My one-person book club fell by the wayside when we moved down south, but I picked it up again recently because it really is immensely rewarding, and I've been able to find all sorts of new literary thrills, no matter where I live in the world.
I've been sticking to the rules of the club for years now - I try to get into as many non-white guy English-speaking writers as possible, I try to stick with something that has come out in the past few years, and I insist that it is something by a writer that I've never heard of before.
For all that, it is also very nice to break the rules, and I have done that with the past three books - they were all still by authors that I never heard of, and were all by women or non-English writers, but they were also all written and first published decades ago, and have been reprinted in all new editions.
The first was Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns, which I 100 percent got just because I loved the title; the next was Arto Paasilinna's The Year Of The Hare, which answers the eternal question of what happens when you abandon your life to wander Finland with a hare; and the latest was The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon, which was very, very Belgian.
They're full of strange perspectives and dated language, but the ones that get the flash new reprints do tend to be seem to be a certain type - they are thoroughly middle class concerns, with the main characters often having to deal with unruly maids and other useless staff, even as the old world rots around them.
They can still come with remarkable imagery that sticks in the brain - the fate of the baker in Comyn's book is particularly rough and something I'll never forget, because it's such an awful fate for a poor bastard who just wanted to make nice bread for people, while the protagonist's use of alcohol to get through the day in the Simneon book is particularly cutting.
The funny thing about the Finnish book is that it's about someone who hates their life and wanders away from it to find themselves, and that's the plot of a lot of the contemporary books I see as I browse for the next selection.
You see the trends so easily when you're looking at he blurbs for every single new novel in the book store. There was a whole year of almost nothing but 'I thought I knew my mother, but when I came home to Buttfuck Idaho for her funeral, I found out the real her'; followed by a strange deluge of content based around the Holocaust (obviously raising awareness about this event, while also reeking of crass exploitation).
The next book is unlikely to fit into any of these categories. I can't wait to see what it is.
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