can't tell you about my favorite parts without giving the whole thing away. It is written as the journal of Flannery Culp (I know, right?) which is being edited as she is in prison for a crime. The whole thing is a cheeky take on the high school stereotypes we lived. The re-edited journals thing of course calls into question the reliability of the narrator, a fact which the narrator points our early on. The climactic party scene is beautifully written, confusing and difficult to follow but incredible. Read it.

The other book I read, I just finished on Saturday, is called Adverbs (2006). It is a series of interconnected but nonsequential chapters/short stories/independent narratives, each titled with an adverb describing how the characters love.

Like The Basic Eight, it is set in San Francisco, which made me love it more. I think my favorite story is 'Collectively,' in which a bunch of random people show up to a man's house and declare how much they love him. Characters' names run commonly through a lot of the chapters, but are not always referring to the same character each time, and you're left trying to piece things together, even though you're not going to come away with a whole picture. This is postmodern writing, definitely, and it's rather beautiful. A quick read, and I recommend it also, although I have to say I loved the suspense of The Basic Eight, with nonlinear bits plopped into a questionably narrated linear story than the pastiche of Adverbs.

Right now I've got both The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer open, although The Namesake isn't holding my attention as much as Everything is Illuminated. I'm going to have to make a dedicated effort to finish it, I think.

On deck, I've got East of Eden by John Steinbeck, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the dugout I've got Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir, The Complete Stories of Flanner O'Connor, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Victim by Saul Bellow, The Pearl by John Steinbeck, and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

I know that's definitely a tall order, but I am going to do my best to get through everything I've got 'on deck' and hopefully some of what's 'in the dugout.'