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: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion.

Extremely Loud is an odd book. It’s kind of fragmented, which is how I read it - short bursts over a month, because I’m sometimes terrible at committing to books and this one was definitely challenging at points. But it’s rewarding - the protagonist, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, is a fascinating character and it felt almost painful to be torn away from him by the alternative perspectives presented throughout the novel. It’s not perfect - some of the more experimental sections border on the banal - but it’s fascinating in a way that few books have been lately.

I’m not expecting much from Warm Bodies - I know it’s unabashedly populist, a YA novel, and the film was middling to good(ish). I just need something lighter after that mammoth.

Read/reading: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling.

I read a book in a day. God. I haven’t done that in a while.

This was a bit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in terms of its exploration of quite difficult subjects through fairly innocent eyes, but it still didn’t condescend. It deserves to be popular, but for good reasons rather than… Twilight reasons.

It’s tough to write about books like this (modern classics, as this apparently is, already suffer from massive overexposure) but I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while. The surface themes aside, this novel had things to say about coming of age that other coming-of-age novels struggle to articulate, and the protagonist feels like a laundry list of teenage quiet kid tropes, but in the sense that it’s immediately accessible for a lot of people. He still feels real.

It’s a bit trigger-y, though it always deals with the subject matter well, and it’s incredibly easy to get through. But… hmm. It’s very good. I’ll be interested to see how the film deals with certain aspects. It gets pretty dark.

Rowling, I have heard good things. I know you’re just an up-and-coming writer with not much experience in the publishing world, but I hope you don’t disappoint.

“… later on Fred evolved into Bob Arctor, somewhere along the sidewalk between Pizza Hut and the Arco gas station… and the terrible colors seeped back into him whether he liked it or not.”

— A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick