Reading Resolution: February Report

Posted by David Duhr in WBN News & Events      10 comments

Mar
1

How is that the quickest month, even in a leap year, feels like the longest? Lots of indoor time in February should mean lots of reading, but unlike January, I didn’t get through a whole heap o’ titles. Maybe half a heap.

I don’t want to waste your time every month rehashing my 2016 reading resolution and why I’m listing the books I’ve read. I covered it in detail in this post. Summation: I must read 52+ books in 2016, at least half by women, and at least half by minority writers and/or foreign writers in translation. Because last year I sucked at doing those things.

I got through four books in February. Here they be:

1) The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson (Translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal) (NYRB Classics)

I heard or that this novel is macabre, unnerving and riveting. For me it wasn’t any of those things. Closest to unnerving.

A sociopath who is, as you might imagine, probably up to no good moves in with an aging, moneyed children’s book illustrator in the dead of the Swedish winter. It’s a very moody book, ideal for a snowy day, as Jansson does a wonderful job with her setting and the bitter, endless cold and gray of Scandinavia’s winter.

The story didn’t grab me, though. Doesn’t mean it won’t grab you.

2) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (Harper Perennial) 

The story of how this book disappeared for thirty years and has become revered since its rediscovery is just as interesting to me as the novel itself, in which protagonist Janie tells her life story to her friend Phoeby, a conversation which serves as the novel’s frame.

Janie’s story is split into four main parts — upbringing, first marriage, second marriage, third marriage — and the novel traces her search for identity (i.e., her desire to not be defined in ways such as “first marriage, second marriage,” etc.) and her own voice.

Hurston details several interesting historical events, including the founding of Eatonville, Florida, where she grew up, and the 1928 hurricane that killed several thousands of people when Lake Okeechobee overran its levees.

It took me a while to get interested in Janie’s story, but once she gets to Eatonville it picks up, and the final section, in particular the hurricane scenes, is riveting. I’ll want to read more Hurston.

3) Detroit City is the Place to Be, Mark Binelli (Picador)

I suppose I have a special interest in Rust Belt cities, having been raised in one (though one that somehow escaped the brutal decline of cities such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and our focus here, Detroit). Still, Binelli’s account of Detroit’s rise and fall is fascinating. This book kept me up late. Doesn’t hurt that he’s a very funny writer, and delivers brilliant touches of humor when least expected.

The 1967 riots are seen as the turning point for Detroit, but Binelli argues that the city’s decline began earlier than that. He takes us all the way back to the city’s founding, then covers the boom years in great detail and shows how it all began to unravel.

But much of his focus is one present-day Detroit, and its future. Binelli (bravely, let’s be honest) actually moved back to the city to write the book, which began as a series of articles, I think for Rolling Stone, where he’s a contributing editor. He covers the city’s political structure, its crime and poverty, its decay and blight — 70,000 abandoned buildings! Downtown skyscrapers of thirty-plus stories abandoned for thirty years! — and its plans, or perhaps lack of, for the future.

It’s a fascinating book. Did I already say that? It’s worth saying again.

4) If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Chester Himes (Thunder’s Mouth Press, now defunct)

I’ve heard this one labeled a novel of social realism, social protest, racial protest, and just protest, as well as a proletarian novel. Doesn’t matter what you call it; it’s very good. This is the kind of book we need more of in U.S. fiction. I’m told that it’s being read in more colleges and even high schools now, after having been somewhat forgotten for decades.

Bob Jones is a shipyard worker in L.A. during World War II. He loses his supervisory position after a run-in with a white woman, and comes thisclose, twice, to murdering a white man who attacks him at work. The thing is, Himes makes the reader (at least, this reader) lust for Bob to kill the man. His rising anger and the oppression he experiences on a daily basis are palpable, all of it climaxing when the white woman charges him with rape — in essence, charges him with being a black man.

It’s not a flawless book. For example, Himes squeezes in an awkward plot point surrounding bisexuality, a decision I can’t understand. (If you did understand that decision, I’d love to hear from you.) And the final one-third of the book has some issues with believability, in my silly opinion.

Still, Himes does a great job depicting that time and place and culture. Pick it up, then pass it along. It should be more widely known.

So there’s my February progress. I’m eleven books towards my reading resolution. Coming up in March: some Walker Percy, hopefully another Tayeb Salih, maybe some Eileen Chang, and a book I have to review.

What have you been reading? How is your reading resolution going so far? Better yet, how is your writing resolution going so far? Let us know in the comments below.

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WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is copy editor and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and contributes regularly to the Dallas Morning News, Publishing Perspectives, the Observer and other publications.