As you know, my attempt to read books in English during this vacation has not been very successful. Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong has offered a timid improvement over the books I have read so far. It’s very far from perfect but at least it isn’t desperately bad.
The novel is set in rural Colorado and narrates the lives of a bunch of very limited, simple-minded folks who exist in a sort of an unthinking animal-like stupor. Some are inexplicably, irreflexively mean. Others are as unthinkingly kind. There is no explanation for anybody’s actions. Things simply are.
The only certainty that organizes this existence is the inevitable badness of all mothers. The unmitigated horribleness of the mothers, however, is offset by the niceness of everyone else. There is no explanation for why mothers are so bad while most other people are kind. This is presented as a fact of life not worthy of discussion.
The author must have been aware of the insufficiency of this worldview and tried adding cachet to his novel by messing with punctuation in a way that makes it hard to read. Direct speech, for instance, is not marked off by quotation marks. The characters’ words and the narrator’s voice all come in a jumble that the reader has to sort out.
In spite of all these unendearing characteristics, though, the novel is better than my preceding attempts to read in English.
Clarissa's Blog 
I really recommend Irene Nemirovsky’s novels “All Our Worldly Goods” and her masterpiece “Suite Française,” if you haven’t read them yet.
// As is written in the Translator’s Note to the Vintage paperback edition, “…together the two books provide a panoramic view of life in France from 1911 to 1940. ”
I love her writing style, her sense of humor & irony. For instance:
// Sitting comfortably, without her corset, her arms and legs bare and relaxed, out in the fresh air, in the sunshine, she felt extremely peaceful; she felt happy, as if she had everything she could wish for. She had a husband she loved, the best son in the world. The paper factory was flourishing. Her mother-in-law was dead. Pierre was making an excellent marriage.
// She had reached the age where you recoil at the idea of any kind of change, as if it were an omen of the greatest change of all: death.
A completely different author I liked is Наум Ним with his autobiographical novel “Господи, сделай так”. Full text is here:
http://mreadz.com/new/index.php?id=2221&pages=1
May be, it can be downloaded to your Kindle from this or another website.
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I like Christina Stead’ s The Man Who Loved Children. I’m also fond of Stewart O’Nan, just about anything he has written.
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