It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

As expected I finished A Separation, by Katie Kitamura, and it's been selling well at work. I think it could make an excellent book club choice with its meditative tone and emphasis on character and motivation.


After I did that post on my top ten oldest unread books I was motivated to actually read one of them. So last week and this week I'm reading Borislav Pekic's The Houses of Belgrade, which was also released last year from NYRB Classics as simply Houses. My edition is older and it's from the Writings from an Unbound Europe series, which was put out by Northwestern University Press from 1991-2012. Nice to see NYRB taking up at least one of their titles.

It's an interesting read but slow and again character-driven. Arsenie Negovan is a retired architect and landlord who has been housebound for some time; as he ventures out in 1968 Belgrade to see what remains of one of his beloved houses, he is engulfed by memories and hallucinations from the past. He is a benignly unhinged unreliable narrator and there is much black humor to be had in his ramblings. Tragedy too.

And I'm working my way through Véra, by Stacy Schiff, Schiff's biography of Véra Nabokov. It's very good and very dense; I can read about 10-15 pages per night and I expect to be reading it for several more weeks. I'm about halfway through page-wise. I would highly recommend it to someone interested in either the Mrs. or her husband or just as social history.

That's it for me. I have comments limited to "members of the blog," of which there are none, but if you'd like to comment drop me a line and I'll see about giving you permission. Which I reserve the right to rescind if comments start getting spammy again. But I miss you!