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Time is still an issue, so I'm going down to two posts a month for the time being.

In the meantime:

What I've Finished Reading

They had learnt each other's faults and weaknesses: they had passed both illusion and disillusion. It was no use asking for more than anyone could give.


Over the past two weeks I finished Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy, for 99 Novels, and then the next three books in the series (The Levant Trilogy), just because I wanted to follow Harriet and Guy Pringle around some more. Then I found out there was a TV miniseries and got it from the library (I haven't had the chance to watch it yet). Why did I get so invested in these hapless kiddoes and their debatably tolerable marriage? In the hands of a slightly less gifted writer, or even a differently gifted one, this story of two people who let each other down in exactly the same ways 500 times over a thousand pages might seem pointlessly frustrating or boring, but it wasn't for me - I just liked them and wanted them to be debatably happy.

At the end of The Battle Lost and Won, Harriet becomes ill and leaves Cairo, dejected because Guy doesn't share her belief that they should stay together no matter what. She ditches the boat to England at the last minute and hitches a ride to Damascus. Then the boat she ditched sinks and everyone on board dies, and there's a stretch of maybe 200 pages where Harriet is wandering around Damascus and Jerusalem, determined not to say anything to Guy because she's supposed to be on a boat anyway and he shouldn't have sent her away so there and Guy is certain that Harriet is dead. And for the entire two hundred pages (which are mostly taken up with the same kind of aimless knocking about that defines the Pringle Life wherever they go) I was frantic because SEND GUY A POSTCARD, DAMN IT. She FINALLY hears about the shipwreck and realizes Guy thinks she's dead, but after calling his workplace a bunch of times and getting some random porter she doesn't know, she decides to just head back to Cairo instead of LEAVING A SIMPLE MESSAGE, GOD DAMN IT HARRIET.

Guy is also objectively infuriating - an amiable, oblivious, desperately insecure teddy bear who believes that the whole purpose of marriage is to have someone you can take for granted. There's also a character called Simon, who gets his own POV chapters like Yakimov the supermooch in The Balkan Trilogy. Unlike Yakimov, he's an ordinary dude with problems that aren't entirely of his own making, so he doesn't yank the books off kilter as much as poor Yaki, and at first they're a little less memorable as a result. I soon got used to it, though I wasn't overly invested in either character and mostly found myself wanting to get back to the Pringles and their complete and intractable inability to talk themselves into any dynamic but the one they rode in on.

Catch-22 isn't the hammer between the eyes that it was when I was fifteen, but how could it be? Even with a memory as bad as mine, there are only so many times you can read a cynical takedown of piety and patriotism for the first time. It's reasonably durable for a black comedy.

What I'm Reading Now

At one point in their friendship, Boswell was feeling neglected by his great friend Sam Johnson, so he decided not to write him any more until he got a letter, to test how long it would take for Sam to "break". Then, being Boswell, he was unable to prevent himself from confessing this "test" to Johnson, with a promise never to do it again.

Johnson, being Johnson, never let him forget it. After the confession, every time a month goes by without a letter from Boz, Sam J.'s next letter begins with a stern warning that Boz had better not be testing him again, and a reminder that such behavior is childish and ill-mannered, and likely to spoil the friendship it tests, but he hopes Boz and the Mrs. Boz and the young Bozlettes are doing well all the same in spite of this inexplicable vice of their protector.

Boswell, naturally, includes every one of them. It gets funnier every time it happens.

The Life of Samuel Johnson is winding down. Sam J.'s health is failing even more than usual, and one of his oldest friends has died. I'll be glad to get to the end of this enormous book, but I'll also miss it.

I've started Temporary Kings (penultimate entry in Anthony Powell's gossip-roman "A Dance to the Music of Time," also a 99 Novels selection) and it's just as much a pile of candy as all the others.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library copy of Hearing Secret Harmonies, last in the Powell series, is on my floor along with The Mighty and Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett - an author I'm excited to read after a lot of glimpsing from afar. I've also put in an Interlibrary Loan request for the next Henry Williamson, A Test to Destruction - which could take anywhere from two days to eight weeks to get back to me. I have to learn to live with the uncertainty, since I've put a lid on book buying at least until the Fall Friends of the Library Book Sale.
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It's been a little while since I've posted here and I'd like to apologize, if (like me under better circumstances) you look forward to reading everyone's book posts on Wednesday, for falling down on the job. There's a sort of obsolete function at the back of my mind that's still going "Wait, wait, wait a few more days, wait until things get back to normal." Unfortunately, there hasn't been a "normal" to get back to, and there isn't going to be.

