Reading tastes have been eclectic

“So what have you been reading lately?” someone asked.

As usual, the answer is: A little bit of everything.

Like many Jay County readers, I’m a fan of Michael Koryta, the author of thrillers and chillers who did a reading at Arts Place a couple of years back for the Jay County Public Library.

I’ve read several of his books, but for some reason I was slow to get around to “So Cold the River.” When I picked it up this summer, I couldn’t put it down. Set in Indiana, it has enough Twilight Zone moments to make Rod Serling envious. I can recommend it enthusiastically.

From there, my reading of late gets a little — shall we say — eclectic. (My wife would probably describe it as eccentric.)

One example is “The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas” by the 19th-century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machedo de Assis. To call it quirky would be an understatement, but I found it to be engaging and a lot of fun. It’s written in a highly digressive style reminiscent of “Tristram Shandy,” which I was supposed to read in college but never made it through. How quirky is it? The memoir is supposedly being written from the grave and is dedicated to the worms working on the author’s corpse.

Only slightly less unconventional is “Love,” the latest from Irish author Roddy Doyle. It’s a dialogue between two old acquaintances over endless glasses of Guinness in a series of pubs. The two men ponder love, their lives, their marriages, their friendship and their families. It takes some work to get through the Irish dialect, but I think it’s worth the effort. Doyle is the author of some great novels coming out of Ireland: “The Commitments,” “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,” “Smile” and “The Guts” to name just a few I’ve enjoyed.

Just as challenging in its own way is “Orfeo” by Richard Powers, who wrote “The Overstory.” While “The Overstory” is a novel about trees, “Orfeo” is centered on both the world of musical composition and the world of biochemistry. There’s also a bit of an overlap to bioterrorism just to make things more interesting. Powers is one of our best contemporary American novelists. He not only knows how to tell a compelling story, he also makes you smarter in the process.

If you want something lighter, I’d recommend “Alibi” by Joseph Kanon. I’d lend you my copy, but I gave it to my brother Steve. Set in Venice immediately after the end of World War II, it’s rich in moral ambiguity, as are most of Kanon’s thrillers. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? And who’s to say which is which?

Moral ambiguity is also at the heart of Milan Kundera’s “Farewell Waltz,” a dark farce by the Czech-French author written in the final years of the Eastern Bloc. Kundera is best known as the author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” I should warn you that it’s not for everyone.

Coming out of that same part of the globe is “Twilight of Democracy” by historian Anne Applebaum. Its subtitle is “The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.” Applebaum’s historical work on the Soviet world — “Red Famine,” “Iron Curtain” and “Gulag” — is among the best ever done. So it is unsettling as she recounts how, in the wake of the fall of the Iron Curtain, young democracies in Eastern Europe have slid so easily into authoritarianism. And it’s dismaying how easily her friends and colleagues gave up lip service to democratic ideals and became apologists for would-be fascists. Applebaum knows fascism when she sees it, and she pulls no punches.

Finally, since that sounds too heavy, I can recommend two new books of poetry that came out this fall: Ted Kooser’s “Red Stilts” and “Whale Day” by Billy Collins. Both poets are getting up in years, so it’s not surprising to find them reflecting on their own mortality. While I am fond of both poets, Kooser’s work holds up better this time around. It’s his poems, particularly one entitled “A Letter,” that have me going back again and again for another read.