Reading round up
Too much reading is never enough. I’m talking about reading books, preferably on paper. I know I go on about it, but I must remind you of this fact. I frequently have to remind myself. It’s easy to get caught up in other faux-leisure activities (the internet, basically). No! Read a book! In a hammock, if you can.
What I’m reading now is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s novelisation of his movie of the same name. I am a Tarantino fan who has loved every movie of his that I’ve seen (I’m no stan — there are some I have yet to see). Seeing the Kill Bills and Inglourious Basterds in the cinema remain some of the most thrilling movie-going experiences of my life. I saw The Hateful Eight at the movies, too, and was highly entertained. For some reason I haven’t seen Once Upon a Time yet, so when I heard through WTF podcast that Quentin had written the story as a novel, I was really curious to read it and thought it would be a fun thing to do before watching the movie.
I’m about halfway through the book and it’s good. The opening chapters weren’t too strong because there was way too much movie chat — cinephile Cliff Booth’s musings about the movies he loved and those he didn’t. There was too much detail and I admit to some skim reading but I’m glad I skim-read those bits rather than deciding the rest of the book was going to be similarly afflicted. It’s not. As you might predict, there’s lots of movie chat throughout the book but it’s much more contextualised and purposeful than in those beginning chapters. I was feeling for the book’s editor, who probably knew there was a lot of fat to be trimmed, but who’s telling that to Tarantino?
I’ve now reached a lovely part of the novel where Sharon Tate has taken herself to a theatre to watch The Wrecking Crew, which she stars in. She’d just given a ride to a young hitchhiker and they shared a hug on the drop-off. Sharon ran a few errands and then spontaneously decides to see the film, with some trepidation, because she’s nervous about watching herself in this comic role. It’s written tenderly and succeeds in taking you back to this wildly different landscape of Hollywood in 1969.
There’s an abundance of detail, anecdote, on-point characterisation, and humour to enjoy in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the novel. I’m looking forward to reading the rest and to Tarantino’s future novels (I read that he got a book deal).
Something I read recently that I didn’t enjoy as much was My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I couldn’t get past 300 pages. At that point, I gave up, thinking ‘if I don’t care about these characters by now, this is doomed.’ Elena Ferrante was someone whose books I’d heard of in only glowing terms. I was hopeful I would like her books, but my underlying suspicion was that since she was so widely praised by so many different people, she wouldn’t be my thing. So I didn’t seek her out. But in August I stayed with my family at a holiday house on North Stradbroke Island and her novel The Days of Abandonment looked like the best option in the bookshelf.
(An aside — I always win with random bookshelf reads at Stradbroke Island holiday houses. On North Straddie I read a Tim Winton (Scisson, his first collection of short fiction and probably the perfect introduction to his work) which put me on a Tim Winton kick when I got back to the mainland. At another house on another long weekend I found Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. And on South Straddie I found Seven Little Australians and Ruth Cracknell’s Journey from Venice. All absorbing books.)
The Days of Abandonment was quite spare and elegant. Focused storytelling. Good, but not great, I thought. Not worthy of the ecstatic praise in the cover blurbs. Still, I didn’t know if this was Ferrante at a peak or at a low, so I thought I’d better read this famous series she’s written, the Neapolitan novels, to really get a handle on what sort of storyteller she is. As I said, I gave My Brilliant Friend 300 pages before dropping it as finally as Mario dumped Olga in The Days of Abandonment. Mario had clearly stopped caring about Olga just the same way Ferrante couldn’t make me care about Lenù or Lila. There was so much explanatory writing — ‘they did this, then they went there, then they felt this’ — and it was not engaging. I would have sworn that The Days of Abandonment was written ten years after My Brilliant Friend because I feel like the writing was more skilled and sophisticated, but it was written closer to ten years before the first Neapolitan novel was published.
That marks the end of my Ferrante foray.
I have three Mark Twains at my bedside, and I’m going to begin by reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as soon as I finish Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’ve been wanting to read Mark Twain for years; I have read that his books are funny and brilliant so I cannot wait to read them, and hopefully to fall in love and collect more Twains and to make summer 2021/22 my Summer of Twain.
