This year has been my year of the Men's Book Club. I was initially a little reluctant to commit to reading a book a month not of my own choosing, since I'd embarked on a fairly ambitious reading program of my own when I first retired. But, in fact, I'd begun to lose some momentum with that and it turned out that reading books with the group took me in some interesting directions I would never have gone on my own.
The year began with Aldous Huxley's second novel, Antic Hay, after which I read Robert Hewison's Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-45. But then I picked up the first of my book club assignments: Junot Diaz's This is How You Lose Her, an interesting book, but not really to my taste. As soon as I'd finished with Diaz, I returned to my program and Huxley's third novel, Those Barren Leaves. Then it was back to a book club book, Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of, one I really enjoyed despite the rather morbid topic and the fact that reading it coincided with my own mother's death and funeral.
When I finished with Barnes, I picked up the next club assignment, Elmer Kelton's The Time It Never Rained, a western genre classic that was all too appropriate, given our latest Texas drought. Then I went back to Huxley and read a book I'd intended to read for a long time, Point Counter Point. But no sooner done with that than I decided to get started on the next club book: Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, which turned out to be a very interesting glimpse of what life in modern India must be like for so many who have missed out on the recent prosperity.
But when I finished Beautiful Forevers, I took a break, first with Stu Campbell's Let It Rot: the Gardener's Guide to Composting, a book I picked up to help me get started with my new composting barrel. Then I started a new "between the wars" arc with Henry Green's Loving. Green is another of those British authors I'd always meant to read, but never quite got around to, and I was really delighted to discover what an original he was. When I finished Loving, I read his wartime memoirs Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait, which I'd intended to read when I was reading all of those memoirs by Orwell and Connolly and Graves.
About then, fairly early in June, my friend Peter alerted me to a recent translation of Homer's Iliad by Rodney Merrill, which I spent some time with before picking up the next club selection, John Gardner's Grendel, which of course I'd read long ago, shortly after it was first published, when I was reading just about everything Gardner wrote. And while I was at it, I went ahead and re-read Beowulf as well, but in translation. Then, before returning to more book club reading, I decided to read Henry Green's Living and Party Going, but it now seems that those were the last of my British books for the remainder of this year.
Back to the men's club and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed Soseki. In fact, I went on quickly to read another of his novels, Botchan, which revealed that he had considerable range as an author and could be very funny. Botchan could almost fall in the category of academic fiction, and the humor and satire, although in a slightly different register, is nevertheless slightly reminiscent of Kingsley Amis or Malcolm Bradbury. Soseki also set me off on a film journey as I decided, on the recommendation of one of my book club colleagues, to watch some of Ozu's classic films of post war Japan, a time much later that Soseki's, but that wasn't really the point anyway.
The next book club selection was 1493, another of Charles Mann's enormous historical explorations focused on the changes wrought by Columbus's voyages. Then I started reading a book I happened to pick up in a local used book store: Christopher Isherwood's Diaries: the Sixties. I'm not entirely sure why, perhaps because the time period overlaps with my own entry into adulthood, but I became fascinated by these diary entries and read with increasing interest Isherwood's reports on his life and experiences. In a way I suppose this was a sort of coda to my program of British writers. Certainly Isherwood himself is part of that crowd, and he knew just about every one of the authors I've been reading. But the view was focused more or less backwards from the sixties as Isherwood renews his contacts with and remembers his old friends and associates from the thirties and forties.
I had to interrupt my reading of Isherwood a few times to read other things. First I turned to the next book club assignment: Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Then I wanted to read Jack London: An American Life by my old friend and erstwhile colleague Earle Labor. I have to say, I was amazed by how much I enjoyed reading about London's life. I knew, of course, that no one now alive knows more about Jack London than Earle, and I also knew from experience that there are few better story tellers, but the London biography is not only a work of exacting scholarship, it is a wonderfully told tale of London's own extraordinary American journey from childhood to literary stardom and world renown.
The last two books on my list this year, unless I happen to squeeze in another before the end of this month, were both book club assignments: Richard Russo's Straight Man and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Technically, Mitchell's book is the January selection for next year, but it's a long one, and I thought I'd better get going on it. Russo's Straight Man was very entertaining, although at the expense of my former profession. His portrait of a small and truly dysfunctional English Department seemed to resonate with all of the current and former academics among the men's reading group, regardless of their own chosen discipline. Mitchell's book is another epic of the orient, set at the turn of the nineteenth century in Nagasaki, where Jacob de Zoet is a clerk employed by the Dutch East India Company. The clash of cultures and glimpse of Japan as it begins to succumb to western influences makes for a great background, but nevertheless I've had some difficulty sustaining my interest in the plot itself, much as I admire Mitchell's skill as a narrator.
I doubt I'll start anything else before the end of the year, and I'm not sure what 2014 will bring. Perhaps I'll continue my British authors program, perhaps not. In any case, I will continue with my Men's Book Club, at least for now. It has been good for me to read outside my own specific areas of interest, and even when I'm not overly fond of the choices, they have been instructive and entertaining, and I have come to appreciate and look forward to the discussions they generate among a very companionable group of men I would otherwise never have got to know.
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