Currently reading, Catch-up edition

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
If I had to pick the least romantic thing in this book--there are many to choose from--it is our nominal hero taking for his last non-love-of-his-life sexual conquest (there were well over 600) a literal schoolgirl with braces whom he grooms for a year before trying anything. When this poor girl finds out she's being jilted, she kills herself, information which is communicated to our hero in a brief aside and never dwelt on.

The book easily reads as an anti-romance, but somehow I think that's not how it was intended.

 

William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
The book that briefly broke my reading system. Whereas your George Eliots, Charles Dickenses, your Dostoevskys and Tolstoys, etc etc, all break into nice little solitary units of reading, Faulkner demands to be read whole. There's something oddly compelling about the incantatory tone: not Proust, exactly, or Henry James; nor at the other end Thomas Bernhardt, where the long sentences are a kind of fugue repeating the same themes over and over again. Any particular piece of the writing will make next to no sense, but you emerge at the end of a chapter with a picture of the whole even so.

Not much to say about the plot except that if any one of the characters had hated black people less, none of it would have come to tragedy, but that's the American south for you. Well, that and the unwillingness to look a situation square in the face, or have an open and honest conversation.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners
A bunch of stories which are somewhere between perfectly fine and good, and then, wham, "The Dead". I suspect it plays better the older that you get, but even so, it's incredible to get ten versions of "this Irish father is drunk and sad" and then one of the high points of European literature.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Another one that hits differently because I am older when I read it. I think sort of astonishing for the author to get at such a young age what it is like to be an older person looking back.