Reads for August

Only listing the new ones.

The Uncle's Story - Witi Ihimaera - Have finished this, thought the Vietnam sections were generally the best. Some immensely moving passages and some jarringly awkward writing. A necessary book. Plz make a movie and cast Cliff Curtis as Sam Mahana.

Interstellar Pig - William Sleator - This one is completely new to me. I'd not even heard of him until recently. Very excited.

A Russian Beauty and Other Stories - Vladimir Nabokov - Snapped up this 2ndhand Penguin Classics edition. Have not read any of his short stories before. Excited!

Light - M. John Harrison - Guaranteed to be within the top three reads for 2010, for me. Terribly beautiful, indeed sublime. I haven't actually made a habit of reading space fiction, so I I was bewildered/overwhelmed on several occasions - but also Harrison's style demands that, and the patience paid off. I'll be thinking about the ideas in this novel for a long time. And dreaming about melting into fractals.

Mutants - Armand Marie Leroi - Wish I owned a copy. The pictures are amazing. Leroi has this hilarious droll tone throughout. There's the attention-grabbing title and a chapter about sexual attraction that I found boring, but he writes very lucidly - even compassionately - about genetic mutations and depictions/interpretations of them down the ages.

Sacred Games - Vikram Chandra - I am 189 pages into this. SO DAMN GOOD.

Well, that didn't quite... work out.

Continued adventures in blogging, eternally deferred...

Finals start in three days and I am wrecked by this godforsaken weather.

In no particular order, a partial list of books that I have finished between April and now or will have finished by the end of May, and which I am going to SOMEDAY post at least short, unwholesome reviews of:

• Cereus Blooms at Night - Shani Mootoo
• Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
• The Temple of My Familiar - Alice Walker
• Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat
• The Lost Steps - Alejo Carpentier
• Black Chin, White Chin - Ronnie Govender
• Cadenza - Ralph Cusack
• Crush - Richard Siken
• Skin Folk - Nalo Hopkinson
• 2666 - Roberto Bolaño (englished)
• A Question of Power - Bessie Head

So all but two are novels. Hopkinson's is a collection of short stories - definitely enjoyed this one. Ugh, only one book of poetry! But what an evisceratingly gorgeous book of poetry. Twelve books in two months is probably shoddy by the measure of some voracious readers I know, but I AM SLOW. At least I enjoyed every single of those twelve books. Mostly. The Alice Walker novel was almost unbearably irritating at times. More on this later. The Bessie Head book BROKE ME.

Plus, this is where 'partial list' comes in, I very conscientiously left out everything that was connected directly to my academic work*. Although I'm tempted to stick Danby's Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature or Erich Segal's Roman Laughter up there. There's an idea: frothy, chatty reviews of classics of scholarly study. It's been done, but so what?

* Lies; I ended up writing a soul-destroying term paper on the Hopkinson book that I feel like personally emailing the author an apology for.