Reading list roundup: Whitbread prize, Forster, American and French novels

I'm still working my way through EM Forster - I started with A room with a view and have read The longest journey and most of Where angels fear to tread so far. I'll write something properly about Forster when I've read them all, though writing a piece on Forster seems like a rather daunting task because he is such a giant of British literature. At most, I can expect to give a few personal reactions.

In the meantime, I'm window shopping, planning my next literary excursion. The Whitbread Prize list was published this week, and provides a few more interesting-looking British novels. An excellent article in the Guardian Review this Saturday on American literature has reminded me that I have to read some Pynchon and DeLillo. The Guardian article reminds me that I have been viewing contemporary American literature slightly through the wrong end of the telescope: I have read a lot that has been published in the last ten years (Frantzen, Updike, Irving, Roth, etc.) but I haven't read any of the books that were being published fifty years ago. I need to go back slightly further in time. So I can't really comment in an educated way on the view proposed in the article that American literature is 'stale and wearisome', except to say that I found The Corrections to be an engaging and intelligent novel. But then I like list-making and pedagogical novels, and have similar tastes in theatre - Tom Stoppard Coast of Utopia trilogy was a recent example of art that is both emotionally true, and also a factual learning experience. I would never have learned, and retained, so much information about mid-19th century European politics and philosophy through a formal teaching course.

And what about the French literature I was going to write about? I have slightly run out of steam (and books, I need to place an order with amazon.fr again). I read Antechrista by Amelie Northom, which was no more than a piece of teenage fiction, and kept me occupied (more or less) on a plane journey recently. I got really stuck with Luc Lang's book on 11 September. It is just too abstract for my grasp of the French language. It has been sat on my bedside table, at the bottom of the pile, for the last month, so I think it's time to admit defeat and take it off the reading list. Similarly with Rousseau's Confessions: it's just slightly too hard-going, and I don't have the patience to sit there with a dictionary by my side. I want to read more Beigbeder, and I'll see what else I can find.