August

Today is August 1st, and we enter the eighth month of twenty-twenty-six. It feels as though this year has scarcely started, yet autumn already looms beyond the dusky horizon. Plans for this month are largely concentrated on the local book festival and local comedy festival. Spouse and I are fortunate to live a short journey from both, and so have maximised our final year of ‘youth pricing’ eligibility and purchased a good chunk of interesting talks to attend. In particular, I look forward to World Cup Fever and the Taiwan Travelogue event.

I sort of set myself a goal to read fifty books this year, but I doubtlessly fell short as I consumed a breadth of manga and noncommercial fiction. To be honest, I feel like rigidly tracking every book and desperately racing to finish a goal can muddy the enjoyment a bit. I don’t actually care if I read forty-eight or forty-nine novels? Instead, I endeavour to read interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable novels which linger in the mind.

This year, I finished Nabokov’s Lolita - what a novel! Truly the most sublime prose and in the hands of an unreliable narrator who knows it. Humbert Humbert attempts to bedazzle the reader with complicated, layered language and convince us of his intellectualism, his superiority, his exceptionalism. He decries most of the female characters, save his fantasy nymphettes, as boorish, unattractive lumps. Though he idolises Dolores and projects a fantastic romance upon her, he cannot hide his disdain and attempts to portray her as a capricious, nasty young woman in an attempt to wrest our sympathies from her. He is the wronged party, he assures us. In a less capable author’s hands, this would be overwrought and obvious - yet Nabokov is genuinely exceptional and the ambiguity and manipulation still evokes a complex array of responses and arguments from readers today. A masterful novel which thoroughly deserves it’s status amongst the classics.

I additionally read Hanya Yanigahara’s The People in the Trees. Truly lush prose; Yanigahara has a similarly stunning command of the English language. Whilst her other works do not particularly appeal to me (they seem rather fanfiction-esque in their plots, which appear to be a conga line of tragedy for her blorbo protagonist), the central conceit of The People in the Trees is uniquely fascinating - I wish we’d spent more time with the Dreamers, but we largely skipped ahead to Norton’s final years and downfall. Again, Norton is a similarly pathetic protagonist to Humbert Humbert who endeavours to convince us of his exceptionalism and blithly allows his misogyny to colour all interactions with women. Yanigahara’s interesting meta aspect involves this as a memoir collated and edited by one of Norton’s most fervent apologists. It works beautifully, evoking a squirming discomfort as you read the revolting justifications and excuses for Norton’s shocking behaviour. Whilst there was no doubt in my mind that Norton was guilty, nevertheless the post-script ‘reveal’ was deeply shocking in it’s explicitness.

I have now returned to a serialised novel which I’ve enjoyed for several years and has recently had an update. I hope to catch up with it this evening, on this wonderful day of Doing Nothing.

— Frost