Literature #1

I’m interested in keeping better track of the books I’ve read recently, and those I’m currently reading. One of my recent goals was to be more meticulous about defining words I don’t know, which, in all honestly, has made reading a much slower process, but has added so much more depth to the material. I’ve also found, empirically, that physically looking words up as I’m reading and defining them in context helps me retain their meaning. I like the tangibility of actual books, so I ended up buying an Oxford dictionary for that purpose. It’s useful for me to annotate material in the books I’m reading without constantly going back and forth with my phone. I actually think it might be kind of fun to keep an active list of new words I come across!

Anyways, currently reading:

• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  • This is honestly a doozy, a head-scratcher, and a literal tome, that seems to lack any semblence of coherence. But people keep saying it’s one of the greatest American novels, so I’m going to stick with it for the time being…
• The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
  • I’ve had this one on my shelf for so long, I found it high-time to finally read it.

Recently read:

• Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
  • I loved Blindness, but I didn’t feel as invested in this one. The concept was pretty unique, and I liked the parallel timelines devoted to Death herself, and to the crumbling of society as Death removes herself from business.
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
  • Warning: spoiler alert to follow… Arguably one of the best books I’ve ever read. Powers devotes 500 pages as a devotional to trees and the living biosphere as a whole, taking the point of view that the Earth will be fine, irrespective of climate change, but humans need Nature’s help escaping and surviving ourselves. Although the ending is up in the air, Patricia Westerford’s character, a biologist who devotes her life to the study of forests (and who has to be an homage to Dr. Suzanne Simard at UBC, who first identified that forests communicate with one another through mycorrhizal networks in the soil) adopts the radical eco-activist mentality that the Earth will be better off without humans at all, and takes the extreme-solution of “unsuicide” – decentering humans and putting the focus on the survival of nature. This was a gut-wrencher, but one that has had a long-lasting effect on my perception of humanity’s deep-rooted cognitive dissonance and selfishness.

Up next:

• A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt
  • This was a gift from my sister. I’m excited to read this, since non-fiction doesn’t often makes its way into my literary ledgers.
• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
  • I love dystopian and surrealism – really looking forward to this.