I've been reluctant to start again, partly because my ability to read has been patchy, and partly because it doesn't matter. But it's something I've enjoyed, and "stop doing everything you might enjoy" isn't actually meaningful action. So the Wednesday Reading Meme will be back in its usual form next week, and this is (I hope) the closest I'll get to Talking About Politics here.

In the meantime, a summary )

Agatha Christie and the rest of the Extended Murderverse might be back next Monday or the Monday after that, but they will also be back.
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Any number of days late and dollars short, but I wrote this so I might as well post it.

What I've Finished Reading

Two Marvel comic book collections, The Dark Phoenix Saga and The Complete Age of Apocalypse, and At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell.

Read more... )

What Anthony Powell has in common with Marvel Comics is that the same people keep showing up, changed but not entirely changed, and eventually you give up on the conventional expectation of an ending.

ETA on Sunday: For some reason At Lady Molly's and Casanova's Chinese Restaurant have been the only things I've managed to read in the past few days: all of Powell's gabby friends gabbing about who's getting divorced and who is too awful for words in the fashionable neighborhoods of the Thirties. Every now and then someone announces that they're going off to fight in Spain, and the rest of the cast make little choking sounds and ease themselves back into the warm whirlpool of their gossip. It's neither soothing nor overwhelming. I'm not sure what it is, but it's what I've been reading.

What I'm Reading Now

I had to read The Count of Monte Cristo a bunch of times because I couldn't figure out what the deal was with Villefort. Is he alive or dead? Alive, apparently, but then who did B. stab and steal a baby from? I don't know! I seem to have missed a thread somewhere. Anyway, I was almost starting to be bored for a second there, but now things are back to good thanks to Dantes' visit to the Morrel family!

The Morrel kids, now thriving and happy, have made a little shrine of the purse and diamond from The Sinbad the Sailor Incident.
"- oh, you make us happy by giving us an excuse for expatiating on the subject. If we wanted to conceal the noble action this purse commemorates, we could not expose it to view. Oh, would we could relate it everywhere and to everyone, so that the emotion of our unknown benefactor might reveal his presence."


"Ah, really," said Monte Cristo in a half-stifled voice.

Honestly, I love the unknown benefactor stuff so much more than the Wheels of Revenge business. It may just be that the wheels aren't properly in place yet? But it's not really just that.

We also hear a little more from Haidee, Dantes' Greek "slave"/slave?/mistress?/ward? who even knows. It's a little on the dodgy side, whatever it is:

"Youth is a flower of which love is the fruit; happy is he who, after having watched its silent growth, is permitted to gather and call it his own."

Ew. But Haidee, it turns out, has a score of her own to settle, so we'll see where this goes.

Maximilien and Valentine are adorable. I hope Dantes' "revenge" is going to include helping them run off together in defiance of M. de Villefort's wishes, and not traumatizing them with M. de Villefort's gruesome death and/or descent into madness. Please be kind to the adorable young people, Dantes! I hope his meeting with the Morrels is what it seems, evidence that there's still a light dusting of cinnamon in the dark whorls of his heart.



[personal profile] osprey_archer thinks she's spotted a potential Runaway Lesbian in the cast, and I agree.

I began Balthazar what seems like ages ago now, and vaguely recall being surprised by how much I liked it, but we'll save Lawrence Durrell for next time.

What I Plan to Read Next

Probably Anthony Powell. Other books, eventually. Posting may be delayed.
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What I've Finished Reading

Certain stages of experience might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came) on those small green tables, within the secret recesses of which , at the termination of a given passage of time -- a quarter of an hour, I think -- the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the coloured balls return no longer to the slot to be replayed, and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careening uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

- A. Powell, A Buyer's Market, p. 274

When, in describing Widmerpool's new employment, Templer had spoken of 'the Acceptance World', I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. [. . .] Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.

