Reading Journal: Thursday 28th January 2010

Wow, it’s amazing what a difference a day makes when it comes to reading. If you caught up with my journal entry for yesterday then you will know that Wednesday didn’t turn out to be one of my best days reading-wise, with the only saving grace being an Arthur Miller short. However, yesterday I enjoyed reading success on all fronts. What a day, and one which made me so grateful that books and reading are such a big part of my life. So let’s head on into a rundown of the day, and my apologies beforehand for such a weighty and lengthy post:

My main reading priority for yesterday was climbing back on board my William Trevor vs. Lorrie Moore reading challenge. So that meant ticking off a story from each writer. William Trevor was up first with the delightful tale, The Introspections of J P. Powers, taken from Penguin’s equally delightful William Trevor: The Collected Stories. The story is about the titular middle-aged, overweight, uber-sweaty driving instructor, who is undoubtedly bored, bored, bored both with his job, and with life in general. While in the company of seventy-three-year-old Miss Hobish, on her two-hundred and fortieth driving lesson (she sees them more as outings now ), Powers ruminates on the mundane regularity of his life, the pointlessness of his job, and the value of his own contribution to society.

As always seems to be the case, William Trevor has made me glow from the inside with this story. His remarkable ability to inject a certain profoundness and depth into his characters is his greatest triumph, and it shines through once again, in his painting of the hapless and rather sorrowful Mr. J. P. Powers.

You know, what I truly love about Trevor though? Is that he’s never conservative with his words, yet he never makes one feel as though he is extraneous in his writing. The upshot? A story which is always slow and considered in the telling, but always ultimately satisfying. And The Introspections of J P. Powers is a fine example of this.Story Rating:

****

Although it would be fair to say that I’ve not connected with Lorrie Moore quite as deeply and profoundly as I have with William Trevor so far, the Moore short I read yesterday was without a doubt one of the most powerful and moving stories I’ve read in many months, from any writer. Go Like This (from Faber’s Lorrie Moore: The Collected Stories), is about Elizabeth, a woman dying from terminal cancer, who makes the decision – with her husband’s approval – to take her own life before the cancer takes it from her. As one can imagine it’s not much of a ‘feel good’ story, but it is one of incredible intensity.

Narrated in the first-person the woman tells the reader not only how it feels to be drawing closer and closer to death, but also how her husband Elliot unconsciously becomes more and more distanced from her, and she becomes more and more isolated. No doubt in resignation to her impending fate, the woman is always blunt and direct, and as a consequence the narrative is to the point of intense. Take this extract for instance which made me blow out hard:

I am something putrid. I wonder if I smell, decaying from the inside out like fruit, yet able to walk among them like the dead among the living, like Christ, for a while, only for a while, until things begin to show, until things become uncomfortable. I return to the living room, grin weakly, stand among my friends. I am something incorrect: a hair in the cottage cheese. Something uncouth: a fart in the elevator.

Incredible stuff from Moore, and it only gets more intense as the story progresses. I know I said I’ve not connected with Moore as much as I have with Trevor up until this point, but this story on its own has got me well and truly super-glued to her. Story Rating:

****

If I had any minor disappointment in my reading day then it would be that the Arthur Miller story I read, Beavers, from Presence: Collected Stories (Bloomsbury), didn’t quite measure up to the one I read yesterday. That said, Beavers is still a great story. Written in 2005, and bearing the undesirable label of being the final story that Miller submitted for publication before his death, Beavers tells the tale of a man’s attempts to rid his precious pond of a couple of beavers who have taken residence.

What begins as a tale of one man’s disdain against nature actually ends up being something else. As the story evolves and certain events take place, the man, who remains anonymous, contemplates on why the beavers were following through on certain tasks, when there was no need for them to do so. My apologies for being so enigmatic, but I really don’t want to spoil the story for anyone else. I’ll just finish by saying that Beavers is definitely one of Miller’s better tales.Story Rating:

****

Again time was tight for me today, but I did manage my customary hour with Canongate’s newly-translated The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah. I’ve passed the hundred page mark now (pg. 123 to be exact) and I’m still finding it to be as charming and alluring as I did before (which is quite surprising given that the story is based around revolution). There’s an undercurrent of fable and myth running through the story – much the same kind of undercurrent I experienced when I read Tahia Al-Ismail’s The Life of Muhammad a couple of years ago (or any Islamic-flavoured prophetic biography for that matter), and this is only making the novel all the more charming. So far, so good. The reading continues…

::Friday’s reading plans::

• Today is the 150th anniversary of Anton Chekhov’s birth – Happy Birthday Anton! – and so depending on how the day goes I really want to read something special in celebration of the occasion. I’m not sure what I’m going to read yet. But if I find the time it’s going to be something special (but then again, to me, everything that Chekhov wrote is special )
• My main reading objective today is to crack on with Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque. It’s getting so involving now that I want to dedicate as much of my reading time to it as possible.

That’s my reading day fixed out. What are your own plans?

‘Reading Journal’ provides an unedited, on-the-fly record of the bookish highlights in Rob’s reading day.