Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
Lately I’ve been going back to read some classic works that I had, in my zany life-arc, missed, in the (selfish) hope of opening up new frequencies in my work. So: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (the zaniness seems to lack agenda and yet still says something big and political); then on to Speak, Memory by Nabokov, newly reminded that language alone (dense, beautiful) can power the reader along; and, coming soon, The Power Broker by Robert A Caro – a real ambition-inspirer, I’m imagining, in its scale and daring.
Vigil by George Saunders is published by Bloomsbury. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is the rare novel that manages to be both a state-of-the-nation epic and an exquisitely painful family row. This particular family is so meticulously observed that reading about them feels less like fiction and more like overhearing neighbours arguing through a thin wall. Franzen’s great trick is to make misery funny without ever quite letting it off the hook. Nobody escapes unexamined, least of all the reader: I started off feeling superior but ended up recognising uncomfortable and unflattering fragments of myself scattered throughout the book. The Corrections is not cosy, and it’s not kind, but it is deeply humane. It suggests that love persists not because people are redeemable, but because they’re not. A brilliant, bracing novel that corrects nothing, yet understands everything.
