I always seem to end up blogging at the strangest times, the interstices of my day. Which is how it comes to be 10.30pm on a Sunday night and me sitting up in bed, typing this with Kate Rusby playing in the background. The plan was to be reading Naomi Alderman's The Lessons (which I have read compulsively over the weekend and have very nearly finished). But I just don't seem to be able to settle properly with a book since the end of the Orange Prize. My attention has fractured. In the wake of all those weeks of having my reading planned and plotted for me unto the last page I now feel slightly adrift and incapable of taking decisive action. This is how I came to pick up The Lessons - it dropped through the letter box at exactly the right moment. This is how Wendy Moore's Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match ended up on my reading pile, even though I already have a non-fiction book on my bedside table (Patricia Storace's wonderful Dinner with Persephone). I was supposed to be picking a work book - short stories or a short novel - but my fingers twitched and couldn't settle, fell on Wedlock and had it out before I could school myself. Too much choice; too many paths to take, so in comes instinct through the back door. There are the books that I should be reading, review copies that I eagerly chased after pre-April - like Guy Gavriel Kay's new book, Under Heaven, and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Veronique Olmi's Beside the Sea. And there are old books that I have promised myself to get around to soon, like A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad, Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces and Jamie O'Neill's At Swim Two Boys. And then there is A Ripple from the Storm, the next book in Doris Lessing's Martha Quest quintet; not to mention Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brien's fifth Aubrey-Maturin novel. But perhaps a period of whimsy is exactly what is required. To freshen up my reading brain, to give it a start.
The whimsy can't last though. The inveterate planner in me is already stirring, with not one reading project in germination but two, and generating lists of books for the summer: two very different looking lists. The first is all about heroines. I bought a book a few weekends ago called Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels, a feminist classic of the 1980s by Rachel M. Brownstein, and ever since I bought it I've been looking at the chapter headings with longing. It is about the experience of being a woman reading novels, and also reading about women in novels. The first section is about Brownstein's own life has been modelled around the concept of the heroine, as an example and a warning; the second is a series of indepth readings of nineteenth and early twentieth century novels. The list of books covered is extremely attractive to me: Charlotte Bronte's Vilette, George Meredith's The Egoist, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. All but one of these novels (the Woolf) is new to me, but all are by novelists I have read before and admired and wanted to read more of. So what better than to read them and Brownstein's book in tandem, chapter by chapter, book by book? I'm sorely tempted.
The second project is centred on the African novel. This I know is not so much a summer project as a life's work, but I've realised how poor my understanding or knowledge of African fiction really is (as a result of reading Doris Lessing, and Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohammed) and would like to take steps to recitify this. I started by finding the small section of the university library dedicated to the subject and brought home The African Novel in English: An Introduction by M. Keith Booker. This book was designed as a primer for American undergrads, a basic run-down of the major trends in African fiction in the 20th century, and uses eight key texts as a gateway. I consider this is probably as good a place to start as any. Here is the list:
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Buchi Emecheta: The Joys of Motherhood
Ayi Kwei Armah: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ama Ata Aidoo: Our Sister Killjoy
Nadine Gordimer: Burger's Daughter
Alex La Guma: In the Fog of the Seasons' End
Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Devil on the Cross
Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions
I have copies of two of these already - Things Fall Apart and Nervous Conditions - and have heard of Nadine Gordimer and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but the rest are new to me. To my surprise the university library has copies of the six that I don't have, which attests to their classic status I suppose. Has anyone read any of them? Are there other African novels I should be reading instead (or, what the hell, in addition)?
I anticipate that both of these 'projects' will be slow burners: no deadlines, no targets, just ideas in the background of the summer. Does anyone else have leisurely reading projects planned?
~~Victoria~~