Diversions

Cervantes's masterpiece is at the centre of my reading at present. It's going at a slow pace though. I'm just over a quarter of the way in and beginning to warm up to the Quixote - Sancho Panza relationship and all the playing around with meta-fictionality. It's nice to be reminded of how much more charming all this post-modern stuff was before we discovered it was post-modern.
 
I suppose things are going slowly precisely because I'm just warming up to it all and discovering how to read the novel in terms of pacing and focus. The digressions into other stories don't help, but I can't see much point in reading the novel at all if you don't try to grasp why Cervantes felt he needed to do this. Actually I've just passed the Cardenio story and quite enjoyed it. It helps to imagine what Shakespeare may have done with it, assuming he, in collaboration with Fletcher, probably did write a play using the tale, when reading Cervantes's take on it.
 
Also I've found myself having to branch off into other things, partly related to work. Back in KL at Chinese New Year I re-read Maya Angelou's Caged Bird since I'll be teaching it soon. It was not exactly a burden to find myself re-experiencing a book I rushed through when I first read it a decade or so ago, and if anything the impact of Ms Angelou's vigorous portrayal of black experience in the States, and its attendant miseries, and joys, was greater than the first time round, but it wasn't exactly something I would have read out of choice.
 
And that goes double for R.J. Palacio's Wonder, a sort of novel for teenagers revolving around a ten-year-old dealing with his facial deformity. This was my set reading for the 'training' I mentioned yesterday that I'm so much looking forward to. Anyway, I duly read it yesterday and this morning and, fortunately, basically enjoyed doing so. It's well written with some outstanding moments. Unfortunately, however, it might also be fairly described as manipulative with regard to its calculated tugging on the heart-strings. Not that I mind this too much - after all, in most respects its heart is in the right place, like a good episode of Oprah - but there's always the nagging worry with this kind of material that it's somehow not entirely doing justice to its extraordinarily difficult concerns.
 
Must say, I'm amused at the idea that someone, somewhere thinks they need to tell me what I must read.