The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason, is subtitled "A Novel." I know it's become pretty common to subtitle novels with "a novel," it's rather strange in this case. The book is a collection of out-takes, so to speak, from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although Mason is clearly intimately familiar with both, he fortunately did not choose to write a pastiche in the Homeric style -- I imagine that the result would have been risible. Instead, he has written a series of episodes that are inspired by the events and characters of the two epics (as well as one that is really about Theseus), as well as some non-Greek stories (one episode owes something to The Tempest, for example).
The results vary from thoughtful to surprising to contrived. In one story, Odysseus returns home to find Penelope married, in another he finds her in the Underworld, in yet another she's a werewolf. As you'd expect with a book like this, it occasionally gets too meta-textual for its own good. There are several stories in which the Iliad or Odyssey themselves show up, and they're usually more cutesy than thought-provoking, with one notable exception. But that's my only issue with thought-provoking collection.
I"m also in the middle of a few books, and thought I'd mention my intermediary reactions.
David Copperfield is interesting in a few ways. It's one of only two books that Dickens wrote in first person, the other being Great Expectations. It's also his most autobiographical work. These influences combine to create a work that is, in some places, stylistically very different from the others of his that I've read. The first few chapters, for example, are surprisingly impressionistic. We get a couple of paragraphs remembering, say, a local church, then a couple about what dinners were like, then a bit about the house, and so on. David's wedding day is also depicted in this way -- a few sentences suffice to sketch a moment here, then a moment there.
I"m not so impressed with the more standard Dickensian sub-plot about Steerforth and Emily. If you've read any Victorian-era melodrama it's really clear where this one is going from the beginning, and it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers exercise to stretch out the book. On the other hand, the Uriah Heep plot is really good; Heep is one of the best Dickens villains I've run across.
In addition to listening to an actual Victorian novel in David Copperfield, I've been reading about the Victorian era in The Children's Book, by A. S. Byatt. She follows a few families from the end of the Victorian era through to the beginning of WWI (I don't know how far into the war she goes, since I'm still in 1908). I'm still not sure if I like this book or not, despite being several hundred pages in (it's a very long novel). On the one hand, Byatt takes a lot of pains to give us a faithful representation of what one part of England might have been like, while also giving us really rounded characters who are not just types chosen to represent their era. On the other hand, it's such a faithful representation that (at least for now) it feels like the novel has no narrative structure (just like real life). There's no build-up of tension across the novel; individual characters have their ups and downs, but they don't happen to coincide with anyone else's.
Byatt writes beautifully, and it's always a pleasure to read her. But I'm not sure how much I could recommend this novel to someone who isn't already interested in the late Victorian/early Edwardian eras.
I want to make a quick caveat to the above comments. She divides the book up into "The Golden Age," "The Silver Age," and "The Lead Age" (the last of which I assume is WWI, though I haven't gotten there yet), so Byatt clearly has some sort of structure in mind, and it may become more apparent to me as I make my way through the book.
I'm reading The Jewish Dog in Hebrew, about a dog's view of the Holocaust. It's funny and depressing by turns. The dog is abnormally intelligent, and has learned human speech, but his view of things is off-kilter, leading to some odd ironic humor. (For example, he's happy when the local coffee shop puts up a sign banning Jews and dogs, because now he doesn't have to wait outside while his master drinks coffee. This sign makes him optimistic that his life will continue to improve under the new rules).
I'm a huge fan of Charles Rosen's music writing. I think he is very clear about a topic which is both abstract and subjective. In Music and Sentiment, he tackles the representation of sentiment in music, starting with the baroque era and going through the moderns. I'm in what seems to be his favorite era, the classical, and I'm enjoying his lucid examination of the move from the baroque conception of one sentiment per piece to the classical idea of an opposition of sentiments which lead to a new synthesis.
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