January
Summer Lightning (1929) by P. G. Wodehouse
The Window Over the Way (1933) by Georges Simenon
The Widow (1942) by Georges Simenon
February
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Maigret at the Crossroads by Georges Simenon
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
March
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
April
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Ironweed by William Kennedy
An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym
May
Ulysses by James Joyce
June
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Nemesis by Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
July
Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
The Victim by Saul Bellow
August
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser
September
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
October
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger
The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll
November
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The Gospel According To Jesus Christ by José Saramago
December
Heavy Weather (1933) by P. G. Wodehouse
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
Some very satisfying reading, with a few surprises. I’ve written about a few of them already, and of the others...
I found the early Cormac McCarthy effort to be a little clumsy in places, but with flashes of brilliance. I know that I will have to read Ulysses again some day and that I will get a great deal more out of it. I could see why Virginia Woolf was bothered by it (and not because of its obscenities). Her own use of the “stream of consciousness” approach was best represented, I am told, by To the Lighthouse. It was my fourth Woolf novel, and certainly not my last.
The first half of The Adventures of Augie March I thought was as rich as anything I’ve ever read. Too bad Augie (and Bellow) had to leave Chicago. Nemesis was a beautiful farewell to novel writing for Philip Roth. The two McEwan novels I read were not, I hope, among his best. My very first Simenon novel, The Window Over the Way, was surprisingly fine. It was so evocative of a time and place (a Black Sea outpost of Stalinist Russia) that I think I can still find my way around it.
My first Barbara Pym novel happened to be the one her usual publisher (Jonathan Cape) wouldn’t publish. Only when she was “rediscovered” (thankfully in her lifetime) was it posthumously published, two years after her death, to critical acclaim. I enjoyed her concentration on a handful of characters in a regional English town, so much so that I look forward to picking up another of her novels.
Sandwiched between two Saul Bellow novels is Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, one of those novels I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Though it came highly recommended for its “realism,” I was never certain what Dreiser was getting at, but the characters are remarkably real. It reminded me of one of George Eliot’s pièces à thése. What stays with me is how its characters tried to triumph over their misfortunes and how little the misfortunes mattered at the end of their lives. I also learned how Dreiser’s publisher had tampered with his text.
But it was the two Wodehouse novels, Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather both of them set at Blandings Castle and the second being a sequel to the first, that had the most pleasant effect on me - an effect that is difficult to describe. Wodehouse is the champion of unserious writers who yet managed to write splendidly. Both novels’ endings were positively delicious. Wodehouse created a world that is immensely alluring. And in 2003 two geographers announced that they had solved the mystery of the true identity of Blandings Castle, which Wodehouse never divulged. Apley Hall in Shropshire, “which they reckon a 98% certainty,” is Blandings (see photo below) – although it’s as much a creation of Wodehouse’s inexhaustible whimsy.
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