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Psychobabble

Books for 2009

The impetus for starting this blog came from the outgoing President. Reading about Karl Rove and George Bush's book reading competition made me curious about how many books I read in a year. 2009 looks like it might be a good one, given the number of books I’ve been given for Christmas and my birthday. Here are some lists that might give an idea as to what to expect on these pages in the future:

Closest to finishing: The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

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January 26th 2009: The Elephant by Aravind Adiga

This story bears a lot of similarity to Adiga's Booker Prize winning The White Tiger; both are stories of the Indian underclass, of protagonists filled with anger at their position in the world and thoughts about how to overcome it. Both works take their strengths from an unflinching portrayal of an overlooked segment of society, the hardships associated with being in that part of society and the rage that boils in some of those that are confined to it. Adiga's cart puller, Chenayya, is constantly sent on errands carrying the wares of the rich over Lighthouse Hill, taxing his undernourished body, whilst all the while he futilely searches for a way out of the hole he is confined to. Characters such as Chenayya, who shits in the road next to pigs and sleeps under a plastic sheet when it rains, are not often the subjects of literature and Adiga's great strength, shown both in this story and The White Tiger is his ability to paint this world with a great deal of plausibility.

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Mr. Smith goes to Washington

I watched this 1939 Frank Capra classic yesterday (my birthday!) and I liked it a lot. Then again, I knew that I would.

Jefferson Smith is a naive woodsman who gets unwittingly selected as a US Senator in the hope that he is too simple to uncover a kickback being arranged by his more senior colleague. They would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that pesky secretary who falls (alarmingly quickly) for his wide-eyed appreciation of democracy (ahhh) and overcomes her own world weariness to help him mount an audacious stand against the system.

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The Accidental by Ali Smith

I could describe this book as follows: “an ordinary middle class family have a (somewhat stale) summer holiday interrupted by a mysterious visitor.”  The problem with doing this is that it makes conventional a story whose structure and prose are anything but.  A tale of Southern England dysfunction covered by the veneer of conformity might have been moralistic and patronising in lesser hands (cf. How to be good). As it was, this story built around a perhaps flimsy premise (the cryptic stranger, left wholly unexplained) demanded uninterrupted attention.

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