Books Review
Apr. 29th, 2009 06:33 amSo one of the reasons that I'm such a big McSweeney's fangirl is that when I first picked up an issue or two of their magazine and read a few stories I was blindsided and basically like "Oh my god, you can do that in fiction?" Issues 18 and 20 in particular knocked my socks off with things I had never seen before and even a couple I had never imagined; that's what got me to subscribe to their novel feed, in the hope of seeing more of the same in long form. And a couple of them delivered, The Children's Hospital in particular, though Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth also qualifies, and maybe that tiny book of short shorts by Sarah Manguso. Some of the others were quite good if not revolutionary: Here They Come, for example. This winter I read and re-read a lot of McSweeney's short fiction and for the most part it didn't catch my breath in the same way even though it was mostly very good, because it seemed mostly very good in the same way. So I asked the professor in the fiction class I'm taking right now if he could recommend something to read that woud be different from what I've been reading, and he suggested two books to me.
The first, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, is a short novel I finished a few weeks ago that I've already recommended to a few of you. If you hate thematic or emotional spoilers, you should just let someone else hand you this book after blacking out all of the back cover and inside dust jacket text. (I'm looking at you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior .) ( So don't read this part, I guess? Except do anyway, maybe. )
The second book, and this one took me two weeks because I was biking everywhere instead of taking the train, was Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. This is a much longer epistolary novel that takes place over a wide range of time. ( Spoilers, but it's way less important here. )
The end of the novel reveals that actually this is a prequel to another set of novels based on the characters who show up in the last fifty pages of the book and don't seem to fit in. It's possible that there's a giant superstructure that's amazingly awesome, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to read five more books to find out. I'll probably pick up one other when I am next unsure what to read; right now, I've started on Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran at the recommendation of![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hari_mirchi , and I need to spend less time reading and more writing for a while.
The first, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, is a short novel I finished a few weeks ago that I've already recommended to a few of you. If you hate thematic or emotional spoilers, you should just let someone else hand you this book after blacking out all of the back cover and inside dust jacket text. (I'm looking at you,
gaudior .) ( So don't read this part, I guess? Except do anyway, maybe. )The second book, and this one took me two weeks because I was biking everywhere instead of taking the train, was Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. This is a much longer epistolary novel that takes place over a wide range of time. ( Spoilers, but it's way less important here. )
The end of the novel reveals that actually this is a prequel to another set of novels based on the characters who show up in the last fifty pages of the book and don't seem to fit in. It's possible that there's a giant superstructure that's amazingly awesome, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to read five more books to find out. I'll probably pick up one other when I am next unsure what to read; right now, I've started on Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran at the recommendation of
hari_mirchi , and I need to spend less time reading and more writing for a while.