25.12.10
DFW Christmas!
I'm interested in what people take to read over the Christmas hols? Do you go for broke and take heavy tomes, or are you pragmatic and take page-turners? I've taken one that looks like the former but is in fact the latter (Infinite Jest), and one that is simply the latter, but wonderfully intelligently intellectually curious-ly-so (Consider the Lobster).
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
This year I brought:
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- The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, by C.H. Sisson (hardly touched it, but in my defence I'm reading S. online)
- Christopher Homm, by C.H. Sisson (read it before, haven't touched it this time)
- The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald (haven't touched it)
- Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust (re-read Place Names: The Name on the train down)
[verse]
- Oracles/Oraclau, by Geoffrey Hill (read it on the way down, sporadically re-reading for a review)
- Selected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill (dipping in for comparisons to the new stuff)
- Chickweed Wintergreen, by Harry Martinson (read some before I left town; supposed to be reviewing it but find it very dull)
The problem is that I'm meant to be writing a lit. review, not sitting around reading novels. Also I don't have enough poetry: I'd normally bring two anthologies (one for Renaissance-modern and one specifically modern) and several collections or Selecteds, but this time I decided to scale back. Disaster. So I picked up Leaves of Grass yesterday. Oh, and I gave my uncle Consider the Lobster, on the basis of how much you rate Foster Wallace!
That Sebald is definitely worth the time! It's fantastic.
ReplyDeleteThis year I accepted that it was largely unlikely that I would be sitting down quietly to really get to grips with some theory, betting that my reading activities would be snatched here and there in rooms where other people were doing other things too, so I went to novels/essays (although I wonder whether DFW's essays are more like belles lettres, though I also wonder what the exact definition of belles lettres is). As it happens, I read about 20 pages of the essays in the whole 5 days I was at home.
I'm very pleased you're distributing Consider the Lobster! I'm reading it now and it's beyond words! His 9/11 article and his long essay on following John McCain for the 2000 presidential primary races are both knock-out powerful, though in such a way that you experience it as a delayed reaction. Lil got me the audio-book of it (read by DFW) for Christmas, and hearing him read it really opens up their power, as it were...
"Consider the Lobster" has been on my to-read list way too long, thank you for the link to the Guardian! Now I am looking forward to reading it more than ever, I need to find out about DFW's "3,000 words to Kafka's 'sense of humour'" and that part about Updike!
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