- A. Powell, The Acceptance World, p. 170

I'm still way behind on everything, but I did finish that Anthony Powell three-novel volume, which was breezy and fun, no demands made on any faculty -- perfect for the past couple of weeks, when I've been physically exhausted. Powell's carefully overexplained metaphors are the joy of my world right now. Thank you for your total lack of faith in my ability to make connections between things, Anthony Powell! <3

What I'm Reading Now

It's C. P. Snow time again! The Masters is equally easy but not quite as breezy as Powell. Our narrator Eliot's in academia now (again, since we've been jumping around in time) and Vernon Royce, the Master of the college, has just been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and given six months to live. Royce's wife and daughter know, and everyone in the faculty seems to know, too, but Royce's wife has decided to keep the news from him and bully everyone else into doing the same. They are pretending it's just an ulcer and will heal with a little rest. I have to agree with Royce's daughter that this is neither fair nor kind. It's terrible to be lied to, and anyway, if he is going to be dying of cancer, he will probably start to notice eventually. I hope someone tells him. This is the most anxiety I've ever felt about a C. P. Snow plot, muted as it still is by Snow's oddly colorless prose style. We'll see!

I started A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, but haven't been quite in the mood - maybe now that I have less lifting to do, it will snap into place.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Caine Mutiny and The Dark Lantern for the 99, and eventually I'm supposed to get Men at Arms from inter-library loan.
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What I've Finished Reading

"I am talking about you and me. I am saying that, right now, sitting by this lake together, we both would earn our scarlet A's. And deserve them."

"But we're both men."

Hawthorne smiled mirthlessly. "That is not lost on me."

The Whale: A Love Story: A Novel )

Speaking of the apocalypse, The Girls of Slender Means is a good book.

The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in one of the row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; some bombs had dropped nearby, and in a few back gardens, leaving the buildings cracked on the outside and shakily hinged within, but habitable for the time being. The shattered windows had been replaced with new glass rattling in loose frames. More recently, the bituminous black-out paint had been removed from landing and bathroom windows. Windows were important in that year of final reckoning; they told at a glance whether a house was inhabited or not; and in the course of the past years they had accumulated much meaning, having been the main danger-zone between domestic life and the war going on outside: everyone had said, when the sirens sounded, 'Mind the windows. Keep away from the windows. Watch out for the glass.'

I read it all on the same day I got it and when I got to the end I read it again. Then I spent a lot of time trying to describe it to people, but maybe it's best just to say it was a good book and you should probably read it if you haven't.

What I'm Reading Now

I started Nana before I left, but didn't get very far. It's good! The young courtesan is such a likable ordinary character: frustrated with her aunt, hopeful about her baby, always struggling to keep her clothes clean (those long skirts and those streets and stairwells soaking with filth! You can count on Zola to notice the difficulty). The back cover promises me an ignominious downfall, which is too bad. I like Nana.

I've actually finished A Buyer's Market, but I'll probably get through The Acceptance World and the end of the volume before I say any more about the world of Anthony Powell. Well, I will say that he loves his gigantic clunky metaphors! The rest can wait. I'm enjoying them a lot.

What I Plan to Read Next

I still have to get the first Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight book somehow. Other than that, I'm not totally sure! Oh, right, C. P. Snow. And Balthazar, the next novel in the Alexandria Quartet! I'm looking forward to that one.
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What I've Finished Reading

I finished Foundation on the plane and then tried to figure out what makes its appeal so strong for me. It's partly Asimov's writing, which is amiable and transparent and makes everyone in the far future sound like Hollywood Romans or company engineers of the 1950s (except that they all swear By Space!) so it's a peculiarly comfortable way to tour thousands of years of made-up history. And the structure is undemanding - it's really five novellas or long short stories bound together, with large gaps in time between each one. There are lots of neat set-pieces and episodes of skulduggery and some pleasant rib-nudging allusions to RL history. It's thought-provoking without being at all challenging or painful.

