Chatting with my good friend Sue over at Whispering Gums, and berating myself for not having read enough American literature, I started listing what I had read in a comment reply – and realised it was more appropriately a post…

Some years ago I had an email correspondence with an African-American professor of literature because he’d asked me to recommend some Australian literature.  I was a bit bemused by this, and so asked him what his reading interests were, so that I might recommend something he’d be likely to enjoy.  It transpired that – by his own admission – he hadn’t read much literature other than his own, and by that he meant African-American, not American in general.  This astonished me, because I was but a primary school teacher with a mere undergraduate degree in English, and I had read many of the classic and notable Russians, Irish, Indian, English, American and Australian novels, not to mention poetry and some plays.  (Yes, the French are missing from that list, but I have since read Proust, quite a bit of Balzac and have Les Miserables on my TBR; also I had read Camus.)   I consider this professor impoverished by his lack of attention to world literature, and I can’t imagine how he got his job!

Anyway, to please him (for reasons I’ve forgotten) I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, an omission from the American writers we read at university.  We read Henry James (can’t remember which one because I’ve read most of his novels since); Faulkner (Light in August); Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter); Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth.)  Since then I have discovered Steinbeck all by myself and have read almost every novel he wrote (I think); and recently rediscovered Hemingway (I think I read The Old Man and the Sea as a schoolgirl) and have a growing pile of treasures on my TBR (and a first edition of For Whom The Bell Tolls!)

In the classics, I’ve read Moby Dick, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening; a couple by Pearl S Buck; some short stories by F Scott Fitzgerland and others by W Somerset Maugham; Breakfast at Tiffany’s and some other short stories by Truman Capote; Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.   In my feminist phase I read Betty Friedan, Erica Jong and Marilyn French but not Gloria Steinam.

I’ve enjoyed ‘popular stuff’ – mostly okay but forgettable except for Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggars; Jane Hamilton, Amy Tan, Alison Lurie, Barbara Kingsolver and even the occasional Jodi Piccoult.  (Some of these are good on long haul flights). I’ve fallen for the over-hyped Charles Frazier and Anita Shreve and found them tedious while Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs was excruciating, drivel exceeded only by the tiresome The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. On the other hand I thought The Hours by Michael Cunningham was terrific; and I also liked Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

The guilt starts with the ‘canon’ of more recent writing, the authors whose names are suggested for the Nobel and Man Booker Literature prizes.  Until this week I hadn’t read anything by Toni Morrison.  I’ve read one by Updike (Terrorist), but have two on my TBR, and started but didn’t finish The Body Artist by Don DeLillo – I have his Falling Man on the TBR but can’t make myself begin it. I enjoyed three or four short stories by Saul Bellow, and liked Jane Smiley till I got tired of her.  I’ve read and don’t like Siri Hustvedt, Marilynne Robinson, and especially not Cormac McCarthy.  I have E.L. Doctorow on my TBR, and hope to get to him one day because Lurline aka The Temptress recommended him.

To refresh my memory I checked out the Excel file where I keep a record of what’s in my Reading Journals – there are 165 entries for American authors since I started keeping journals in 1997. 

Maybe that’s enough?

PS 31.7.09

Of course it’s not enough.  I’ve just read Fahrenheit 451 and loved it!