Ulysses. This book is so hard. I mean, I knew it would be hard; I just didn’t know I’d have two dozen people saying, “Oh, it’s not that hard. I didn’t even refer to any outside sources!” Me, I am using as many outside sources as I have time to get my hands on. We just finished the “Oxen of the Sun” section and I really need to go lie down now.

Billy Budd. One of only a couple of books on my exam reading list that I haven’t read. Except I thought I had read it, and it sure seems familiar, so maybe I’ve just forgotten it.

I’m about halfway through it and my only comment so far is that this book is very, very gay.

Wild Life. What a great story. This book reminded me of Marilynne Robinson, Andrea Barrett, and early Barbara Kingsolver, all wrapped up in a turn-of-the-century adventure story.

By all rights this book should have irritated me, because it hit two of my biggest pet peeves and it hit them early and often. The first peeve is historical and factual inaccuracies. Nobody in 1905 was talking about “conservative Republicans,” not while Teddy Roosevelt was president, and you must promise me that if you are ever lost in the woods, you will not eat the plants that Gloss has her heroine eat, particularly the narcissus bulbs. The other peeve is heavy-handed politicizing, but here I was able to chalk that up to character; that’s who Charlotte is, or it’s who she is at the beginning, anyway. And the factual issues just didn’t bother me so much because the prose was so lovely and the story so engaging.

The story has some profoundly sad moments, but if I had to sum this book up in one word it would be “fun.” I love a good feminist adventure story, and you just don’t see enough of those.

Jane Eyre. I am not a Jane Eyre fan. I read this for the first time last year, a rather embarrassingly delayed reading since I distinctly recall writing at least one paper about the book in college. I didn’t love it enough to finish it in college, and I didn’t love it very much last year, and I don’t love it very much now. The various sections of this book seem to have nothing to do with one another; I can never get a handle on Jane Eyre herself because she seems to morph into a totally different person with each change in circumstances.

But this is a good reading. It’s Juliet Mills, and she’s good enough that I am enjoying the book more this time around than I did last year, although I’d still like to slap pretty much everyone in the book.

Lady Susan. One of the lesser-known Austen works, an epistolary novel, very short, less subtle than her best writing. I enjoyed this a lot and the reading was very good, although I have two complaints about the audio version: one, different readers for each letter-writer is just a little too much for me, and two, long musical interludes between pieces really annoy me in an audiobook. The audio format is not good enough for classical music.

I enjoyed the book a lot, though. I am not sure it’s one of Austen’s better works; I like her best when she is subtle and a little cruel, and here is she not subtle and crueler than usual. It’s still worth checking out if you thought you’d run out of Jane Austen.

Lady Susan. I enjoyed the last one so much that I just feel like hearing another Austen.

Pride and Prejudice. My second reading of this book, although this time I listened to the unabridged version available at Audible; Kate Reading is the narrator. An excellent reading, one of the best audio books I’ve heard. And although I’ve been lukewarm about Austen for years, I think I am now fully reformed. This is the first Austen I read and enjoyed, and this time through I absolutely loved it, so much that I think I have to kick something off my top-ten-novel list.

I hate love stories but Elizabeth and Darcy have to be the best love story ever.

I wanted to note that we have changed the date and time for the weekly Ulysses chat to Wednesday. Daylight Savings Time made things more complicated, so Monkeytoe has made a list of the likely time zones. Basically it is 10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 7 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

The new time is giving me trouble. I hadn’t realized how much I counted on having Wednesday night to finish the week’s reading. Jeremy has class on Wednesdays and goes to the gym afterward, and that has been my Ulysses time until now. I am once again going to be unprepared for chat because I haven’t finished the chapter. I might just skip it.

But we are nearly halfway done with the book!

Wild Life. I just started this last night; so far it looks like one of those reads that will be pure pleasure. It’s also reminding me a lot of Little Big Man, which probably should not surprise me since they were originally assigned for the same seminar. (The professor dropped the Gloss novel at the last minute.)

Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran. Our current book club selection, and the first novel written in Farsi by a woman. (See my previous post for more background.)

I enjoyed this a lot and I will probably reread it at some point, although I might try a different translation as I was never entirely happy with this one. This is a deceptively simple novel; on the one hand it’s almost a life-in-wartime thriller; you know from the outset that something terrible is going to happen. The sense of doom that infuses this novel is not a red herring: the ending spirals into exactly the kind of horror that you expect. But since the focus is on the woman who stays home with her children and goes about her household duties and charitable activities while war and upheaval are about to erupt outside, the thriller tension is never relieved by any kind of big action scene. Which is part of the point, I think: while the men have outlets for their anger and fear, Zari’s struggle is more subtle but also more complicated, because she has to find a way to overcome fear and make her own choices while she is living a very constricted life.

The male-female relationships here are complex and fascinating, and Danishvar never goes for the simple answers. Zari is smart and she does suffer a great deal as a result of decisions made by men, political decisions in which she has no part to play. At the same time she isn’t a saint, and some of her husband’s criticisms of her are valid: while she resents having someone else in control of her life, she tends to give in to fear instead of exercising what control she retains. And the Zari character becomes a lot more complicated as you realize that this is no feminist diatribe disguising itself as a novel; the husband and wife at the center of the story share a real and honest affection and respect, even if the power balance is not one that we might be comfortable with as modern American readers.

The last three chapters are difficult reading and I’m not sure I understood chapter 21 in particular, since it seems to be partly a dream sequence involving a lot of culture-specific symbolism that I did not understand. Still, I really loved this book and I think it ought to be more widely read by English-speaking audiences.

