Wise Children. Oh, why did it take me so long to read this? Books like this one, sitting on my shelves gathering dust because I once thought they sounded interesting enough to buy, but then never got around to reading them, are exactly why I am undertaking this project and reading the books that I have instead of buying anything new.

I loved this book a lot, obviously. It’s the kind of book I want to read again for fun, but it also makes me want to go back to school, to read or reread all of Shakespeare (I am limiting myself to The Winter’s Tale for now), to go back and read some Bakhtin.

This is a novel about the theater, about the romance of family (blood ties and created families alike), about fathers and daughters, about the “hypothesis” of fatherhood and the effects of its denial, about Shakespeare, about bastard children and lost heirs and endless sets of twins (I think there are five sets of twins, all told). Dora Chance, an identical twin and a bastard child and an elderly woman, looks back on her life as a song-and-dance girl on the wrong side of a great theater family that has fallen on hard times, artistically speaking: they now do margarine commercials, game shows, and cooking shows. Shakespearean plots and illusions repeat all through the novel and are sometimes consciously evoked by Dora, and sometimes appear under the surface.

The story is nominally about fathers and daughters and the claiming of paternity, right down to the title: the proverb reads, “It is a wise child that knows its own father,” but Shakespeare turned it around to, “It is a wise father that knows his own child,” in The Merchant of Venice, and in this novel the knowing and not knowing definitely goes hand in hand with wisdom, on both sides of the parental equation. And Carter opens the novel with a quotation: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, never mothers and daughters.”

But I think the novel is about mothers. The absent mother, dead in childbirth or murdered by the father, the adopted caretakers, the grandmothers, the stepmothers, the nanny. Fathers are both larger than life and entirely elusive here, but mothers are everywhere. They crawl out of the woodwork to fill in the gaps Shakespeare left, while the “wise children” are so focused on fathers that they take for granted the mothers all around them. A quote from near the end:

‘Nora … don’t you think our father looked two-dimensional, tonight?’

She gave me a look that said, tell me more.

‘Too kind, too handsome, too repentant. After all those years without a word. Remember that terrible bank holiday when he pretended to our faces that he thought we were Perry’s? And tonight, he had an imitation look, even when he was crying, especially when he was crying, like one of those great, big, papier-maché heads they have in the Notting Hill parade, larger than life, but not lifelike.’

Nora sunk in thought for a hundred yards.

‘D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dreams and wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.’

And on top of all of that, Wise Children is raunchy and very, very funny. I loved it without a single reservation.

You’re an Animal, Vikovitz!, translated by John Casey. I don’t read very much fiction at all these days, and what I have been reading has all been pretty straightforward, so this odd little book wins the title of “Weirdest Book I’ve Read Since Grad School.” The author is a biologist, and this is a collection of stories about a character named Viskovitz who is reincarnated (well, maybe; I think the last story tells us all we know about what’s happening to Viskovitz, but “reincarnated” is as good a word as any) over and over in the bodies of different animals. He is always surrounded by the same collection of souls — his nemeses, Zucotic, Petrovic, and Lopez, as well as his two loves, Ljuba and Jana. Jana is always the one he ought to love; Ljuba is the femme fatale, his mirror image (sometimes literally), the spark for their mutual destruction.

The stories are hilarious, raunchy, and sometimes stupefyingly weird. The reproductive drives of various animals are posited as metaphors for human behaviors and urges, but even though the imagery is far from subtle, the metaphors never annoyed me. Probably because the book is so funny.

An excerpt:

The situation was rendered still more equivocal due to the periodic sex changes that we hermaphroditic sponges have to undergo. It wasn’t easy for me to accept the fact that my father was the wife of his mother, that his daughter (my sister) was his grandfather and his grandmother was also his brother (my uncle). These relations were becoming even more morbid because of the way our bodies were piled together — it was difficult to figure out where you ended and where your immediate family began. And it wasn’t easy to develop a healthy personality when the canals of your flagellate chambers were held in common with an invaginated mother, incestuous sisters and a bisexual father. When the only anatomical features on which you could construct an identity were the gastral cavity and the aperture of your osculum.

The tragedy of being a vegetable was that you couldn’t commit suicide. The advantage of being a sponge was that you could drown your sorrows.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The entire time I was reading this I kept thinking that it should really be taught in high school English classes, or possibly even junior high. Then after I finished it I read some reviews and it turns out that everybody younger than I am has already read this, because it was assigned in high school. So, uh, nice work, high schools of America!

I am out of the habit of talking about books so I don’t have a lot to say except that I really loved this collection. You’ve all read it anyway, and written your tenth grade research paper on the idea of memory as an index of social and individual identity, so why do you care what I think?

When We Were Orphans. This was my second Ishiguro novel and I liked this one much better than The Remains of the Day, although I concede that Remains is probably the better book. But detectives are more interesting than butlers, even when the detectives are just as lacking in self-awareness as the butlers are.

I really enjoyed watching the story unfold here, despite the fact that the protagonist and narrator creeped me out a bit from the outset. I got a whiff of Charles Kinbote from him from the very first pages, although it became clear after a while that he wasn’t quite as crazy as all that. Still, I am a sucker for a good detached and deluded narrator.

This was the first adult novel I finished in non-audio form in about a year, I think. That is a depressing statistic, particularly if I confess that I only finished one or two audio books in 2008. And possibly they were all written by Lemony Snicket.

I am going to try once again to resurrect this goddamned blog. I’m getting quite a bit of reading done right now, and I’ve undertaken a bit of a project: I am going through my pile of unread books, which numbers in the hundreds (seriously, there may be over a thousand books in this house that I have not read), in more or less alphabetical order. “More or less” because I don’t have to finish all of the As, I just have to read an A author, then move on to a B, etc. I have my books shelved in a way that makes this fairly easy: post-19th century fiction is all shelved together in alphabetical order, but there is nowhere near enough room on the shelves for all the books, so the ones I haven’t read are stacked in front of the shelved books. (Since I have too many books, possibly I should also undertake to ditch one or two every time I finish one.)

I am allowed to take breaks for pre-19th century fiction or even nonfiction, but I am not allowed to buy anything new except for book club. And then only if I can’t get it from the library.

We’ll see how this goes. Currently working on “Alexie, Sherman,” which was a great first choice.