Read/reading: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, a giant Instapaper queue

I’m still reeling from this book. It’s definitely cemented Eugenides as one of my favourite writers - he writes characters so finely detailed that they leap off the page, and is so invested in his world that he can make the most mundane situation seem utterly invested in magic. This was heartbreaking, and brilliant, and at once hilariously and painfully relatable, and it makes me absolutely furious that he’s only written three novels. (I still haven’t read The Virgin Suicides, but it’s on my wishlist.)

Maybe because this was so fantastic (and anything following it would be diminished), or that I’ve more or less exhausted my work’s library, or that I’m fighting off the urge to plunge into the ASOIAF series so soon after reading the first book, or the fact that I’m going to be in America for two weeks and probably won’t be reading as much, but I’m taking a break to plough through the huge reserve of articles I’ve saved in recent weeks. With any luck, I’ll come back with renewed vigour. Or something.

Seriously, read that book.

Read/reading: The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling, The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis.

Hm. This one was fucking dark. Beginning with a massive trigger warning, there’s also a laundry list of things that would never fly in the Potter books, and sometimes you get the impression that Rowling’s enjoying herself a little too much in being quite so grotesque.

That said, it’s as well-written as her work for children, with all the added narrative and verbal complexity you’d expect from an adult novel, and while the ending leaves you feeling totally hollow (this is not a pleasant book) it is still a good ending in the sense of it being impressive. You’re led to care about some truly loathsome characters, and it’s a brilliant indictment of where small-town thinking can get you. In a nutshell: if you read the Daily Mail, don’t read this.

The Rules of Attraction is about the only fiction paperback I have that I haven’t read, and I’m not sure why - I picked it up a few years back for £2, and never got around to it. Time to start!

Read/reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

Okay, so Perks doesn’t quite qualify as “silly”, but it’s a bit lighter reading.

Things Fall Apart wasn’t quite what I was expecting. On the one hand, there’s a clear winner by the end (white people, having fun), but the book focuses more on the journey to that point. It seems more like a clash of cultures than an express judgement on colonialism, and that came as something of a surprise; having heard this exalted as the first true postcolonial text, that it contained some degree of nuance was refreshing to see.

I never really studied postcolonialism over the course of my degree, so I’m necessarily ignorant on the subject, and therefore can’t judge how true-to-life this book is. There are some very ugly (I was going to say primitive, but that would condescend) attitudes towards women on the side of the black protagonist and his village, and an almost casual attitude towards violence - I won’t spoil the explicit details, but a number of deaths occur throughout this novel, and the vast majority are committed by Nigerians against Nigerians.

It suspends judgement, though, and maybe that’s what the postcolonial literary movement needed - not something that took an explicit position, but one that just laid out a surrogate for the colonisation of Nigeria in bare terms. In that respect, it’s impressive. And wonderfully written, but that almost feels like an afterthought.

The idiosyncracies of teenagers are going to seem very superfluous after reading this.