What happened to y'all? Stopped reading, or what?
Let's get this thread going again!
In the past couple of weeks I read the following books... first of all, Toni Morrison's
Beloved. Really intense and important book! It's about a woman (and various other characters) who escaped slavery in the South in the mid-18th century. It's about killed children, real ghosts (!), and questions of guilt. I liked it a lot, even thought it's far from an easy read. There's a lot of implications and loose ends. This is part of what makes the novel interesting, but it doesn't make it light reading. Which is perfectly fine. Just so everyone knows what to expect.
Next up was Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian. I was looking forward to that book, because the only McCarthy novel I had read before was
The Road, which I really liked.
Blood Meridian wasn't my cup of tea at all and, overall, I didn't enjoy it. The first two thirds of the book seemed like a monotonous repetition of massacres. The first part of the novel also suffered from extremely one-dimensional characters in my eyes. There was just zero character development and zero emotional or intellectual depth. Things only got interesting when the Judge was described in more detail. I really liked the ending, but overall,
Blood Meridian seemed like a generic Western to me. Western stories are not my cup of tea at all. On top of that, a McCarthy novel is just the complete opposite of
Beloved in every way, so maybe it was just the wrong time to read it.
Blood Meridian was by far (or at least that's what it seemed like) the most male novel I've ever read. It's all about violence, men in rugged nature, a complete lack of empathy, and apart from the odd whore or killed Indian/Mexican woman here and there, there's a complete lack of female characters. As said, not my cup of tea.
At the moment, I'm reading Eduardo Galeano's
The Open Veins of Latin America. This book is a history of Latin America since the arrival of European powers and recounts how the continent has been exploited by outside powers since the very beginning: from European colonizers (Spain and Portugal) at first to English and Dutch trade companies and then ultimately to the US since the mid-18th century. It's also a critique of capitalism and the inequalities that world trade has produced. I think it's pretty accurate for the most part, even though it seems a bit outdated in some parts (especially when addressing the Cuban revolution), as it was written about 50 years ago and of course can't address what happened in Latin America during past decades. If you're interested in Latin American history (as opposed to
contemporary Latin American politics), I can only recommend this book! It's one of the standard books for Latin American history (at least from a socialist perspective) and pretty much the Latin American equivalent to Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States. Galeano died a few months ago, so his name might ring a bell...
I also read a couple of short stories by Alice Munro and George Saunders, both of which are authors I really like. Next up will be Knausgaard's
My Struggle 1. I'm not sure what to expect. I feel like, for me personally, this could be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing. We'll see...