Catherine Lacey's Reading List

"There’s a sense of porous boundaries between the main character’s internal reality and what she can see. There’s all this marvelous slippage. I suppose it’s counterfactual in that it’s a book that’s not content entirely with factual reality. She has the feeling that Proust is walking around in her neighborhood. It’s wonderful. It is an absolute delight. The main thing I read for is the voice of a story— not the plot or the setting or even the attributes of the character aside from the way they speak. I think you have to understand your appetite as a reader to choose the right book to read. You should choose this book if you want to spend some time in the company of a voice that feels like a very good, old friend of yours taking you on a nonlinear tour of the way she writes in between her life and everything she’s ever read."

"There’s a long chapter in which Costello gives a lecture about ethical vegetarianism. It’s my understanding that this lecture was one that Coetzee gave, as himself, in his ‘real’ life. He’s created this alter ego, in a way, a female academic, and he sets this fictional/non-fictional self through a world that’s essentially identical to our own. In this way, I feel this book carves out a little space between the novel and the essay, which is a place I’m very interested in exploring. Many things; Coetzee is a genius. But you have to hand it to a novelist getting his essayistic lectures to do double duty. He writes with total authority and joy."

"This isn’t, strictly, a novel, but I’d like to argue for a wider definition of the novel in the English-speaking and English-reading world. In other countries, a novel is often just thought of as any book that isn’t trying to pass itself off as a fact. Story collections, as we call them, enjoy a second-class citizenry for no good reason. I think this is a mistake. For this and many other reasons, I’m recommending Screen Tests as a counterfactual novel because it is a collection of writing written from a consistent point of view, that of Zambreno, as a character, in a certain mood. No, it’s not a novel with a single plot threading through the stories, but it is a novel if you can accept a single line of thought as no more or less valid than a plot. It’s a perfect book. One night some years ago I woke up at two in the morning in a very unusual moment of insomnia, and I went downstairs like a child on Christmas and I pulled this book from my shelf and I read the whole thing over the course of a few hours then I went back to bed. Best case of insomnia of all time."

"It’s a very confused and confusing lecture—but that’s a feature, not a bug. You have to be willing to walk with Vila-Matas as if he’s some kind of intoxicated tour guide of a city that doesn’t even entirely exist. It’s wonderful. Like all the books suggested here, the drama comes in the turns of thought. If that sounds boring to you, it probably will be boring to you. If you’re the sort of person who cannot be bored when left alone to think for a while, then you will probably enjoy this and all the other books here."

"As with the Zambreno, this is breaking form a little, but I am begging you not to let this stop you from reading this and every other Jaeggy book. If you really need to imagine this book as a novel, think of it as being narrated by a fictional character who is a very creative aspiring biographer summarizing the lives of a few different people about whom she might later write a whole biography. The slippery nature of facts is very much a theme for our era—difficult to escape and imperative to grapple with."