JOST A MON

A few years ago, Olivia Judson burst onto the scene with Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation. Various animals wrote to this biological agony-aunt asking for tips for better sex and procreation, and she gave them very pertinent advice. How to avoid being eaten by your mate after sex was one important topic, especially when you are a few hundred times smaller than her. A successful television show followed.

A bit later, Isabella Rossellini got into the act with her online series of videos titled 'Green Porno', which explored the sex lives of various fauna. These were gross yet funny; I watched one or two.

It turns out that the very clever Alessandro Boffa beat both women to it with his exploration of love, obsession and beastly antics, You're an Animal, Viskovitz. The hapless Viskovitz is desperately in love with the seductive Ljuba, but no matter what his incarnation - a mantis, a shark, a sponge, a scorpion - he is constantly thwarted, either by his bad timing, or biology, or the pressures from his friends or competitors (and it's always the same trio: Lopez, Zucotic, Petrovic). The wondrous Ljuba makes eyes at him, yet invariably he has to settle for the homely Jana. Animal behaviour to illustrate the human condition can be dry and academic, but Boffa, a biologist by training, has a facility with expression and superb humour, and this is lovely, whimsical stuff.

Animal sex can be smutty, which allows us to segue into Alan Bennett's twofer, titled Smut: Two Unseemly Stories. Bennett has an unjudgmental touch with much sympathy for his characters, and he wields it lightly here. In one story, a widow joins a local teaching hospital as a diagnostic aid; the professor is attracted to her; the students think her 'cool' because she has allowed her bedsit tenants to perform sex acts in her presence in lieu of rent. Bennett explores sexual awakening in middle age: the widow is impressed by the versatility and energy of the young tenants and recalls that she had never been quite as enthusiastic with her husband. Although she doesn't appear to be much aroused by what she sees, she veers between heightened interest and indifference, and her main concern remains 'what will other people think if they knew?' In the other story, a gay man with an overbearing mother and a distant father marries a woman he considers silly. The dynamics in the family are in constant flux, and everyone's imperative to maintain their   secrets and superficial relationships provides the humour and pathos in the tale.

On the one hand, there are families that successfully hide their loves from each other, and on the other, there are entire societies that keep an aggressive, claustrophobic eye on everyone. The resulting atmosphere of suspicion and poison, parochiality and patriarchy, love and desire, is sparely described in Wajdi Ahdal's  A Land without Jasmine. Set in Yemen, a lovely girl is an object of barely suppressed lust by nearly all the men she encounters. Her neighbours, local shopkeepers, her professors, all assume that she wants to seduce them. Polite smiles are taken as invitations. No matter how demurely she conducts herself, she stirs loins. The girl disappears one day, the police get involved, and the story lurches from one self-serving point of view to another. This is a furious, explicit polemic against the systematic brutalisation of women in traditional Arab society; small wonder that books like these forced Ahdal to leave the country to save his life. He is back in Yemen now, but who knows whether his much-needed voice has the audience it deserves?

And finally we have the frankly peculiar Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille. Reading it reminded me of Guillaume Apollinaire's nutty, frenetic and surreal Les Onze Mille Verges: Or, the Amorous Adventures of Prince Mony Vibescu, a bonkfest that is too funny to be erotic. (Oh, and it could have been in my sub-200-page read list, except I've read it already.) But where Apollinaire was light-hearted, Bataille is obsessive. Geometrically unfeasible contortions abound in this debut novel, which has far too many multiple orgasms to have any resemblance to reality. (Or, perhaps, I've just led a very sheltered existence.) Roland Barthes' textual analysis led to hidden meaning and much philosophising - so why is the book promoted as erotica? Besides the obvious intersection between sex, murder, madness and religion, what does it offer? It might have been avant-garde when it first appeared in 1928, but today it feels forced and pedestrian. I'm baffled, baffled, I tell you.

(For some utterly bizarre reason I can't fathom, several of the books I've got from the library as part of my exploration of the sub-200-page range deal with sex. And I'm only up to the letter B! As you see above, we have an Ahdal, a Bataille, a Bennett, and a Boffa. Were it not for the Ahdal, I'd have given this blog the title of Birds and Bs.)

There are more than four hundred books on my To-Read list. It is a daunting number made especially so by attention deficit and a niggling feeling of restlessness. I have decided to put them aside for now. Maybe when I have that study I have been promised where I can reign like a potentate and reach out to grab a likely book from one of several floor-to-ceiling shelves - then, I'll get onto buying these books and reading them. Until then, to keep my mind ticking along its unexamined and un-introspected path, I have resolved to introduce an element of randomness to my reading.

