Margaret's Column

After reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Peter Matthiessen’s brilliant Shadow Country back to back, I decided I needed something light. (after Shadow Country, something by Brian Moore or Cormac McCarthy would qualify). So I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch.

Pratchett is light, and frequently hilarious, but he’s never frivolous; behind the funny exterior, he has a lot to say about power, and the uses and misuses thereof, corruption, and the daily struggle to just keep one’s feet in an uncertain world. When I read his books I keep a pencil handy to mark these little insights; I think he’s as profound as Swift. Why he never quite gets his due critically is beyond me. (Well, actually it’s not. He writes fantasy, doesn’t he? Thus his work is nothing but light escapism. Lord, I hate snobbery.)

Next, I will probably FINALLY get to Dan Simmons’s Rise of Endymion, which, like Night Watch, has been sitting on my shelf for some time. Simmons is another seriously underrated writer. This man wants readers to think. And his erudition floors me.

Since the Simmons I have is an omnibus of Endymion and Rise of Endymion, that will take me through most of February. I think Cold Mountain will be next; it seems more like winter read than something for sunny weather. I haven’t read this since it was new, so I’m looking forward to it.

Then what? Actually, I don’t know. Perhaps something new will appear, maybe in the book club circular, that I simply must read. I owe great thanks to the science fiction book club, which is where I discovered Simmons, Pratchett, Naomi Novik and Patrick Rothfuss.

So, I see that my ‘list’ takes me through February at the furthest. Perhaps that’s as it should be-this isn’t a list for class, after all. Perhaps after that I won’t even worry about it; I’ll just prowl around and see what looks good to me, or if my mother recommends something. Right now she's prodding me to read The Divine Comedy. I promised her I'll think about it.