Fiction bender.
12 September 2011
For whatever reason, I have not really been in a nonfiction mood the past few weeks.
This is not to say that I haven't been reading nonfiction. I've got a title in the bathroom and one on my nightstand, and I'm enjoying both of them when I read them. But I can't seem to focus on them exclusively. It is therefore taking me forever to get through them, and that's weird for me.
On the other hand, over the last few weeks I have plowed through every Anne Tyler novel I own: The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Searching for Caleb, Back When We Were Grownups, and Earthly Possessions. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant--one of my very favorites of hers--has only remained unread because I can't find my copy (I know it's here somewhere). For whatever reasons I find Anne Tyler to be a very interesting novelist. I wouldn't call her comfort reading, though--there's something ever-so-slightly edgy* about her fiction and her characters that both unsettles and settles me. If that makes any sense. And I like the fact that I never really know what Anne Tyler the author is thinking. I remember finishing The Clock Winder and thinking it had a lovely happy ending, and then I read in an interview that she didn't think she'd given it a happy ending at all.
Are there any authors, fiction or non, who do this for you? Soothe but yet provoke?
*It was very hard to read Saint Maybe again, particularly the part where the mother of two young children and a baby is falling to pieces from depression (with reason). Interesting how the scenes describing a baby being in its crib all day with not much attention affect me now, with CRjr around.