Lazy 3-day weekend poll ~ spring reading list, edition 6 :: Now Smell This
Welcome to our 6th annual spring reading poll! Please recommend a great book to add to our reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.
Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.
(Or, as always, just talk about something else.)
My recent reading…
…will be added here by Saturday afternoon, I am running late, sorry!
Update…
On the fiction front, I will start with what is easily the best book I’ve read so far this year, and it will not surprise me if it holds that spot through 2025: Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, which was nominated for prizes as both fiction and non-fiction (Flanagan himself says labels are for jam jars). This is the one I will scent: Candide by Aftelier, which is altogether too optimistic and “pretty” for the book itself…do wear something light and pretty to keep your spirits up, but do read it.
The New York Times says that Question 7’s “presiding spirit is W.G. Sebald”, and if you don’t care about Sebald, skip this paragraph, because while I was reading Question 7, I also started on Carole Angier’s biography Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (I believe recommended by Kanuka), and at the same time (I like to have many books going at once) I re-read three of Sebald’s books: The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. I did not care for the Angier biography, which was to my mind overly focused on the detection of real-life sources for Sebald’s material. This might be worthwhile (see W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions at the Atlantic for one positive review), but to my mind misses the point — I never thought the Sebald books were “true” in the sense of non-fiction — and as a literary project, is so intensely un-Sebaldian as to be annoying (see Speak, Silence, In Search of WG Sebald: Seek his books instead at The Irish Times). If you’ve never read Sebald and would like to, see Where to start with: WG Sebald at The Guardian.
I read two fiction works by the French writer Anne Serre, The Governesses and The Beginners, and decided she is brilliant but not really my thing. I also liked but did not adore At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong. I did adore yet another autobiographical novel, Eurotrash by Christian Kracht.
I read two mysteries last quarter: parts of Elly Griffiths’ short story collection The Man In Black, plus the first in the Rowland Sinclair series by Sulari Gentill, published in the US as A House Divided.
Non-fiction besides the Sebald biography included Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood by Martin Booth, also recommended by Kanuka and wonderful, and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight, which was quite good but I would have been happier with the 400 page abridged version. I am determined to avoid biographies over 5-600 pages for the immediate future.
Note: top image is detail from Woman Reading with Peaches, Henri Mattisse, 1934, [brightness and contrast adjusted], public domain, via WikiArt.