What are you reading Mondays is hosted by J. Kaye’s Book Blog

I’ve just finished reading :

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

From Wikipedia.org:

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of Josef Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Besides having a shared interest in drawing, the two are also fans of the Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini…

Klayman gets Kavalier a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company which, due to the recent success of Superman, is attempting to get into the comic-book business. Renaming himself Sam Clay, Klayman starts writing adventure stories, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produce Amazing Midget Radio Comics (named to promote one of the company’s novelty items). The magazine features their character the Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero…(T)he Escapist becomes tremendously popular, but, as often happens, the writers and artists get a minimal share of the publisher’s success. Kavalier and Clay are slow to realize that they are being exploited, as they have private concerns: Kavalier is trying to help his family escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and has fallen in love with a bohemian girl with her own artistic aspirations, while Clay is battling with his sexual identity.

Kavalier, driven by grief over the murder of one family member by the Nazis and the internment of the balance of his family, enlists in the navy, unaware that his would-be fiancée is pregnant. He returns from service and an extended self-imposed exile only to find his cousin and former love a married couple; the remainder of the novel follows the three characters’ attempts to reconstitute a family, and to find a new creative direction for comics.

Many events in the novel are based on the lives of actual comic-book creators. The novel’s time span roughly mirrors that of the Golden Age of Comics itself, starting from shortly after the debut of Superman and concluding with the Kefauver Senate hearings, two events often used to demarcate the era.

This is a dense, richly described history of the comic book industry in America from 1939 to 1954. I thought the industry was strong when I was a kid in the ’60s but evidently it was only a shadow of what it was during its heyday.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 but it sent me running to my dictionary one too many times. I rate it 7 out of 10 stars.

I’m currently reading:

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

“Traipsing through muddy fields in search of his lost dog, Tom Loxley is preoccupied–with the book he is writing on Henry James; with an enigmatic artist…; and with his elderly mother…As Tom’s search progresses, (the book) bursts with life and emotion, making brilliant use of the conventions of suspense as it leads us to see anew the conflicts between our bodies and our minds, the present and the past, the primal and the civilized.”

I’ve just started reading this. It’s set in Australia, a part of the world that I’m unfamiliar with so I find the background and setting fascinating.

I’m trying not to think about what could be happening to the dog, and concentrating on the other plot lines instead.

Technorati Tags: The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser, Tom Loxley, Joe Kavalier, Sammy Clay, Kavalier & Clay, Rosa Saks, The Escapist, Luna Moth, Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of, Pulitzer Prize winner, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards winner