I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters. This one has been on my to-read list since it came out in 2001. I started it last night and read fifty pages in a sitting, an unusual pace for me this summer. The book could be a little gimmicky: a Lebanese-American woman tells her life story literally in fits and starts, in a series of abandoned first chapters of her autobiography. The prose is occasionally a little stilted but that feels intentional; Sarah (the narrator) is picking through her life to find a way through the rough spots, to pick out what is important or compelling or what summarizes her life. I am loving this a great deal, and if it had been published a few months earlier I would have guessed we’d found the inspiration for Acanit, because there is a definite similarity (only minus the smugness, and this character is Lebanese and a bit older than Acanit). Alas, I, the Divine came out in October of 2001, long after Acanit’s journal appeared.

Oh, well. If you miss Acanit and wish she had either persisted as fiction or turned out to be a real person after all, you might like this book.

World of Wonders. Book three in the Deptford Trilogy. Wow, am I suddenly a huge fan of Davies, although I don’t think I had ever heard of him before he got multiple mentions in this year’s thread about the books we love. I liked World of Wonders more than I liked The Manticore, but the real strength of each of these books is how they work together as a trilogy. I said before that I was a little annoyed by The Manticore because I have a low tolerance for Jungian analysis. World of Wonders is more subtle and ambiguous than The Manticore in that regard, but since the Jung thing is present in all three books, I guess the obviousness of the device in the middle book is a pretty effective way of cluing in readers who might be unfamiliar with the archetypes. And, I don’t know, by the end it wasn’t irritating me; it was kind of fun to work out the puzzle of Boy Staunton, and to see, by the end, Magnus and Dunny and Liesl as Shadow, Friend, and Anima, respectively, but for what character? Davies himself? The reader? It’s impossible to say.

I would call this trilogy a perfect summer read: a good story, well told, entertaining and thought-provoking and just a ton of fun to read. Highly recommended.

School starts in a week. I am taking two classes this semester, unless I drop one, which I might. The reading list looks pretty easy and also pretty interesting, so I will just have to see what the writing workload looks like. Here’s the list for my contemporary British fiction seminar:

• Ian McEwan, Atonement. I read it last year and didn’t really like it, but maybe I will get over it.
• Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
• Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest
• Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
• John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Graham Swift, Last Orders
• Pat Barker, Regeneration
• Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door
• Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day

And here is the list for my fiction-writing class, which I will probably be kicked out of because I am not a major:

• John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist.
• Helene Cixous, Three Steps in the Ladder of Writing
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It’s not a bad reading list at all. I was toying with the idea of dropping the second class, though, in favor of taking a whitewater kayaking class, but then I realized that the latter required me to be on the other side of an absolutely insane commute at 5:30 p.m. once a week. I’d rather read Gardner than sit in a traffic — which should explain exactly why my house is a ten-minute walk from my office, because I really, really hate Gardner. I just hate traffic even more than that!

Dubliners. I can’t honestly remember if I have ever sat down and read Dubliners straight through, although I have read all or most of the stories multiple times. I wasn’t sure they would work very well read aloud, but so far I am enjoying this a lot. Which is good, because I was afraid that David Copperfield had soured me on audiobooks forever.

David Copperfield. I give up. I was trying to finish volume one of the audiobook so I could pick it up again later without losing my place, but I can’t do it. Two weeks ago I had two hours and a fifty minutes left in volume one, and right now I have two hours and thirty one minutes, and I wasn’t paying attention for most of the 19 minutes I actually listened to.

It’s not the reader’s fault. I hate this book. I need to stop right now, because it took a lot of effort for me to stop hating Dickens, and this stupid book is undoing all the good work done by Bleak House. I might try again some day, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

World of Wonders. Book three in the Deptford Trilogy. I am about a third of the way through this one and I love it almost as much as I loved Fifth Business. I am so glad I picked up this trilogy; my reading summer was not going very well before I started reading Davies.

The Manticore. Book two in the Deptford Trilogy. I finished this a week or so ago, and I unfortunately did not love it quite as much as I loved Fifth Business. I blame the myth crit class I took two years ago — I hated that class and it permanently burned me out on Jungian archetypes, I think. I wish I had read this book before I took the class, because I think I would have enjoyed both more. I still highly recommend the entire series, and I can see how some people would love this volume the best, but Jung still puts me into an eye-rolling frame of mind and I could never shake it with this book.

I also found the ending unsatisfying, but I guess I can live with that.