Those four hundred books on my list range quite widely across genres of fiction and tropes of non-fiction. Most of them are on the list, however, because I read of them on some review or the other. As I do not browse bookstores anymore, there is no serendipity in my reading. So what better way to reintroduce an element of chance than by random grabs from the library's fiction shelves?

I don't want to spend hours on thick tomes that might prove enervatingly boring half-way through. I don't want to linger for hours on one paragraph and try to glean every manner of jewel from it. As I said - attention deficit. So here's what I am going to do: I'll go through the fiction shelves of my local library in alphabetical order and I'll pick up every book under 201 pages long. I will ignore the blurbs and I will get stuck into every book. I'll likely discover authors I had never heard of, never read, and - given any other trajectory in my life - would never attempt. 

The choice of 200 pages as the upper limit on size is quite arbitrary. After all, a book of 150 pages with small font is as chunky, word-wise, as another with 200 in big type. Still, it's an important psychological barrier. I can finish a two-hundred page book in a day (or at a sitting were it not for constant interruptions from sundry little imps and my own nervous energy). I needn't worry about wasting hours should the prose be impenetrable. And carrying the books from and to the library will not ruin my back. Good stuff.

So here I'll make (and keep updating) the list I'm ploughing over. I might blog about them. Or I might not.

Okay, I felt compelled to add some genre stuff too. It's a rare crime or sci-fi book that comes in at less than 300 pages, but if you look closely enough, there are some sub-200 ones. Rare, but they're there.

1. Ted Allbeury, Dangerous Arrivals. [England]
2. Benjamin Black, The Lemur. [Ireland]
3. Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Went Bananas. [USA]
4. Max Brooks, Closure, Limited and other Zombie Tales. [USA]
5. Tori Carrington, Queens Ransom. [USA]
6. Judith Cutler, Silver Guilt. [England]
7. Philip Daniels, The Inconvenient Corpse. [England]
8. Francis Durbridge, Curzon Case. [England]
9. Wolf Haas, The Bone Man. [Austria]
10. Gerald Hammond, With My Little Eye. [Scotland]
11. Alanna Knight, Deadly Beloved. [Scotland]
12. Bill Knox, To Kill a Witch. [Scotland]
13. Fritz Leiber (*), Swords and Ice Magic. [USA]
14. Elmore Leonard (*), The Switch. [USA]
15. Roy Lewis, An Assumption of Death. [Wales]
16. Roger Ormerod, More Dead Than Alive. [England]
17. Anne Perry, A Christmas Visitor. [England]
18. Alexei Sayle, Mister Roberts. [England]
19. Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs. [Austria]
20. Georges Simenon (*), Maigret Sets a Trap. [Belgium]
21. Peter Turnbull, False Knight. [Scotland]
22. Barry Unsworth, Morality Play. [England]
23. Minette Walters, The Tinder Box. [England]
24. David Wilson, The King's Park Irregulars. [Scotland]

The authors with stars against them are those I've read before. Onward!

Update: December 10: I'm beginning to think that with twenty-five books into this quixotic randomness, I've still not passed the first three letters of the alphabet. Too slow a progress! So, from the letter D, I'll only pick up books by authors I haven't read before - unless I really want to read that book.

Update: January 21: Incredible. There are books in this list that I cannot bear to continue reading. Sub-200? Pshaw. The books that defeat me are crossed out in the list above.

Update: January 31: I figured I might as well add the country of origin of each writer, so that I can keep track of the translated works.

Update: February 10: Letter 'I' and Inoue's doing my head in.

Update: February 18: Up to the letter 'K' with a slight detour towards Verhulst.

Update: February 28: Now nipping my way to 'O'.

Update: March 12: Decided to scan the crime/sci-fi/fantasy/horror shelves alphabetically as well.

Update: April 6: In the 'R' lot, with a couple of 'S' lying around too.

Update: April 16: Added the first graphic novel/memoir into the mix (Talbot's 'Dotter of Her Father's Eyes').

Update: May 8: Man, I'm really suffering now. I'm at the W's and it's a real drag to continue with this. Second wind, second wind...

Update: June 4: Haven't really made much progress with the W's, but rather liked Taichi Yamada's Strangers...