Syllabus!

"What are the books your book club has read?" Ryann's friend Serena asked me today at dinner. Good question! And nobody is in a better position to answer than me. So let's take a look, shall we, at what kind of syllabus we've built up over the years here at unpacking my library.

We led off with The Road, which, I wrote, is a horrible book with which to lead off one's book club. Not an auspicious start! But the lack of any auspices ended quickly, with Atonement, which was a good 'un. And then the wheels came off, as far as anyone regularly remembering to read the book and comment on it, your truly not excepted. But the off-wheels brigade looks like this:
Grendel by John Gardner
Author, Author by David Lodge (SUSPENDED)
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
And now, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami.

Here's the first thing: I would have guessed more books! This is like figuring that a cousin or someone you haven't seen for a while must be seventeen or eighteen by now and finding out that he's twelve. Also, in the interim, I've read, on my own time, about a hundred and twenty books. Yikes. I'm sure you too, Official Book Club Members and Also Interested Members of the Public, have read way more than eight books since November 2007. So I guess the first thing we learn from the Syllabus is, we should try to stay a little firmer in the saddle on the curricular horse.

What else can we learn about the books chosen, in methods varying in their democratic-ness, as the Official Selections of our book club? No women thus far, a statistic on which we should improve. A bunch of books that, the Road notwithstanding, are sort of academic but still sort of fun. The theme most evident on the Syllabus, I guess, would be writerliness, particularly in the amount of time stretching from My Late Life in Norwell, with Atonement and the aborted attempt at Author Author (which I finished, incidentally, while also half-listening to life stories from my cousin Kate at the Tampa Bay airport) up until my Wintry Life in Western New York, with the Savage Detectives. Granted, this was almost exactly the period of my dictatorial control of the Official Selection of the Book Club, but there we are: a book club that, Officially, wants to read fiction about people whose job it is to write fiction. That seems right, if a little broad; maybe a book club that, Officially, wants to read fiction about people who are critically ambivalent about their destinies as producers of fiction (Briony, Grendel, and the narrator of Pnin in particular, here). And what the hell, me too, or at least someone ambivalent about his evident destiny as a producer of words for the purpose of entertainment. And, there being no better way to struggle through the production of words for entertainment, than continue to produce words for entertainment, I suppose we will go on, thus writerly, unpacking our library.