At the beginning of 2010, we prompted the lucky recipients of our mono.kalender with a greeting card to read more. Today I realized, bizarrely enough, that my reading list was the only new year’s resolution that I actually put into action, while successfullly ignoring bigger challenges. It also made me realize that fulfilling resolutions feels good, even the pleasant ones, since I really enjoyed reading these three books:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy might quite possibly qualify as the darkest, bleakest and most depressing book I’ve read, as in ever – but also as one of the best. An apocalyptic road trip of father and son through a United States that have been devastated by an unnamed catastrophe, it is nothing short of one long and hopeless nightmare which is all the more unsettling because it feels entirely plausible and, well, realistic, as in possible. Underlined by McCarthy’s spare and dry prose, it is a journey into a cold and desperate future, which offers only the faintest glimpse of hope on the very last page. A fun ride it is not, more like a merciless descent into hell, but an utterly compelling one.
A Sport and a Pastime, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. The 1967 novel by American author James Salter might be enjoyed by McCarthy for a similar sparseness in writing, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read – in fact, it is the only of his novels that Salter thought to be any good. Set in a small town in France and describing a brief and intense affair between an American college student and a provincial French girl, you may be excused for being reminded of Fitzgerald and Hemingway – in fact, not the worst of references, and A Sport and a Pastime lives up to any of these effortlessly.
And finally, Infinite Jest by the late and great David Foster Wallace, which plays in a league of its own somewhere up there in literature heaven. 1079 pages of hard work which took a good 3 months out of my year. But when I finally reached the last page, I was ready for a sequel, or alternatively, to simply start from page one again. 1079 pages of pure and simple genius, painful at times, annoying at others, but often enough hilarious and lucid and never short of utterly brilliant. ‘Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest?,’ our cover star Dave Eggers asks in the foreword, answering with maybe – duty maybe it is not, but a life-enhancing experience it is any time.
So now, time to compile a new list of 3 books for 2011…
