B List: In-between
C List: David Mitchell--Cloud Atlas...…………………………………...89/509
Yesterday was my 50th birthday. Not sure how many more I am going to get, but I figure I might as well keep plugging away at the lists. I was ill over the holidays so I didn't get much reading done this month.
This is the second Steinbeck book (along with East of Eden) that I have taken up in recent years, and while I don't like Grapes of Wrath quite as much because of, I regret to admit, the lower class milieu which informs the dialogue, it is undoubtedly the defining literary document of the Depression-era United States as far as the collective imagination goes. I cannot at the moment think of anything else that really comes close as far as emphasizing the psychic misery particular to that time period. Its emotional power is real, which I like.
This Mitchell book, which I think of as super-up-to-date, is actually already 16 years old. I anticipated it was going to be a Pynchon or Will Self kind of book that was ungodly clever but rather a chore to read and I was planning to dutifully get through 100 pages or so and give it up. But so far I have to confess it is quite readable, and clever, yes, but not in a zany, eccentric way, but the erudite English way that I suspect many of us who read books feel that we could have been if we had grown up in the right environment and been properly educated. At the very least it is calculated so far to appeal to many of my weak points, especially the Zedelghem part. Mitchell himself is around my age (along with Knausgaard) and when I was younger and in the process of failing to become anything that I wanted to become I was angry whenever anybody who seemed somewhat similar to me was able to succeed, though now that people my age are starting to die all around me and I've perhaps nearly died myself I'm kind of softening and letting it go.
I also managed to read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut during this period also. People either like him or they don't. I do think he is funny, so I like him. The first half of this book I thought was great. I felt like the story kind of got away from him once Papa dies and the ice-nine got loose. At least I didn't like it as much.
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