Resolutions

More reading resolutions for the New Year:

1) Read at least one Dickens novel

I will undoubtedly be helped along in this by the Dickens Reading group I have joined. The next two we are scheduled to read are "Martin Chuzzlewit" and (I believe) "David Copperfield," neither of which I have attempted before.

2) A Faulkner novel

A Faulkner and a Dickens a year have been my goals in recent years, but I flubbed Faulkner in 2006. This year I will try to grow a spine and complete "The Sound and the Fury," chosen because my favorite Faulkner thus far was "Absalom, Absalom!".

3) One Alice Munro

4) One Margaret Atwood

5) One Pat Barker

These last three were authors from my "Contemporary Women Authors of Britain and Canada" oral examinations topics a couple of years ago, and I think enough time has now passed that I can peacefully return to them (without twitching or exhibiting any other symptoms of Post Examination Stress Disorder). In the intervening years, my library has filled up with unread works by these women, because of my admiration for the three or four books I had read by each for the exam, and it is time to start addressing the surplus. I anticipate that the works will be: "Runaway" by Munro, "Oryx and Crake" by Atwood, and "Border Crossing" by Barker.

6) A Kazuo Ishiguro novel

Last year I read "Never Let Me Go" and found it neither as endlessly impressive as "Remains of the Day" nor as off-putting as "When we were Orphans." This year, perhaps, will be the year of "An Artist of the Floating World."

7) A Paul Auster novel

Paul Auster was my major discovery of 2006, when I read "Book of Illusions." I am currently in the midst of "The New York Trilogy," which I hope to heaven I will finish in 2007. If not, I will be filled with shame - it is an excellent book.

8) A new play a week

The most challenging and most necessary of my goals. Since I study drama, I tend to give short shrift to reading plays that are new to me, avoiding anything that has a whiff of work about it. A play a week hardly seems like hard work, however, and 52 new plays this year seems a tremendous achievement. Perhaps I will start with Shaw's "Major Barbara," which is still sitting in my inbox, partially read, sent by the wonderful people at DailyLit.

Chunksters

Having recently discovered the phenomenon of book challenges on Blogger, I thought I might take one up. And what better one to start with than the "Chunkster Challenge," given my love of all things that go by the name "Chunky." I once developed a passion for Yorkie chocolate bars in Britain as a dual response to their advertising campaign: on the one hand I was spurred into rebellion by their assertion that the chocolate bars were "not for girls," and on the other I was intrigued by the fact that it described itself as not just any Yorkie, but a "Chunkie Yorkie," defying any delusions that those who ate it were slender and wispy of form.

But I digress. My point was simply that I really couldn't resist something called the Chunkster Challenge. And what is this appealingly named beast? It is a fairly forgiving, loosely conceived challenge, as Bookfoolery and Babble tells me: set yourself a group of "Chunksters" (books over 400 pages) to read between January 1, 2007 (today!) and June 30, 2007, and see how you fare. A complete set of rules can be found here.

So what chunksters will I be including in my challenge? To be honest, a number from the following list were books I was intending to read this year anyway, either for book groups or the "1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die" project:


1) Don Quixote, Cervantes

The chunkiest of all chunksters, which has long loomed windmill-like on my horizon.

2) Tristram Shandy, Sterne

Can I really claim expertise on meta-anything without having read this?

3) The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe

For my British Classics reading group. I have read "The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole, but never this other most famous of all gothic novels.

4) Kafka on the Shore, Murakami

A touch of very recent literature. This will be my first full Murakami experience, although I read a couple of stories from "An Elephant Vanishes" after seeing Theatre de Complicite's luminous stage version.

5) The Famished Road , Okri

A leftover from my 2006 to be read list, and a belated read for my Literary Fiction reading group.

6) Something Rotten , Fforde

A light interlude, the most recent in Fforde's "Thursday Next" series of literary mysteries.

7) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , Anne Bronte

The next read for my British Classics reading group, this may be the first "Chunkster" I undertake.

8) Suite Francaise, Nemirovsky

Another very recent book (in English translation, not in composition), this was among the best received fictional works of 2006.

9) Dirt Music, Winton

Another leftover from 2006 and the Literary Fiction reading group.



My goal will be to read one of these a month for the next six months, for a total of six out of nine completed. I will keep you updated on my progress....

"A hen is an egg's way of making another egg."

As I finished up James McClure's "The Artful Egg" (1984)I couldn't help thinking of a conference I recently attended. A woman participating in a seminar became somewhat agitated, almost leaping out of her seat as she inveighed against the persistence of the mind-body or soul-body duality. Finally she let forth an anguished and strident cry: "I am NOT a vessel!" Everyone in the room murmured appreciatively, although whether it was the point or the performance that they enjoyed was unclear.

Later that day, I saw the woman at a reception. She was carrying a tiny baby.

I don't want to overemphasize the importance of this to her stand. I am sure the mind-body duality has always been a source of outrage to her. But this certainly added a meaningful richness to her zeal.

Parenthood, as one might suspect from the novel's opening lines, is no small or carefree endeavor in "The Artful Egg." Children become full of guile and complexity as they age, and are cheerfully resistant to your social deceptions when they are young. To say more would perhaps reveal too much about this double-stranded whodunit, so I will simply summarize the premise: a progressive writer is murdered in apartheid-era South Africa. What was the motive? Her money? Her politics? Her thorny familial relationships? The police (riven with racial strife themselves) compete against each other to solve the crime, while simultaneously delving into the demise of an infamous interrogator's wife in circumstances that suspiciously mirror the "accidental" deaths of political prisoners.

I found myself troubled by the racial politics of the novel (this may be to be expected in any book about apartheid). The plot is explicitly subversive, as paradoxical as that phrase may seem, but the characterizations revel in a physicality of stereotypes that can be quite unsettling. So grotesque are characters of all ethnicities that the body itself, with all its racial codes, becomes a source of extremes, a vessel of disgust.


"The Artful Egg" (1984)
James McClure [who, I am sad to say, died earlier this year at the age of 66]
***1/2