The Perfect Time of the Year to Attack your Literary Bucket-List
As the year comes to a close, it’s often a time for reflection and anticipation. The year in reading is, of course, never complete without having at least attempted to topple the ever growing literary babel of to-be-read classics. If your ambitions in this area have fallen a bit short this year, there’s a wonderful corpus from the cannon here to read as we head into 2024.
First up, perhaps the most famous and significant from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, we have The Passion According to G.H.. A short and contemporary novel, The Passion casts a very long and very ancient shadow. Written in a mystical burst in 1963, The Passion is elucidated as the inner monologue of a well-to-do woman known only as G.H. as she undergoes a spiritual crisis after accidentally crushing a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe. A book unlike anything you will ever read, profoundly intense and unsettling. Do not look too closely at the innards of dead insects shortly after reading.
It’s a hard act to follow, but Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved, certainly manages. Now is the perfect time to get around to this contemporary classic. Giving history an immediacy and with a searing intensity and truthfulness, Morrison has crafted a narrative that is as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Part of the bibliography which eventually would go on to win Morrison the Nobel Prize, no self respecting bookshelf is complete without a copy.
Likewise, there is no time like the present to get into the elusive and encyclopaedic works of Thomas Pynchon - a master of 20th century American postmodernism. There exists only one or two pictures of the man himself, and less still is known about him beyond his early life. Considered widely to be the most reclusive writer in the world, it is of no surprise that his works are often just as oblique and eccentric. However The Crying of Lot 49 is certainly Pynchon’s shortest and most accessible book and is definitely the best place to start if you want to read the man who is likely the greatest (and probably) living writer in the English language.
And, of course, we can’t be done without mentioning Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Here giving voice to an entire generation of black Americans in the picaresque tale of an unnamed “invisible” black man, who begins his tale describing his subterranean living conditions, and goes yet deeper as he begins to tell his story. Deeper into himself, and into the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century. Required reading.
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