The work I'm focusing on the most intently at the moment is
The Recognitions by William Gaddis. It's about a struggling painter whose style is undiscernibly similar to that of the Flemish masters, and is given an offer to have his works passed off as lost paintings from obscure painters for far more than they would sell as his original works. Gaddis uses the case of forgery in the art world as a metaphor for forgery in the world at large, and what's most haunting about this work is that it's over fifty years old, yet still resonates perfectly about our modern world; perhaps moreso than when it was written.
I'm also reading a pair of books that end with the Kennedy assassination;
Libra by Don DeLillo and
American Tabloid by James Ellroy. DeLillo's novel focuses on Oswald as the central character and also features an internal investigation by U.S. intelligence attempting to piece together what actually occurred in the assassination; it's written in DeLillo's highly eloquent, literary style and still makes for rather fast reading. Ellroy's novel includes many of the same characters and was indeed inspired by DeLillo's novel, but Ellroy focuses much more on the collusion between organised crime, big business, and elements of the government, with the overall implication being that the FBI, CIA, etc. are all themselves a type of organised crime. It's written in a rapid-fire format that reminds me of Hemingway, though it's interspersed with a large amount of period slang that makes most detective fiction seem soft-boiled by comparison. It's so effective that I've already ordered the sequel,
The Cold Six Thousand, as I expect to be through with this by the end of the upcoming week (it's a lot shorter than the 950-page monster
The Recognitions).
I've also been reading
Mao II by DeLillo and
V. and
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, but it's been awhile since I picked them up. I also have the final sections of
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and
2666 by Roberto Bolaño unread, which I intend to get to eventually since both are superb. Nothing wrong with any of these works in fact - I would recommend all unconditionally. Working in a book store just makes it difficult to remain focused on a single work
Since I see someone above was reading Card, I'm just going to say that, if I had it all to do again, I would've stopped after
Speaker for the Dead and not allowed subsequent volumes to lessen my enjoyment of the first two novels.
Re: What are you reading?
Linear Mode
