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Every Step You Take Wednesday
May. 2nd, 2018 07:56 amWhat I've Finished Reading
I didn't spend all of The Mansion in a Mink-induced panic because once Mink is tucked away in Parchman, the book goes meandering along down non-Mink trails that are sometimes interesting in their own right and sometimes not. There's a kind of tepid convoluted love story and a character - Flem's daughter, who went away East and lost her hearing in the Spanish Civil War - who should be a fascinating character but isn't - and I don't know if it's because Faulkner is shy about doing his brambly interiority thing on female characters or if he just didn't feel at home with this particular one.
We come back to Mink at the end, of course. Cousin Flem, "a son of a bitch's son of a bitch," has done all he could to stop Mink coming back to Jefferson, but you can't stop a man who's got nothing to lose. Then a truckload of symbolic baggage is unloaded directly onto our grateful heads, as we always knew it would be. Immediately after I closed the last page, all the minor irritants and confusions of the long non-Mink middle section evaporated. Even the sense that I didn't fully understand the context, though factually true (this is the last book in a trilogy, it turns out) dried up and blew away. The irritants etc. came trickling back later, but it took a while.
On Sunday I had some spare time so I went to the nearest bookstore, had a very expensive and mediocre coffee drink, and read all of Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. I didn't mean to read it all. I meant to read about 75 pages and leave the rest for another day, but there were no chapter breaks and one thing led to another.
My greatest disappointment was that even though Pratchett dedicates the book to the many readers who sent in new verses of The Hedgehog Song, no new verses of The Hedgehog Song appear in Witches Abroad. This hardly seems right.
What I'm Reading Now
Way back in the early days of this record, I read a book called Boswell's Presumptuous Task, the totally engaging biography of a man who set out to write the world's best biography and succeeded, while failing at every single other thing. What I've finally just started reading now is the biography he wrote, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. It's ENORMOUS and as of page 60 or so I am not disappointed at all. Samuel Johnson was a well-known Tory writer and entertaining grump in his fifties when the young Boswell attached himself to him like a hapless clap-ridden baby sloth to a Bigfoot, or, if you prefer, like Plato to Socrates. He spent the rest of Johnson's life writing down everything Johnson ever said or did on the bold assumption that posterity would appreciate it. I can't speak for the rest of us, but as far as I'm concerned he was right. More on this later.
Also later: B for Burglar, Too Many Cooks, Inspector Cadaver, and maybe the new issue of Poetry; I'm still behind on everything.
What Interlibrary Loan Hasn't Found For Me Yet
I'm still waiting for Goldfinger by Ian Fleming! Come on, interlibraries, bring me my spy pulp so I can cross it off the 99 Novels list!
I didn't spend all of The Mansion in a Mink-induced panic because once Mink is tucked away in Parchman, the book goes meandering along down non-Mink trails that are sometimes interesting in their own right and sometimes not. There's a kind of tepid convoluted love story and a character - Flem's daughter, who went away East and lost her hearing in the Spanish Civil War - who should be a fascinating character but isn't - and I don't know if it's because Faulkner is shy about doing his brambly interiority thing on female characters or if he just didn't feel at home with this particular one.
We come back to Mink at the end, of course. Cousin Flem, "a son of a bitch's son of a bitch," has done all he could to stop Mink coming back to Jefferson, but you can't stop a man who's got nothing to lose. Then a truckload of symbolic baggage is unloaded directly onto our grateful heads, as we always knew it would be. Immediately after I closed the last page, all the minor irritants and confusions of the long non-Mink middle section evaporated. Even the sense that I didn't fully understand the context, though factually true (this is the last book in a trilogy, it turns out) dried up and blew away. The irritants etc. came trickling back later, but it took a while.
On Sunday I had some spare time so I went to the nearest bookstore, had a very expensive and mediocre coffee drink, and read all of Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. I didn't mean to read it all. I meant to read about 75 pages and leave the rest for another day, but there were no chapter breaks and one thing led to another.
My greatest disappointment was that even though Pratchett dedicates the book to the many readers who sent in new verses of The Hedgehog Song, no new verses of The Hedgehog Song appear in Witches Abroad. This hardly seems right.
What I'm Reading Now
Way back in the early days of this record, I read a book called Boswell's Presumptuous Task, the totally engaging biography of a man who set out to write the world's best biography and succeeded, while failing at every single other thing. What I've finally just started reading now is the biography he wrote, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. It's ENORMOUS and as of page 60 or so I am not disappointed at all. Samuel Johnson was a well-known Tory writer and entertaining grump in his fifties when the young Boswell attached himself to him like a hapless clap-ridden baby sloth to a Bigfoot, or, if you prefer, like Plato to Socrates. He spent the rest of Johnson's life writing down everything Johnson ever said or did on the bold assumption that posterity would appreciate it. I can't speak for the rest of us, but as far as I'm concerned he was right. More on this later.
Also later: B for Burglar, Too Many Cooks, Inspector Cadaver, and maybe the new issue of Poetry; I'm still behind on everything.
What Interlibrary Loan Hasn't Found For Me Yet
I'm still waiting for Goldfinger by Ian Fleming! Come on, interlibraries, bring me my spy pulp so I can cross it off the 99 Novels list!
