Reading in Hot Weather

Josie is attending day camp all this week, thanks to her other grandmother, and my schedule is suddenly quite open. The heat, hovering around 90, leaves me little inclination for much more than reading. So I plunged into the Big Bag o' Books my friend left for me and came up with Nick.

Nick is the story of the narrator of The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby, Nick is a bonds salesman, renting a small place near the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick's role is mainly that of an observer and we know little of his past--Yale and from the mid-west.

With no more than that to adhere to, Michael Farris Smith has given Nick a rich backstory, replete with the horrors of trench warfare in WWI, the ache of lost love in Paris, and a wander through the brothels and bars of a very wild post war New Orleans.

Smith is a terrific writer who brings Nick to vivid life--but after my two previous reads (pre-Vietnam War and WWII,) I determined to study war no more and turned to the quiet sensibilities of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Not war as such, but this is the story of an artist in post war Japan. Masuji Ono made his name with popular patriotic paintings that supported Japan's imperialism. In the wake of defeat and the changing political environment, he finds himself in a delicate position, especially as he has a daughter for whom he is trying to arrange a marriage and whose parents will be, as is usual, looking into his background.

This novel reminds me a great deal of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day despite the very different settings. There is the same preoccupation with self, with facades, and with the perceptions of others. And, of course, the same beautiful writing. A nice change from trench warfare.

And now, for something completely different.  I had not been aware of Samantha Irby until Book Bub offered her book of essays and something about the blurb convinced me to give it a shot.

I loved it! The woman is a self-deprecating, self-aware, non-filtered, raunchy observer of life. She is a Black, Bi, city-girl, comfortable with disclosing the most outrageous parts of her life. I am none of those things, as well as being of a very different generation. (Nothing outrageous to disclose, even if I wanted to.)

 But I found myself nodding and grinning and muttering, yeah, boy! time after time. 

Now to find her other books...