Reading Round-Up, 1/12/2014

It’s been over a month since I’ve done one of these round-up posts, and in that time, I’ve only properly reviewed one book. What have I been up to? The books I’ve read since last time I did a round-up include:

• Alix Kates Schulman’s memoir Drinking the Rain. I liked this, although I thought it started a little slowly. You have to have a fairly large appetite for nature writing in the book’s first section, although it is beautifully written and interesting. Basically, Schulman retreats to an isolated primitive cabin in Maine to live on her own. Later parts of the book include more of Schulman’s past life — her involvement with the feminist movement, her marriage, her writing. There’s lots of interesting stuff here.
• Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory, a short collection of feminist essays, and also an Emily Books pick. Really great cultural criticism.
• Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic. This reminded me a little of A.M. Homes’s writing in the way it’s realistic fiction but turned up just a notch — the people are a little larger, wackier, and stranger than in real life, and more stuff happens to them than happens to most people. I liked it.
• Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring, which I wrote about in my previous post.
• Laura Kipnis’s Against Love. I started off loving this and continued to like it to the end, although the tone began to feel a little same-y after a while. But this book is a great critique of contemporary ideas about marriage and fidelity. I finished reading it not feeling against love, exactly, but definitely against social expectations that people fit into one model for how relationships should go (which I was already, but still).
• Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. Review forthcoming!

As for current and upcoming reading, any plan I previously had got disrupted by the publication of the Tournament of Books short list. I love the Tournament of Books and have followed it closely for a few years now. It’s so much more interesting than other awards and contests because the decision-making is transparent, at least once you get to the short list stage, and you can follow along and comment on each decision over the course of several weeks. And I love how the organizers recognize how silly and ridiculous the whole idea of a Tournament of Books is. It’s absurd! But it’s fun, and I’m glad they do it.

As happens every year, I’m tempted to read some of the books off their list so I can follow along with the decision-making that much more closely. As it turns out, Hobgoblin gave me a copy of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries for Christmas, a book that’s on the tournament list, so I’m reading it right now. Since I put James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, also tournament short listed, on my TBR list last month, I thought I’d check it out of the library and see if I liked it, which I do, so I’m in the middle of that now too. After that, we’ll see. I have a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, so I might pick that up, and others on the list look appealing as well. I may read from the list until I get bored with contemporary fiction and then move on to other things. Of the 17 books on the list, I’d already read only two: Herman Koch’s The Dinner and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

Have a great week everyone!