Underworld. It took me two months to the day but I finally finished this 800-page monstrosity. I did the first third on audio but had to switch to paperback; the reader was good but he spoke way too slowly, with too many pauses, so a book that is actually a relatively quick read (considering its length) was going to take an inordinant amount of time. And frankly I did not like the book enough to spend that much time with it.

I would cite this as a prime example of a made-up genre I call “dick lit.” This is a book that ties the larger issues of society (waste, nuclear war, fear, poverty, religion) to the private concerns of men (impotence, virility, father-son relations, a particularly male form of coming-of-age). Which is fine. I love me some Moby Dick. But I hated Underworld. DeLillo is not writing for me; he is writing for manly guys and their manly, manly cocks. The female characters in this book could have been replaced with robots labeled “madonna,” “whore,” “madonna-whore,” “whore-madonna,” with no change to the character development or to the plot or to the larger themes he’s working with here. Every woman exists to allow Nick, the main character, to careen off of her and change in some way.

I am not really reviewing this novel. Like I said, it wasn’t written for me. As characters, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover receive more attention than any of the women in Nick’s life, and I found the Bruce and Hoover sections well-nigh unbearable. I gather that DeLillo is doing something larger here than telling a personal story of one guy, but I don’t care if you are telling the story of 20th century America or the story of one guy’s midlife crisis; if the women in your story are all the literary equivalent of scenery, I am not going to give a shit about what you have to say.

This is my last DeLillo. It’s probably not my last piece of dick lit, but it’s my last DeLillo.

As I have noted recently, I am so busy right now that I am having trouble keeping up with my reading, and reading-about-reading has been abandoned completely. (Due dates for fiction-writing class, upcoming California Supreme Court argument, upcoming California Supreme Court brief — all within two weeks of each other.) Writing-about-reading-about-reading isn’t even on my long-term agenda for the moment, but I did skim through some literature weblogs this morning and saw that apparently some of my favorites have been posting their top ten novel lists.

And I can do that! Because I do it every year over at the Usual Suspects, so I can just update last year’s list, with the same rule of only one work per author. My list is not surprising, not obscure, and probably not very interesting, but it gives me something to post that does not directly relate to what I’m currently reading so what the hell:

• Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner.
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison.
• Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot.
• The Brothers K, by David James Duncan.
• Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

I told you it wasn’t a very interesting list. Once I finish Ulysses I will probably have to bump something off that list. This year I bumped The Sun Also Rises, Anna Karenina, and A Tale of Two Cities. Last year I bumped Last Exit to Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird. This year I nearly added The Iliad but changed my mind.

This year’s TUS discussion on the topic.

Pride and Prejudice. I have read this before but I have decided that I am definitely graduating in the spring of 2005, because the exam list for that semester has been released and I have read practically everything on it. (I was going to graduate this fall , but when I saw that waiting another semester relieved me of the horror of having to finally make it through Tom Jones while simultaneously rereading several long or difficult works like Middlemarch and Invisible Man, I said to hell with it. I am fundamentally indolent at heart. The only downside to the 2005 list is that I will have to finally get to the end of stupid Wide Sargasso Sea, and I will also have to reread the hated Jane Eyre, but almost every work is something I loved the first time, and I will endure just about anything to avoid reading Henry Fielding.)

Anyway, I am getting a head start on rereading the works on the 2005 list, and I am doing the easiest ones on audio. I am pleased to report the unsurprising news that Jane Austen is perfect for audio.

Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran. This is our current book club selection and I am way behind, since we have already had early discussions and the beginnings of the real discussion. The book was written in Farsi by a Iranian woman in 1969 (before the Islamic revolution), and concerns events during the 1930s or 1940s — I’m not really familiar with any of the history here, except what Jayran has explained in the discussion threads and what I gleaned from reading Freya Stark’s book last month. It is the first novel published in Persian by a woman, and is one of the most widely read novels in Iran.

Apparently there are two English translations. The one linked above, the Ghanoonparvar translation, is the one currently in print and the one that I am reading. My school’s library had a different translation by Roxane Zand, but I am an idiot and spent over twenty bucks on this version because I was too busy to drive to the library over spring break. That version is called A Persian Requiem but it is out of print. Jayran has both translations and has read the novel in Farsi, and she didn’t care for the Ghanoonparvar translation, which makes me feel a little better because I don’t much care for it, either.

The story is told from the point of view of a wife and mother, who despite the crappy translation is an entirely vivid and compelling character. In fact, I think I can say that I really love this book even though the language feels a little alienating. I am not approaching Savushun on a particularly intellectual level; it’s just a really good story, kind of a page-turner, and I love Zari and I am afraid that very bad things are about to happen to her.

This is one of the best and most interesting books we’ve chosen for the book club in a long time, and I’m sorry that the high price tag and general difficulty of tracking down copies has resulted in such low participation this time around. I think I will offer to pass my copy around to any TUS members who want to read it after I am finished.

The Mayor of Casterbridge. I hadn’t read this since high school, but I enjoyed it then and it was an excellent choice for getting me back into the audio habit. I think I have determined what I want in an audio book: novels with lots of drama (even melodrama), relatively simple language, clear but not ponderous readers who only slightly inflect to distinguish between dialogue and narration. Nineteenth-century novels originally published in serial format work particularly well because there is usually some repetition, so it’s fine if your mind wanders a little. (This is also why the Harry Potter series works better on audio than on the page.)

Casterbridge was entirely satisfactory on all counts. I love Thomas Hardy but I refuse to think too much about him. His constant revisions of his own work makes it hard to pin him down in any way, so I just read him for the fun of it. If Audible would only add the unabridged audio version of Jude the Obscure I would have nothing to complain about.