More Catching Up...

Just quickly, one I gave up on:

"The Night Ocean" by Paul Lafarge.

Not too much sticks in my memory about this book, which I stopped reading about two thirds of the way through. It is the story of a search for the origins of what is supposed to be a diary of H.P. Lovecraft, in which are detailed his homosexual relationship with a much younger man. The quest is to see where this diary was supposed to have originated, and whether it was a fake. At least, that is how I recall it. But I just got bored with it. If you happen to be an H. P. Lovecraft fan, you might enjoy it. There are apparently crowds of Lovecraft fans--they seem to be some sort of cult.

"Word by Word" by Kory Stamper.

This book is by a lexicographer who worked for Merriam Webster, and if you would like to know how dictionaries get created and edited and up-dated, this is an amusing guide to the life of a lexicographer. As a word maven, I enjoyed it. As an afterthought, I grieve these days over my print dictionaries, of which I have so many, though I still like to look up words in my two volume Shorter Oxford English dictionary. But with my British library card number I can go into the full OED online for free.

"Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart.

Anything by Gary Shteyngart is worth reading, but the library cut me off about three quarters of the way through this book. The plot is set in the future when everyone is constantly online on their "apparat," with each 'a' crowned by an umlaut--the device is a super-sophisticated smart phone that provides users with heaven knows how much information about everyone around them and the world at large. And to 'verbal' someone is to by-pass the use of the apparat. The United States is ruled by a single dictatorial party: it is totally in debt to the Chinese: Central Park has become a tent city: black helicopters circle overhead: there is a  disastrous war with Venezuela: and road blocks proliferate around cities.The love story is that of a geeky, Jewish, middle-aged man and his relationship with a young Korean girl. Shteyngart is obviously drawing on his own experience in his descriptions of the Korean family and culture because he is married to a Korean. I enjoyed what I read, with some reservations, but not sufficiently to get back on the 'holds' list to download it again.

"Solar Bones" by Mike McCormack

This novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and it has won an important award in Ireland. It's a stream of consciousness narration, right there in the James Joyce/Virginia Woolf tradition. (It is not like Ullysses: the language is straightforward) There is little in the way of punctuation--in fact, one review correctly describes it as "one long sentence." There are occasional breaks in the text that tend to show shifts in the train of thought. And the whole text is a review of a middle-aged man's life, not in chronological order but moving from the present to the past--from childhood to middle age: from the early days of marriage to dealing with grown-up children: coping with his wife's desperate case of food poisoning: pursuing his career as an engineer that brings him in conflict with local politicians--and all with plenty of rumination about the nature of life and love, religion, and human suffering.
I thought there was a degree of repetition in some of these musings, but overall this is a very impressive novel that I recommend.