Willoyd's Reading 2024

[willoyd]

09.  The Sorrow of War by Nao Binh **

The book for Vietnam in my Reading The World project. This is a classic of the Vietnamese war I understand, on a par with All Quiet on the Western Front and other war greats. I can see sort of see why, but personally I found this a tough, unrewarding read, boring me rigid before I reached half way, and struggling to make it to the end of what is, after all, only a slim 220 pages or so. Graphic in detail (the even mildly squeamish should be wary), unrelenting in its grimness, it may well be an all too starkly accurate portrayal of what the war was like, but I also found it repetitious and narrow in its language (this, of course, may be a function of the translation), equally repetitious in its narrative, and disjointed in its telling - chronological this is not (I don't normally find this a problem, but on this occasion it just confused). The odd attempt at metafiction just felt clumsy. All of this, for some readers (actually, most readers from the reviews - I'm definitely in a minority here) may well add to the impact, or carry this into the realms of the classic, but I'm afraid it just lost me about a quarter of the way in, and with only occasional remissions, it remained that way to the end, by which time I was really having to force myself not to leave it unfinished (I'm really trying to ensure I read books all the way through for this project, even if it's one I'd normally abandon). I'm sure this is down to inadequacy as a reader on my part, but this was a book I was glad, relieved, to put behind me.

[willoyd]

10.  The Offing by Benjamin Myers *****
We're reading a Myers book for my next book group (The Perfect Golden Circle), but as I've read it before (I may still reread) I decided to try one of his that I hadn't read. My local indie shop owner, knowing I was after something a bit lighter, suggested this.  Spot on!  It's an elegiac look back by the narrator, Robert, to a time just after the Second World War when, as a young man on the cusp of moving from school to the mines in his Durham coalfield village, decides to 'take off' for a few weeks in the summer to explore the world around him on foot. He lands up in Robin's Hood Bay (on the North Sea coas)t, and meets up with and develops a friendship with an older woman living on her own. It's a Bildungsroman, but aside from that, reminds me very much of perhaps my favourite book, A Month In the Country, as in both the (young male) narrator's character and relationships develop over an English rural summer with a quietly powerful long term impact on their life.  - it's not quite there, not being as nuanced, nor with quite the variety of tone and he plot development that was part of what marked AMITC out, but it was a beautifully poetic read with an interesting development, that I can see myself going back to. Benjamin Myers is an author who is gradually growing on me - he's not (so far anyway!) spectacular or showy (although I'm told that a couple of his books that I have yet to read are very different), but quietly gets under your skin. An initial five star read,but could easily get kicked up a level later. (BTW, 'offing' is apparently the name for the distant part of the sea that's in view - the part where the horizon meets the sky).

[willoyd]

Currently reading the big one!
Could well not be posting much over the next month or so, as have at last got stuck into a book that have been intending to get to grips with for some time now, my choice for Ireland in Reading the World - the almost inevitable Ulysses*! Am around 150 pages in (Leopold Bloom has just arrived at the cemetery).  Am being helped along by Patrick Hastings' The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses, which has a useful summary of each episode, which I'm reading as a follow-up - and it does help.  I've also got one of the annotated versions on my Kindle, and that's been really useful too understanding some of the references, although one could get hopelessly bogged down if checking out each one!

But even before using these, I'm starting to find it utterly addictive. In places it's almost hypnotic in its rhythms. It's particularly picked up since Leopold Bloom appeared (in section 4, Calypso) - his internal narrative is rather more down to earth than Stephen Dedalus's and have almost instiinctively warmed to him.  If anything (and only so far!) have found it an easier read than expected, although section 3 (Proteus) left me gasping rather especially at the start.

It's going to need a reread though, I can already see that!! In the meantime, I had expected that I might need to intersperse with some lighter reading and that I would likely have to be quite structured/organised in my reading to get through, but at present, I'm loving the exploration and positively wanting to pick it up and get stuck into the next bit, so we'll see!

*In fact, Ulysses was from the word go, at the heart of the project, as set it as the baseline, the earliest, book that could be read.  I started Reading The World in 2022, the centenary year of the book's publication, and it was the first book I chose for a country.  Sort of made sense that books should come from the last 100 years - or at least in the years since Ulysses was published.

[willoyd]

11.  Not A River by Selva Almada *****

Much as I'm loving Ulysses, it's a book that I think I'm going to need the occasional break from, and this is the first! Reading various articles on publishers of books in translation (particularly a Guardian profile piece on several UK indie publishers), my eyes picked out this book from Charco Press in a tabletop display in my local Waterstones during a browse earlier this week. I've not read any of their books yet, but the name was familiar from the articles. A quick glance, and I knew I was hooked, not least by the production values (I'm a sucker, especially, for French flaps!). I've since discovered it's on the longlist for this year's International Booker and, having read it, I'm not surprised.
At only 99 pages (including a fascinating translator's note), this was a short but absolutely compulsive read: two friends are on a river fishing trip with the teenage son of another friend who died on a previous visit. They successfully land (by shooting!) a monster ray, which attracts the attention and the ire of local villagers, threatening as the book progresses to boil over in violence. The story tells of how the relationship pans out, with flashbacks centred both on the fishermen and the villagers' lives fleshing out both how they got here, and why things work out the way they do. It's a carefully, tightly woven narrative, made all the tighter by Almeda's very lean language and the spartan use of punctuation and paragraphing. So often this latter makes life harder, but the author's style rapidly grew on me, and it really did add to the atmosphere and my involvement as a reader (I may have been helped by the fact that I'm a few hundred pages into Ulysses, which has similar traits that actually made this feel relatively easy!). Almeda's focus is primarily on aspects of masculinity, much toxic, in a strongly patriarchal society, and some of the fallout from this, with this being the third in a thematically related trilogy of books (they each stand alone, with no narrative or character crossover, so don't need to be read in order).
Yet, whilst the questions are asked and themes aired, this is also, in its simplest terms, a brilliantly told story, with a twist that both took me utterly by surprise, and made me go back to reread whole sections (easy enough when there's only 99 pages!) to tease out the clues, indeed large bites of narrative meaning, that I'd missed. This was a book which produced a genuine "Oh I see it now!" moment well after I'd reached the end. Maybe (probably!) I'm just a bit thick, but I did enjoy the revelatory experience!
So, a very happy impulse choice (perhaps not the right word, as this is a very dark book!), and a great one for Argentina, the 37th country to be visited in Reading The World.