What I'm Reading Now

Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Times of Normal Rockwell

I liked this a lot, although I was made a little uneasy by Solomon's heavy hinting that Rockwell was sexually attracted to his teenage male models. (She carefully insists he never acted on this attraction.) If you can wince your past that, this is an interesting look at Rockwell's artistic growth, as he moved from an apolitical creator of funny paintings to a left-leaning artist who created what are probably the two most famous visual works of the Civil Rights era:

It's also a good look at the history of popular art in American through the 20th century. Very readable, and except for the bit mentioned above, I enjoyed it immensely.


Frank Conroy, Body and Soul

This is re-read of one of my favorite books. It's the story of a musician from his early childhood (about four years old) through his young adulthood (about 25 years old). The musician, Claude, is a prodigy, and the book suffers just a little because everything comes to the kid so easily -- he finds the perfect teacher when he needs one, he inherits a fortune just when he needs one, everyone is always in awe of how wonderfully he plays, so on and so forth.

It's basically the Brave Little Tailor plot -- watch this wonderful guy succeed -- but it's well written and immensely readable. This is my fourth or fifth re-read, and I enjoy it every time.

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

This is the first bookI've read by McEwan, who is apparently a big deal. (He won the Booker Prize in 1988, among other prizes.) I picked up this one because I thought it was science fiction -- it's set in 2120, and deals with a world affected by climate change. Well, sort of deals with it. It's mostly about an academic who is studying a dinner party given by the wife of a famous poet in the early 21st century.

McEwan himself has said that this novel is "science fiction without the science," which, dude.

Half of the book is set in 2120, in England, which is now an archipelago, and told from the point of view of a scholar who is writing about a lost poem, written in 2014. It is a corona, which is a series of linked sonnets, and has an enormous reputation despite the fact that no copies exist and no one has ever read it. This part of the book is interesting: the hunt for the poem, and the look at England in the future caused by climate change: metal is scarce, major cities have been lost due to global floods, thousands of species have been wiped out. The university system continues, but students are bored and don't do any of the work required in the humanities classes. They don't care about history or the past, and don't want to learn about it. This is all interesting reading, and McEwan writes well.

The second half is a journal (found by the scholar while he is looking for the poem) about the wife of the poet who wrote the lost poem. It's less interesting, honestly, though it reveals the answers to all the secrets we're teased with in the first half of the book.

I mostly enjoyed this, though I don't know if I'll read anything else by McEwan. Dr Skull has a copy of Atonement, another of his books, and I read the first several pages of it, but didn't like it well enough to go on.