Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
The days are getting longer, and the problem becomes how to connect the past to the present.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Going one chapter at a time does indeed make this a bit easier to handle.
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
Modernism promised and delivered in 2015. A research-based academic exercise (an extended poem made up only of the titles given to artistic depictions of black women) that fulfills its promise and becomes something greater and more moving through sheer weight.
Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
I almost gave up on this one immediately: "small town hypocrisy, blah blah blah". But it is worth remembering in this time of imagining false pasts that some of the modernist project was about dispelling exactly this kind of view of the past: there was virtue that turned out to be vice, that people's greed and desires are constant, and that the only thing that changes over time is how willing people are to admit to any of it. Mid poetry, though.
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
I've been reading as an adult for ~35 years, and there have been a couple of important post-college phases I've gone through.
By about 2004 it was clear enough that there's not a ton of variation in literary fiction plots because only some things are 'big' enough to be worth writing about: war, death, marriage, murder, crime etc. So within the confines of any particular work you can figure out where it's going because there are only so many places a story can go. This was the origin of my anti-spoiler view that a narrative that relies on an unexpected twist to be worth it cannot actually be good, because there are plenty of narratives with twists that are also well-constructed regardless of whether the plot has been spoiled.
Somewhere around 2010 I began to realize the formal gap between an author's ambitions and their skill. Once you have run through an appreciable portion of classics, however defined, you begin to move into works where the idea is good but the execution cannot keep up with it. Cortazar's Hopscotch is a fine example of this--as an idea very good, but the story onto which the structure is grafted cannot hold its weight. And usually that's the way it works: good idea, bad execution.
Rarer, in my experience, is the opposite--good execution, bad idea. (I suspect I filter out many of these candidates before I start reading them.) The non-narrative bits in Don Quixote were like this for me, and now so is An American Tragedy.
I don't like true crime, largely because I was paying attention in my undergrad sociology of law course and so it presents no new information about how the world works. I had to back out of the excellent OJ Simpson documentary Made in America once the crime happened out of the panic-inducing sense that I knew exactly what was going to happen and did not feel like reliving it again. And a decade of reading and writing on human rights violations has made me profoundly uninterested in the psychology of a criminal or murderer.
And yet: this book is masterfully written. It skillfully moves between people and views of reality, builds them up from the fundaments, can explain the differences between them, and move from clinically detached to realistic depiction of emotion with ease.
Unfortunately, it's still a true crime book, more or less, so onto the never-to-be-finished heap it goes.
(A question for myself to ponder: what makes this insufficiently interesting but Crime and Punishment fascinating? Aside from not having to wait 450 pages for the crime.)
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