June reading

11 July

I've decided to try to distil what I am reading into haiku. Yes, it could be seen as a sign of being a wanker but I think its a good way of trying to work out what the writer was really on about.

I re-read Marry Me by John Updike after reading Couples again. I last read these books in the 70's/80's when I was at uni and before I'd had affairs with men. I think I just thought about it then. I needed Esther Parel (Mating in Captivity) in my life but she only wrote it last year. I liked Couples - it was sexy, redolent of the 60's but still real. Marry Me was disappointing.

Flip-Flopping Jerry
Loves Ruth. Or Sally. Or Ruth.
Or? How will it end?

If I had more room, I'd write "And who cares?" I didn't like Jerry or Sally much. I liked Ruth and Richard. I wondered whether I liked any of them when I read it in 1980. I wish I'd written in the margins. This blog is a way of writing in the margins...

I also read The Road by Mr Cormac McCarthy who writes about men. This book is less obviously a book about men and more a book about the relationship between the anonymous father and the anonymous son in the face of a post-apocalypse world. It was absolutely gripping; both the unfolding of the story and the depiction of the tragic doomed relationship they shared. I loved the way that he avoided telling us what had caused the apocalyspe and that, contrary to the way the genre usually unfolds, the story is set several years after disaster has struck.

A world full of ashes.
Doomed father and young son lurch
onwards. World without hope.

The love story (if you can describe it thus) is what enables you to read this grim story. It's beautiful sparse prose. A wonderful book.