(My library-book binge, continued from the previous entry.)
I hadn’t read Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Views the Body before (I think – I am horribly amnesiac about books I’ve read, sometimes) and was therefore pleased to be able to check it out of the Central Library. As much of a fan as I am of Sayers and Wimsey, however, this collection of stories ultimately felt too light. I had to be objective and award it two instead of three stars on goodreads. (I don’t really like the rating system but it does help draw some crude distinctions – the most problematic rating is probably the three-star one, though.)
Minzhi has mentioned Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built a couple of times, so I checked it out together with Stephen King’s On Writing (!) – both rare non-fiction reads for me, but both books about reading (yes, even King’s).
Spufford’s work focused more on child psychology than I’d expected, though his sketch of a child’s journey towards “adult” literature was perceptive. True to Spufford’s hypothesis that children either “graduate” to Austen or diversify within a specific genre, my own transition to adult lit was marked by the reading of some Austen as well as copious “thrillers”, some horror novels of King’s genre, and Crichton’s visions of S&T gone awry.
King was easy to read, as usual, and his book is eminently sensible, e.g. he says, and I quote in inexact words, “To write, you must read. A lot.” Despite how people turn up their noses at his popularity, I actually rediscovered some of my interest in King’s novels, and respect for his brand of “page-turners” while reading On Writing. While he places himself in the same class as John Grisham and Amy Tan, I’d say that he’s probably superior to both (I never got into The Firm), and perhaps even to Dan Brown (I say unfairly, having never read a single Dan Brown). At least King writes honestly about middle America and formulates plots based on the everyday.
I’d heard about Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for some time now and finally obtained the only accessible copy of it from Bukit Merah Library recently (snapping my thong sandals in the process, and having to borrow scotchtape from the counter to secure the thong so I could hobble out of there). Lovely, haunting writing, but it’s “work” – and having thought like that, I realise how far I’ve come from academia. I’ve to be in the mood to read Ulysses, and I’m not sure when that moment would come. But Housekeeping is slim and melancholy; portable art.
I lit upon a couple of Konigsburgs after, since Yvonne’s rave made me realise what I’d missed out on during my childhood. (And as an aside, how does one discover what the “must-reads” are when one is a child anyway? I read almost indiscriminately and mostly independently, though Mom brought some books home from her school library as well – Just-So stories and Amelia Bedelia.) Silent to the Bone is well-paced – so much so I finished it in one sitting. I loved Konigsburg’s depiction of friendship between Branwell, a boy who had been struck dumb after his half-sister had gone into a coma, and his best friend Connor. But more than that, I loved the friendship between Connor and his much older half-sister, Margaret.
I’ve mixed feelings about The View of Saturday. It’s about smart kids, quirky cultural diversity, and teaching – very good topics. However, I feel that there were some gaps in the backstory – how did Julian decide to invite Nadia and Noah to his tea-party? Why does everyone seem sort-of related between Epiphany, New York and Century Village, Florida? What happened to Ethan’s crush and why didn’t his love for the theatre figure in the only school production that cropped up in the narrative? Am I just being too adult about it all?
Between the two Konigsburgs was Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin – yikes, ugh, yeesh. I thought I would love it when I started reading it, and still like it, but an epistolary novel told from the perspective of the mother of a high-school killer/shooter is no fun, especially when the mother is a rather unlikeable upper-middle-class self-hating American who buys rare animals to please her daughter and with the knowledge that she has a monster for a son. Oh, she had also chosen to have that daughter – a docile, pliant thing – in order that she could have an ally in her battle against her husband (who always took her son’s side) and her son – again, with full knowledge that she has a monster for a son.
I find it difficult to assess the merits of a novel woven into being by the voice of a single (unreliable) narrator, but I think Shriver does well having her protagonist dwell obsessively on the quietly bone-chilling behaviour of her son from the moment he was born till the day he shot 8 people dead at his school 3 days shy of turning 16. I thought at first that no one could be so monstrous as to have been brought into this world as a disenchanted adolescent, but that may be Eva Khatchadourian’s own imagining – especially since she’d never wanted to be a mother in the first place (I loved how she covered this part of the story). Also, the whole nature-vs-nurture question is presented quite cunningly here, filtered as it is through the voice of the narrator.
But the father is a real dupe, heartily clasping his evil son to his bosom and disbelieving the mother at every opportunity – so much so that I can’t believe how Eva continued to love him, bury her head under the sand, and allow him to remain deceived till the end.
Some people say that this book makes one think twice about having a child, and I would’ve agreed 50 pages into the book. Now that I’ve finished it, I’d say, think twice about having a child you don’t really want and would resent, and please get him some help if you suspect him of being a completely amoral misanthrope – it’s so odd how, in a culture where therapy is all the rage, Eva K never did think to send Kevin to a therapist though she’d always known he was wicked.
