Portnoy's Complaint, and all the Books I Am About To Read or Finish or Give Up On.

Finally, finally - I have changed the default font for this blog to Arial, instead of having to reset it everytime I make a new post. It's not a blogger setting - you have to change the default font in Chrome - as set out here.
http://joshwentz.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/change-default-font-in-blogger.html

So the last few pages of Portnoy's Complaint were a bit mad and incomprehensible to me - it felt as if he hadn't run out of rage, just run out of narrative and words. There is a sense in which yes his impotent encounters in Israel neatly tie up, in narrative terms,  his rage at the Jewishness he grew up in, at the goy world he grew up in, and now the "real" Jewish culture that he has jetted into.  That is always the way with novels, - endings are difficult after all those words and all that build up, unless you're Jane Austen or a nineteenth century novelist, in which case endings are literal - marriages, deaths, successes. Modern novels struggle with these because they are too unambiguous, and if we've learnt anything in the 21st century it is that most things are uncertain and ambiguous. The things that aren't - the fundamentalists of any religion or political organisation, the bigots, the simply stupid are mainly just rather upsettingly and fuck-up-the-worldingly wrong.
So what now? I thought I'd make a list of the books that I have to read at the moment, or books that I'm half way through. This  may be a long task, and I might give up halfway, as i have given  up half way in so many of these texts.

Churchill - biography by Roy Jenkins - half read.  It's a bit massive, Churchill isn't that intrinsically interesting compared to, say, Lincoln (Team of Rivals is a long plod, but I finished that), or Nixon (Jonathan Aitken's biography - one perjurer writes about another - I really liked the irony of that, and it's well written & interesting - Nixon is a fascinating character.

number9garden - Dacid Mitchel - he of Cloud Atlas - picked it up 2nd hand. Really liked

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet  

Incandescence - Greg Egan - half way though this, left off about a year ago as i ran out of steam - going to have toi pick up a complex plot again to finish this.

Dostoevsky - Rowan Williams - the ex Arch Bishop of Canterbury's critical study of Dostoevsky, that I struggle with - I'm going to have to restart this. 

We Yevgeny Zamyatin - started this, but found it fundamentally depressing, in the same way that I found The Handmaid's Daughter fundamentally depressing - so won't finish this - must give it back to its owner.

Then there's two or three more Roth, and two or three more Richard Ford, The English Patient, book 5 or 6 of Game of Thrones , and that's apart from the maths stuff I'm interested in, poker books, new issues of Asimov's and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Started a story in the latter last night which is strangely compelling (I can't be arsed to think of anything more original to say) - a story of Quakers hiding a runaway slave, but finding that the slave hunter after him is a metal built simulacrum full of cogs and gears - kind of steampunk meets Django Unchained - it's so fantastical, yet it's kept my interest - in fact I 'll finish it now.

And of course the next two books in the Dirty Havana trilogy.
There's probably more lurking downstairs - books that I've picked up somewhere and didn't quite get around to starting, +there's Charles D'Ambrosio's The Point in the post, and none of this counts any of the re-reading I'd like to do.