A cursory glance at my 2006 reading list and I’m one scream away from seeking therapy. I’m all over the map, really. I couldn’t even begin to explain the path that led me from Jonathan Coe’s epic comic/psycho-drama/mystery The Winshaw Legacy (aka What A Carve Up!) to Jonathan Lethem’s hallucinatory sci-fi Amnesia Moon, to Kenneth J. Harvey’s tough, stylistically ground-breaking Inside, told from the point of view of a just-released convict, freshly cleared on DNA evidence – not guilty (but far from innocent).
Along the way, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral made me rethink modern history, Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory introduced me to a whiskey priest in Mexico’s past, and William Boyd’s An Ice Cream War took me back further still, to World War I as it affected the lives of colonists in what are now Tanzania and Kenya.
All great, but what lingers the most:
Re-reading J.P. Donleavy’s A Fairy Tale of New York which Andrew Saikali (that would be me) previously described as the story of “an educated rascal with an appetite for life, intertwined with social satire.”
And especially stumbling upon Gustave Flaubert’s Flaubert In Egypt, his actual journey, at age 27, along the Nile, told through journal entries and letters home that are passionate and ribald, frustrated and clear-eyed. To quote, um, myself (in a previous post), “Flaubert In Egypt pulls together these various strands and stands at once as 19th century Egyptian travelogue, youthful memoir, geopolitical Middle Eastern history, and literary artifact – the nexus of Flaubert the youthful romantic and Flaubert the keen-eyed realist.”
