I read The Family Moskat by Issac Bashevis Singer earlier this summer, and thought it was awesome. A multi generational story about a family of Jewish people living in Warsaw in the decades leading up to WW2. The last line was absolutely insane. I’m going to write it here because I think the story won’t be ruined without any of the context: “‘Death is the Messiah. That’s the real truth.’” So so heavy and good.
Also recently read The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. It’s sort of a travelogue, where Sebald is on a walking tour across England, but he spirals into all of these mini essays about Joseph Conrad and the silk trade and English imperialism in China and anything else his brain flits across. It was like a super controlled stream of consciousness.
In between I read West of Rome by John Fante. Two light novellas that were nice pallet cleansers for the denser stuff of the summer. Fante is almost always great, IMO.
I’m not sure if I mentioned in an earlier post, but also read Gunter Grass’s the Tin Drum a couple of months ago. It was such a trip of a book. I would seriously recommend it. The character Oskar is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. A man born fully sentient, he stops his growth at 3 years old and develops the skill of “sing shattering” where he can break glass with his voice. All told from Oskar’s perspective in an insane asylum where he lives after being falsely accused of murder. The book jumps from first to second to third person, sometimes in the course of a single paragraph, which took a second to get, but once I did the story really rolled.
Topic: books to read (Read 507919 times)