May Reading

May was a busy month for this bookworm, and my reading ran the gamut from the Greeks to the present day for personal and professional reasons. All of it enjoyable and edifying, for a change!

OEDIPUS THE KING by Sophocles

I read OEDIPUS THE KING for the first time in many years because it's on the syllabus for an alumni course on the Detective Story as a form that I'm taking at Yale this summer. (Yale does really interesting alumni programming and they finally hooked me on this one because it involved going back to the New Haven this summer, taking classes on campus -- oh hell yes -- and I'm currently writing a detective story which has taken me some time to wrap my head around. I figured I might as well go to Yale and go as deep into detective stories as an art form as I can, right?) Anyway, the point is, the last time I read Oedipus I was a teenager and I read it in a Classics context. It hits different when you read it in as an adult. I mean, the guy didn't just sleep with his mother, which my teenaged lizard brain recalled. They had a FAMLY TOGETHER. Yikes.

A MURDER OF QUALITY by John Le Carre

Still on the detective story theme, I read this because it was described by someone on Threads as a murder in a small town kind of tale, and that's what I'm working on, too. This one is set in a town with a storied boarding school at its center. That's another one of my life tropes, so it was a win win kind of read. I haven't read a lot of Le Carre spy stories but I enjoyed this little mystery a great deal, despite some outdated tropes that were kind of pointing to the killer all along. And I got some good tips on structure along the way.

OH WILLIAM! by Elizabeth Strout

This book is a gem. A literal gem. My first reaction was to think, why do the rest of us even try writing when Elizabeth Strout is out here running circles around us? Then I went to add it to my Storygraph and saw I'd actually read it before, during COVID, and it hadn't registered with me at all. So I walked over to my bookshelf in the famiy room and yep, there it was, in hardcover! Which means I liked it well enough to keep it, but also totally forgot everything about it.

Which kind of kills me because, as a writer myself, I don't really love Barthe's "death of an author" idea but this kind of proves it -- as does my experience with Sophocles. At this point in my life, this book hit so much harder, because I bring so much of my own experience to it, and I can connect better, and fill in the gaps.

Anyway, my response to reading OH WILLIAM! this time was to run all over Los Angeles and buy her entire back catalogue. I am now the owner of every Strout book written, including the new one, and when we're done with Battle of the Books, I'll read through her whole list from start to finish. When I finally fall in love with a writer, I fall hard.

RUN FOR HILLS by Kevin Wilson

Oh my gosh this book. I laughed, I cried -- often at the same time. And he hits on another of my life tropes, which I will not ruin for you because even though it's pretty obvious I didn't even notice until one of the characters did me a favor at the end and said it all out loud. I am a Kevin Wilson fan and will likely become a Kevin Wilson completist when I'm done with Strout.

PERSUASION by Jane Austen

I chose this as my first Battle of the Books read because my mother, I think, gave my kids this gorgeous set of Austen books and no one cracked them open ever and they've just been sitting on the shelf looking pretty. So I figured I'd start with Austen and give this set a whirl. I haven't read PERSUASION before but I think I've seen a movie of it because the second half of the novel felt very familiar. Oh and if you want to test your aging brain, Austen is a good place to start. It has been some time since I was an English major doing battle with sentences like these. It was easier then -- but hopefully now that I've read this, and have moved on to EMMA, I'll be better prepared for the number one book on our Battle of the Books list: MIDDLEMARCH.

Oh hey did I mention we're doing a Battle of the Books through Labor Day? Jump in now and level-up your summer.

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