reading books

I don't listen to the radio much. Whenever I move to a different country, I re-discover the joys of this medium, but the excitement wears off quickly and I start to get bored. I can't find the patience to sit and listen for hours. The radio wakes me up every morning and then, exhausted from the exercise, goes to sleep all day.

Despite my isolation, a few pieces of pop-culture trivia make it trough to me. I have heard of Lake Wobegon, and I know the name of Garrison Keillor, the radio host who invented this place to tell stories from the bizarre to the quaint, and always from the prairie. The setup intrigued me, and I yet I was left out – or remained outside, as I could never be bothered to figure out when the show was on air. When I saw a book of Keillor's, We Are Still Married, at the Oxfam bookstore, it was mine in a blink.

I have to say that I'm mildly disappointed, especially given that the book promised more than I had expected. Keillor used to write for the New Yorker. I love the New Yorker. The book contains many stories initially published there. It could have been perfect. That it wasn't I blame on repetition. The New Yorker is a cornucopia of styles, topics and formats. The book was too uniform. While most stories were good and some positively hilarious, in quick succession they lost much of their charm. Give me one such story per New Yorker, and I'd have a blast.

Sad as it is to say, the other book I recently finished reading was even less enjoyable. Right before going to Istanbul, I got Orhan Pamuk's memoir of the same name. After dragging my patience through chapter after uneventful chapter, by the end I could still not say what this book was really about. It doesn't tell Pamuk's biography, but neither does it tell the biography of the city. Most paragraphs seem concerned with the tristesse Pamuk claims is unique to the city, characteristic for it and essential for understanding it. I didn't get it, and I'm not enamored with his writing. Snow is sitting on my shelf, unfinished after two years, the pages I've read so far inevitably melting into oblivion, and I haven't come one step closer to finding out why Pamuk was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature.

The books I'm presently reading entertain me more. I bought Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children a while back, and it's a riot of a read (though nothing compared to the riots that will be staged when his Nobel Prize is announced). My Jordanian friend and frequent visitor to London warmly recommended John Steinbeck, and I enjoy The Winter of Our Discontent very much.