What are you reading?

[Indecisive Poet]

Using this limbo time to do a bit of reading for fun – I just read One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time, a novel that's been at the top of my reading list forever. While I deeply appreciated much of its lyricism, commentary on capitalism, inventiveness and use of the magical realist genre, and probing insight... I was also deeply, deeply disturbed by Garcia Marquez's seemingly un-self-conscious representation of "love" as pure sexual desire and the book's unrelenting misogyny and obsession with sex. Am I missing something here!? I've been talking to my partner about the book and he keeps asking me if maybe the representation of sex/sexuality/masculinity in the book is meant to be a critique of it, but I'm just not seeing anything but endorsement. Would love to hear from anyone else who has read it! I'm feeling bummed out because so much of my experience of reading the book was incredibly uncomfortable.

Edit: in case anyone does want to offer perspectives, I'll say firstly that (1) I understand that incest was certainly represented as problematic, and that (2) there are interesting and capable female characters, but that neither of these things make up for the fact that the author seems to think that human beings are at their core lust-filled cretins and that women are first and foremost sexual objects.

Edited January 11, 2020 by Indecisive Poet

[Karatani]

I thought Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet would hold me over through January. Nope. Read all four in 12 days. And they wrecked me.

So now that I’m a puddle I’m finishing up Kazuo Ishiguro ‘Remains of the Days (what do people think about it? I’m underwhelmed. I get that it’s a slow-burn meditation on ideology and morality but idk I just find it...boring).

[digital_lime]

18 hours ago, Plurabelle said:

I thought Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet would hold me over through January. Nope. Read all four in 12 days. And they wrecked me.

So now that I’m a puddle I’m finishing up Kazuo Ishiguro ‘Remains of the Days (what do people think about it? I’m underwhelmed. I get that it’s a slow-burn meditation on ideology and morality but idk I just find it...boring).

Weird--I had the opposite reaction. I made it through the first of the Neopolitan quartet before giving up, utterly indifferent. But I thought Remains of the Day was absolutely absorbing and very moving. There's a movie adaptation of it that doesn't seem too bad. Maybe watching that could be a way for you to discover how to enjoy the novel. (I was indifferent to Ishiguro's other famous novel, Never Let Me Go, though, because the plot seemed so obvious that the tension Ishiguro was working so hard to develop fell utterly flat.)

If you have any advice for how I can learn to love the Neopolitan quartet, I'd love to hear. It's been lauded by reviewers (and critics and philosophers that I really respect), but I just can't seem to figure out what's so enchanting about it. 

[Karatani]

@digital_lime funny! I guess we have opposite tastes. I think I just find the narrator, Stevens, a bit dull in Remains, and felt the politics were predictable - as part of what I love about the Ferrante books is how the four serve as a meditation of the dialectics of power and lasting contradictions of theory when they come to praxis in personal, political, and intellectual, geographic, (etc.) life. Also-subjectively- felt like the books really kept a solid momentum.

[vondafkossum]

Is anyone digging in for Vintage Sci Fi Month? I picked up Martian Time-Slip this week, and I'm using it as a distraction from my students' horrible exams. 

 

[Wimsey]

I'm currently finishing up Home, by Marilynne Robinson. I read Gilead a couple of years ago and decided it was finally time to dip into the sequel. It's a beautifully written novel, and I love the peacefulness of the setting, which presents a nice contrast with the hectic nature of graduate admissions.

I also treated myself and bought a used copy of Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel: 1920s to 1950s. It's directly related to my research interests, so I'm excited to start reading.

[CanadianEnglish]

Does anybody else read literature completely outside of their field of interest for fun? I don't know about ya'll, but I cannot read my field of interest (late 20th century female Caribbean narratives) as a fun hobby. I read just absolute trash YA novels or a fantasy series that doesn't make me want to do a character analysis. I'm currently reading Name of All Things by Jenn Lyons as a way to procrastinate editing my thesis and to distract myself from refreshing my email every 10 minutes. Would love to hear about your field and what you read for fun! (Hopefully more strange dichotomies). 

 

[caffeinated applicant]

2 minutes ago, CanadianEnglish said:

Does anybody else read literature completely outside of their field of interest for fun? 

Yes and no--I still read in my field of interest (contemporary short fiction by women and 20th/21st c. fiction about queer women more broadly), but I space it out a lot with hobby reading. Mystery/whodunits are my main "brain cleanse" read--used to be YA, but the analytic side has started to creep in with the YA and spoils the enjoyment of it. Currently I'm reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a "fun" read, in part because I don't see myself going into 19th century fiction--it's one of those chunks of literature that I never particularly liked or found easy to read in college, but now I'm whipping through this novel and thinking huh, I get why this was a bestseller! 

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

5 hours ago, CanadianEnglish said:

Does anybody else read literature completely outside of their field of interest for fun?

I would say roughly 75% of my pleasure reading is at least tangentially related to my field of interest (in that category of at least tangentially related I'm basically counting any Anglophone literary novel or memoir written between 1890 and 1990 that deals on some level with queerness. I also read criticism in my field for pleasure upon occasion, so I'm counting that too). The remaining 25% of my pleasure reading is a mix of foundational texts across periods other than my own that I haven't gotten around to (e.g. the Divine Comedy) and purely fluffy, even trashy, fun (for instance, I'm currently audiobooking my way through Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series with much glee - LGBTQ fantasy, especially with a heavy dash of romance, is my favorite guilty pleasure).

Edited February 6, 2020 by The Hoosier Oxonian

[caffeinated applicant]

4 hours ago, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series with much glee - LGBTQ fantasy, especially with a heavy dash of romance, is my favorite guilty pleasure

Went straight to the Goodreads Want to Read shelf with that one--yes pls. 

Related on the field of interest front: I finally got around to Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers a few weeks ago and it Wrecked Me. Read it in about two days, sobbing on the couch at the end, whole nine yards. I haven't read much that's focused on Chicago during the AIDS crisis, and I look forward to diving into the extensive sources that Makkai lists in the acknowledgements. 

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

3 hours ago, caffeinated applicant said:

Went straight to the Goodreads Want to Read shelf with that one--yes pls. 

Related on the field of interest front: I finally got around to Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers a few weeks ago and it Wrecked Me. Read it in about two days, sobbing on the couch at the end, whole nine yards. I haven't read much that's focused on Chicago during the AIDS crisis, and I look forward to diving into the extensive sources that Makkai lists in the acknowledgements. 

Ooh, are you a Goodreads user? I need more GR friends to swap good recommendations with - feel free to send me a friend request if you're interested (profile link)! (And any other Grad Cafe folks looking for opinionated Goodreads friends are welcome as well!)

Edited February 7, 2020 by The Hoosier Oxonian

[Wimsey]

10 hours ago, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

Ooh, are you a Goodreads user? I need more GR friends to swap good recommendations with - feel free to send me a friend request if you're interested (profile link)! (And any other Grad Cafe folks looking for opinionated Goodreads friends are welcome as well!)

I'll send you a request, too! I'm pretty active on Goodreads.

Today I hope to start Affinity, by Sarah Waters. I've heard so many good things about her books, so I'm looking forward to giving her work a try.

[Rrandle101]

Some of y'all might have seen this in the other thread but I made a doc for if any of y'all want to share the works in your field that really get you going that you would recommend to other people that aren't familiar with them. Please feel free to edit and leave a little comment (or none if you want) on your entries The link for it is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s6FpFX04Nz2mHm1aSal-zr-6VXEmWdQYt0ZjB8Wg3H4/edit?usp=sharing