I'm on a bit of a reading binge these days -- a sort of defiance of the general zeitgeist of distraction, hysteria and just general shitshow stuff.
Reading, I've said many times, is my only constant.
I've just started Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God. It's too early to say whether I love it or not, but I'm having a rocky start given the genre. I'm not a person who enjoys the dystopian novel or even fantasy, so it might be hard going. We'll see (or read). I just finished Cynthia Bond's novel Ruby which was lying around my house for many years. It has some amazing lyrical passages in it, but overall I found it overwrought. Obviously, this is subjective, but as I get older I find that I like things stripped down to the essential. Lisa Halliday's novel Asymmetry was riveting for me, a kind of meta-fiction thing going on (shoot me now for even using the word meta) and stripped of sentimentality. I found the story really interesting and sexy and was blown away by the structure and writing. Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied Sing was perhaps the most beautiful book I've read in years -- brutal, spare, lyrical and transcendent at once. If you look over there on my righthand side-bar, you'll see a list of all the books I've read so far this year -- when I glance at it, I'd say that Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied Sing and Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon were my favorites. Quatro is one of those writers who appears to have been living in my brain taking notes.
Up next, after the Erdrich, is poet Robert Hass' A Little Book of Form and maybe simultaneously Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. I'm also making my way through a pile of New Yorkers.
Reader, what are you reading?
