The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy is kind of a strange book! It consistently avoided ever becoming what I thought it would be. In some ways, it’s sort of a biography of a place and time more than a narrative.
Most of the way through McCarthy’s Outer Dark, which is extremely similar to one of Faulkner’s novels, though I can’t remember which one. It’s either A Light in August or Sanctuary, but one of those books has a subplot that feels like a companion piece to this novel.
Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel was too inside itself for me. It seems to be her least well regarded novel, so probably the wrong place to start, but it was the one available at the library.
The Most Dangerous Book: THe Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses is fascinating. It’s basically the biography of a book, tracing it from conception to construction and through its strange, tortured path to publication, and then going over the many legal issues that followed. To write about Ulysses requires an examination of the modernist movement, the changing political and social dynamics of Europe and the US, and even the limitations of the First Amendment at the turn of the 20th century.
This will probably lead to me rereading Joyce’s books (excepting Finnegans Wake) over the coming months.
