This week I have finished Eden and read Raising Cain and skimmed a book I will not be using for a class in the fall. And I am working my way through The Known World, which I will be using in class, and am now reading and enjoying Let the Great World Spin, on the suggestion (surprising) of my sister.
After Eden I think I shall take a break from depressing and incredibly long Israeli novels. This one made me like the David Grossman one better. So is it better to reflect directly on "the situation" in your novel or to seemingly ignore it until it infects every pore of every character's miserable life? Hard to say. But Eden is no eden (which I should have known) and I wish people would be more generous with their quotation marks when using the word "utopian." I thought it might actually be utopian. It was not. Not only that, but many loose ends are not at all tied up -- and by not being tied up it is clear that the misery that the reader knows about will only be compounded by the misery that is yet to come when the characters (all living their lives beyond the book's pages for me) find out.
As for Raising Cain -- I clearly missed this when it came out -- I read it on the suggestion of a teacher at the people's school -- I did learn some useful things (how to frame discussions about fear and how to encourage emotional intelligence through discussions of people and literary characters), and I was glad to finish it in a few hours becuase it would have been an annoying read over a longer period of time.
And hopefully The Known World will not make my students fall asleep quite as quickly as it is making me....
You will all note that I am taking a hiatus from Red Mars. I need a summer sci-fi read as good as Sherri Tepper's The Margarets. Any suggestions? (Well, well, well, it seems as if Tepper has a new book AND it is postapocalyptic: The Waters Rising.)
You are amazing with your willingness to read incredibly depressing books. I can't do it unless there's a work-related payoff, or the book is so gripping I can't put it down.
ReplyDeleteOn NPR the other day I heard about a book called Robopocalypse. I'll bet it's terrible, but you could read that.