Reading Wrap-up 1/26

[vamp_ress]

Duras, Marguerite: Abahn Sabana David. Open Letter Books. 2016.
I've bought this years ago in a bundle with several Duras-books and I must say, I've no idea what I read here. I think the word one uses for something like this nowadays is: word salad. At least it was short.

Riddle, John: Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Harvard University Press. 1992.
This was delightful. I actually bought this for fic research, but I thoroughly enjoyed it even apart from the excellent info it provided. The author's thesis is that - contrary to popular belief - people in antiquity and well beyond had very detailed knowledge about contraception (and abortion). Later, this knowledge was lost. The assumption is that this loss was caused by Christian religion and its rigid moral standard. Fascinating!

Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath. Penguin. 2006.
I read "Of Mice and Men" as a teenager and was absolutely blown away. I always meant to give Steinbeck another go and find a few more favourites. I went with "The Grapes of Wrath" because this is argueably his magnus opus. And boy, did I hate it. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but this book didn't age well. The most interesting thing about it is the fact that it's widely popular and acclaimed in the U.S. despite its openly communist agenda. (Mind you, not that there's anything wrong with a communist agenda, per se - but my understanding is that the U.S. and communist ideas don't mix well.)

Donaldson, David Santos: Greenland. Amistad. 2022.
This was such a missed chance. The blurb says this is a novel within a novel about E.M. Forster's love affair with an Egyptian tram conductor, but I learnt basically zero about that. Everything about Forster and his affair read like an author self-insert (or maybe a protagonist self-insert, since the protagonist is also the author of the book within a book). I took basically nothing away from the read expect maybe the info that black gay men in New York are obnoxious and annoying. (Sorry to all N.Y. gay men ...)

Moore, Kate: The Radium Girls. Simon & Schuster. 2016.
God, this was painful (pun intended). This is such an important book with such a strong sujet, but the execution wasn't even mid it was infuriatingly bad. The writing had the level of a romance book you buy at a whim at a train station. It was that bad. Moore clearly wanted to write a kitschy novel - every character here (and there are way too many) was introduced by bodily features. Women have dazzling smiles and men have strong arm muscles. Paired with the subject matter of the book this approach made me gag. The book needed to be written, but Kate Moore was the wrong woman for the job, sorry.

Johnson, Denis: Train Dreams. Picador. 2012.
I had never read anything by Denis Johnson but right after finishing this I bought another of his works. This was so good! It deals with the life of a man in the Idaho Panhandle throughout the 20th century. It starts in 1917 and ends in the 1960s with his death. In the nostalgia this evokes it reminded me a little of Harrison's "Legends of the Fall" which is equally panoramic in its approach and shows a time not too long ago but ultimately lost and absolutely alien to us now. Fantastic read!