Books mentioned in this post:

Philip Roth – Everyman

Kiran Desai – The Inheritance of Loss

Philip Roth – Portnoy’s Complaint

Having so recently finished those two big honkin’ 19thC books (and if you’ve been paying attention at all you won’t have to ask which) [ Adam Bede and Emma, duh], I’m at somewhat of a reading crossroad.  That’s not to say I’m reading nothing, but considering my normal reading pattern is to have a good six or eight books on the go at once, finishing two books that took up so much reading time will tend to leave a gap. What’s the quote about nature abhorring a vacuum?  Well, so does Lisa abhor reading holes.

One way of plugging said reading holes involves a simple perusal of my email in box, most specifically my inbox at work.  Working in a library as I do, I get a lot of newsletters related to books, most of them leaning toward what’s hot off the presses.  I’ve signed up for all of them, mind, so I can’t say it’s the library signing me up for these. The simple fact is when I first started at the library my job wasn’t terribly busy. I hadn’t learned the ropes of basic tasks well enough to take on anything extra, so my free time was filled perusing periodicals like Book List and Publisher’s Weekly. And, being a list-maker by nature, that started what has become my mile-long list of titles accumulated in the process of reading these wonderful book periodicals just since last September, when I was hired.

Imagine what the list will be like when I’ve been there a year, five years, ten years… It will be most unwieldy. I may have to abandon my current streamlined procedure of writing down titles and authors on sticky notes and adhering them around my desk/cubicle area and actually take advantage of the information age and start a spreadsheet.  That would be far less eccentric, but much more practical. That’s true, but you’re speaking to someone who owns literary action figures (Shakespeare and Jane Austen, in addition to Curious George with a hula hoop, if the definition may be expanded a bit).  Practical isn’t exactly my forte, but when I start losing sticky notes you can bet I’ll be called to action.

[2013: It’s long since become a whale of a list, thousands of books long – many of which I own but, strangely, haven’t found time to read. But hey, they’ve let me go since then. Surely that will resolve things.

Or not.

Probably not.

As of today – 9/5/13 – I have somewhere around 2,500 of my books listed on Goodreads. I don’t think that’s even half the books I own.]

[2015: I’ve sold and accumulated so many books, I have no idea where I am numbers-wise. Plus, I’ve since divorced, necessitating the culling of my book collection. Hundreds of volumes are still at my former marital home; I live in an apartment now and have no room for the vast majority of them.]

Thank goodness for interlibrary loan, that’s all I can say.  Living in suburban Chicago I really can’t complain about the abundance of great libraries willing to lend me their books. And, what may be almost equally as sweet (or, as my daughter says it, suh-weeeeet!), I DON’T GET CHARGED FINES FOR LATE RETURNS… That last should maybe be kept ‘twixt you and I…

At present I have, well, a few interlibrary loan books.  Not as many as would be my record (which may explain why the interlibrary loan person won’t ever make eye contact with me, and why she mutters a lot under her breath), but a decent number.  Every time I enter the staff area in the library I always must check my mailbox for new arrivals, as that’s where they generally wind up, though I have had them lobbed from the interlibrary loan desk to my own, in the past. Usually she’ll be kind enough to call to me and get my attention first, to be fair.

Phillip Roth’s latest, Everyman, is one most recently found stuffed in my mailbox, along with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

I’m not exactly a Philip Roth fan, but the reviews I’ve been reading about his latest sounded intriguing.  Never mind the fact his Portnoy’s Complaint stands amongst the most “disgustful” books I’ve ever read to date.  I had a very difficult time getting through that one, I will admit, and it scared me off him quite effectively for a while. But I don’t like to judge a writer by one title alone.  I like to vary my reading, too, and it never hurts to throw something not in a Lisa genre into the mix now and then.

The Desai title is another that made my book radar, either via the daily reviews I receive via email or through one of the literary periodicals.  Plus, this is an author I’ve never read before, which gets me double bonus points. I’m pretty sure this is the review that attracted my interest in this one:

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family’s neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook’s son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a “better life,” when one person’s wealth means another’s poverty.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

These two books, as well as the others (books which I’ve usually forgotten I’ve requested, I should qualify) that will either fly to my desk via airmail or wind up in my inbox, should pretty effectively fill the holes on Lisa’s reading list.  Next time I’ll post about my current main reading list, but for now I think I’ve made this short story long enough…

[2013: I didn’t finish Everyman or even start the Desai. I’m not proud. Honest but not proud. To date, I’ve read nothing by Desai and nothing more by Roth, though he’s still on my list and I’ve bought a couple more of his books since I wrote this post. See, not like an author doesn’t stop me buying his or her books. I don’t get it, either.]