A Little Light Reading

Summer has always marked a season of reading for me. Growing up, summer was free of school and homework; university similarly so; even now as a working adult whose life isn’t governed by the ebb and flow of a school year anymore (although it could be argued that my part time graduate program fits the bill) summer is recreational reading time.

I’m interested by how my reading habits have changed. I used to read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but for almost a decade now, I’ve shifted solidly into non-fiction, Nero Wolfe style mysteries, and novels that don’t fit nicely into any kind of specific niche like Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park, or Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. It takes a great deal of persuasion to get me to even try a science fiction novel these days; my space opera days are over I think.

I’m not the kind of person who usually reads one book at a time. At the moment, I would guess I have about twenty books on the go, stacked in random order on the bookcase adjacent to my bed. They are all festooned with various kinds of bookmarks, often with whatever was conveniently to hand.

Sometimes I do read a book cover to cover. Last night I finished Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, the novel he wrote before The Da Vinci Code; I read the latter about a year ago.

Both novels are a fun light read. Even though they’re quite long, the pacing is quick; almost reading like a novelization of a movie. Both books have inspired people to think there is truth to the symbology and secret societies portrayed between the covers. I was reading over the weekend in the paper that art galleries like the Louvre are now getting die hard fans/believers visiting all the artworks referenced in The Da Vinci Code. Even conspiracy theory books “explaining” The Da Vinci Code are starting to propagate. Hello people! It’s fiction! P.T. Barnum would have a field day.

Also read so far this summer, I finished What is Good? by A.C. Grayling, an overview of philosophy from the Greeks to the present. Grayling is a brilliant writer; eloquent and well read, he has the gift of explaining the esoteric in a format the average reader can grasp without ever “dumbing down” the material he is discussing. I also bought and read his latest collection of short essays, The Heart of Things, which I would argue is the best in the series.

If you’ve ever read and enjoyed Peter Mayle’s autobiographically inspired A Year in Provence, you’ll really appreciate Arthur Clarke’s novel A Year in the Merde. Written in the same style as Mayle’s work, namely with each chapter representing a month, Clarke’s novel is bitingly satirical of the French. In brief, this novel follows the exploits of an English ad executive who, having successfully orchestrated the opening of a chain of French bistros in London, has been hired by a French firm to open a chain of British teashops in Paris. Things go hilariously south from there.

I’m hoping that between now and September I’ll get through more of my reading pile. I’m still about half way through George Orwell’s collected essays and The Road to Wigan Pier, almost two-thirds through Barossa Food, and have yet to get started on Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris or Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.