Because this is conference week and I won't be able to view comments for hours, I'm going to post my tentative reading plans. And I hope that you reciprocate in the comments. No such thing as hearing about too many good books.
Next week, I plan to write about my current novel, David Vann's Goat Mountain. I must tell cfk right away to not read this book. Don't let your tender heart be bruised by this. I promise not to be graphic in the diary to get to the heart of the ideas instead.
The novel is about an 11-year-old boy who has gone hunting with his father, grandfather and his father's best friend for years on family property. This is the first year he is supposed to get his own deer. Something else devastating happens instead, and the fallout is brutal.
About halfway through, the novel has been an intense and earnest look by the author at issues that appear to have mattered to him a great deal for most of his life. It's primal and tribal, with lots of detached ideas about Old Testament justice. There is the sense that the author is writing about this story to make sense of the issues contained in the story, and that reminds me of what Ernest Hemingway is like at his best. I keep going back to Big Two-Hearted River while reading this.
Also on my plate is to finally finish The Goldfinch. I want to get past the grown Theo, his love life and upcoming trip to Amsterdam to get to the end. Friends I trust say the end is a beautiful treatise on art. I want to see if I felt that way too.
Something else I started and left is The River and Enoch O'Reilly, an Irish novel that has an interesting beginning about one of those once-in-three-generations flood and then goes to the story of Enoch, who is rather taken with Elvis and radio preachers. Hmmm. It could be good or be a spectacular failure.
What else should be on my radar, wish list and totally impractical TBR mountains?
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