I don't know precisely why, but I've been feeling inspired to write a "top 5 books I read this year" type post – maybe because this year I went on a finally-reading-some-of-those-classics kick, so for once I feel like I have something of substance to say about literature?
Anyhow. Here are five books that had an impact on my year:
• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
I'd have to say I had a complicated relationship with this book. The concept is fascinating (the real-life memoir of a professor of literature in revolutionary Iran who meets in secret with a select few of her students to read banned Western classics) but the execution is a bit muddy, and at times it really drags. I kept putting it aside, then coming back to it months later.
Ultimately, though, this inspired me to pick up many other books, classics I'd never read (The Great Gatsby, Jane Austen, Henry James...) and to look at others I had read before in a new light. Reading these works along with Nafisi felt a bit like being in a college English course again, and I really miss that. So kudos to her for getting me to think about "great" literature again.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I admit it – I'm one of those few girls who just never got into Austen as a teenager. The early 19th century is not really my thing. It was Nafisi who pushed me to finally give Austen a try (Persuasion, then Pride and Prejudice) and...I enjoyed it! I find it funny that in essence nothing "happens" in Austen's books (sample plot point in Persuasion: the protagonist goes to visit her sister; this event lasts about 100 pages), and yet I found myself engrossed. It helped that I had a fantastic annotated version of Pride and Prejudice that explained all those little cultural details that would usually go over the head of a modern reader, so I learned a great deal by reading it.
And I'm glad to have finally read this classic, the book that spawned pretty much every romantic comedy ever. I actually enjoyed it enough that I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a modern update (they were going to be theater folks, with Darcy and Bingley as big-city actors coming to a small town just for the summer stock season!) but then I realized everyone's doing it and dropped the idea. But it says a lot about how evocative the scenario is that people are still being inspired to do remakes.
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
As an extension of the above-mentioned classics kick, I ended up finally picking up this classic-of-the-modern-age. For some reason, somewhere along the way I'd picked up the impression that Holden Caulfield was an unlikable, obnoxious narrator and that I'd have to force my way through this book someday just for the sake of having read it, but wouldn't enjoy it at all.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I think I sympathized even more with Holden than I would have if I'd read this as a teenager. His disillusionment with the world and lonely confusion rang far more true for me now than it would have when I was a teenager and still quite an idealist. I loved the book, and it (unsurprisingly) reminded me of a more modern take in the same genre, Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," which I read last year and became an instant favorite.
• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
Just because I've been catching up on the classics doesn't mean I can't still enjoy the occasional YA fantasy novel! I will defend to the end that "children's" literature quite often grapples with the deepest questions of all. I beg your leave to quote the great Philip Pullman on this point:
"One mistake that adults used to make about children's books,
is to think that children's books deal with trivial things. Little things
that please little minds, and little concerns about little people. And,
so, nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the contrary,
it's been my observation that a lot of highly praised adult books, or
highly successful adult books, in recent years have dealt with
the trivial things. Such as "Does my bun look big in this?" or "Will my
favorite football team win the cup?" and "Oh dear, my girlfriend's left
me, whatever am I going to do?". Whereas the children's books have dealt
with ultimate questions: "Where do we come from?," "What's the nature
of being a human being?," "What must I do to be good?" These are profound
questions, very deeply important questions. And they're being dealt with.
Largely, not in the books that adults read, but in the books that children
read." (quote drawn from a "Harry Potter and Me" transcript)
Seraphina is a story set in a wonderfully creative world of dragons and quirky saints, but it's also a story of a girl taking up her fantasy-novel-hero role despite her many fears and insecurities, an in-depth look at both the brave, heroic image the world sees and the mess of confusion that often exists inside. Also, the author's conception of these dragons-who-live-among-humans (they're sort of like Vulcans – or Sherlock Holmes – in that they can mimic human emotion, but they don't really get it) is just stunning.
• Sunshine by Robin McKinley
I knew Robin McKinley is an amazing writer, but I guess I'd forgotten just how much so, until I picked up this book, on the strength of the fact that about a gazillion people had recommended it.
This is a vampire novel. Vampire novels are definitely not my thing. But this is a fantastic story. The narrative voice is long-winded and confusing, the ending leaves pretty much every single plot thread that you really wanted to know about unresolved, and no, there's no sequel in the works. And yet, it's so engrossing and original, you can't help loving it desperately, warts and all.
And here are the honorable mentions:
• Maurice by E.M. Forster
This would be up there in the top five if only I'd actually read it... Alas, I've only seen the movie (fantastic!) and when I went to the used bookstore hoping to pick up the book itself, they didn't have it, so I got E.M. Forster's "A Room with a View" instead. (Also good.) But wow, what a story. Just wow.
• Emma (Jane Austen) / The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton) / The Casual Vacancy
(J.K. Rowling)
Think these three novels don't have much in common? I beg to differ.
The first two I also saw in movie form (this was before I got on my Austen kick later in the year) because they happened to be lying around in the cottage we rented for a group hiking trip to Wales.
Watching them back to back, I was struck by how they essentially told a story of the same stripe (women trying to navigate their path through an extremely rigid and judgmental society) but with the fundamental difference that Austen's take on the subject matter is essentially sunny (literally – in Jane Austen's England, apparently the sun is always shining and there are non-stop picnics), while Wharton's is more realistic/tragic. Or compare Austen's Pride and Prejudice with Wharton's The House of Mirth: Elizabeth Bennet wants something greater than a humdrum marriage of convenience, and she wins her Mr Darcy. Lily Bart (SPOILER ALERT!) wants something much the same, and ends up socially ruined, then dead.
A few months later, when I read The Casual Vacancy (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling's first "grown-up" book), I was struck with the thought that this book is, in a sense, a continuation of those themes, simply in a modern-day setting – it's still about the tragic struggle against restrictive social circumstances. (At least, to my mind the particular female character I'm thinking of here amounts to the book's main plot line, though it's a book of many interwoven plots.) To draw that line from turn-of-the-19th-century Austen to turn-of-the-20th-century Wharton to turn-of-the-21st-century Rowling was fascinating.
• Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
Again, can't count it because I watched it rather than read it, but I was noticing the other day (probably because of reading A Room with a View, set in a similar era) how much the characters from Parade's End have stuck with me. I'm starting to think the Edwardian era/early 20th century must have been a fascinating time – in some ways already surprisingly modern, or at least in the process of a massive breaking-away from tradition (women's suffrage movement well underway, etc.), yet still lacking that massive push toward modernity that, for better or worse, the two world wars would end up bringing.
No comments:
Post a Comment