There's also Trantor, the beautiful/horrible subterranean city planet, where children go up to the observation deck once a year for school field trips and cry in fear of the open sky. But as large as it looms in my heart, Trantor is only seen in passing in Foundation. The impossible scale of things in general (the Galactic Empire lasted for twelve thousand years! Encompassing twenty-seven million planets!) sort of lifts it out of the realm of "speculation one might question" and into a different one - fantasy or fable, maybe? - in which the reader's inability to picture the administrative nightmare of day-to-day life in the Galactic Empire is part of the point. But it also doesn't poke too hard at that difficulty. I don't know! I like this book in a very specific way: I only want to read it when I have a long ride ahead of me. But when I do, it's the best thing.

What I'm Reading Now

A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell:

While I undressed I reflected on the difficulty of believing in the existence of certain human beings, my uncle among them, even in the face of unquestionable evidence-- indications sometimes even wanting in the case of persons for some reason more substantial to the mind -- that each had dreams and desires like other men. Was it possible to take Uncle Giles seriously? And yet he was, no doubt, serious enough to himself. If a clue to that problem could be found, other mysteries of life might be revealed.

I didn't manage to finish A Buyer's Market before I left town, but I am enjoying it pretty well.

I took a diminutive 99 Novels selection with me instead: JUSTINE by LAWRENCE DURRELL. This book will always be in all caps in my heart, but maybe for different reasons each time. I was so annoyed with Lawrence Durrell in the first few pages, but then I adjusted to the style and now I'm ok. There will be more about this book later, whether you want to hear it or not.

In the meantime, I've come down with something that makes my throat close up and my ears ring. This may be the perfect state in which to read Justine, but it is not great for the rest of the things I was planning to do this week.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm saving Foundation and Empire to read on the way back.
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What I've Finished Reading

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. . . They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading.
--A. S. Byatt, Possession

Grave-robbing! Long-lost heirs! The wrath of the heavens and the vengeance of the trees! Action-packed index-card searches! A labyrinth of title drops! Possession was the best time I've had in, I don't know, a couple weeks at least. Even better than Dick Talks With Oliver Mellors? As a book, yes; as a running joke I'm going to keep tediously alluding to for the rest of my life, probably not. But you can't have everything all the time.

Seriously, this book was a delight and a half. I could rake up a lot of tiny caveats (and one medium-sized one: I thought Sabine's journal was too conveniently explicit even for this celebration of all things epistolary and omniscient, and it throws the second half of the book off balance for a while) (and my dislike of certain revelations about Ellen Ash keeps growing quietly, now that I'm not reading anymore) but none of them made a significant dent in how much I enjoyed it.

[personal profile] osprey_archer has real discussion and spoilers. I may attempt some real discussion in the future. I will note that Beatrice Nest saves the day, and the stupid rich guy I was rooting for also saves the day, and shows Val a good time and throws in a couple of Albert Campion references for good measure.

What I'm Reading Now

The Anthony Powell I got from the library was the first three novels of A Dance to the Music of Time in a single volume. I finished A Question of Upbringing a couple days ago and may or may not get through A Buyer's Market before I have to leave town again. They're ok! I don't anticipate any trouble reading twelve of these. They're very fast-moving, especially given that Burgess and others put it into my head to compare them to Proust. People keep turning up briefly and melting into the crowd and reappearing six months later with the marks of their own unseen narratives on them, kind of like a large-scale version of Austen movie dancing, though that metaphor wouldn't have occurred to me at all if Powell hadn't frontloaded the whole “dance” thing.

On the other hand, I haven't started Henry Williamson's The Dark Lantern yet because the library didn't have it. I'll have to order it when I get back, and probably the 99 Novels are going to be on hold until then.

I'm reading The Story of an African Farm, which I've meant to read for a long time because it was a favorite book of one of my favorite writers, L. M. Montgomery (and consequently of Emily of New Moon). The problem with that is it's impossible for me to respond to the book on “its own terms,” without reading it through the eyes of Maud-as-Emily and Maud-as-Maud. But maybe that's just a problem with books in general, and not so much a “problem” as a condition.

What I Plan to Read Next

Small books that fit in my luggage! The Painted Veil, the Foundation trilogy, maybe one or two of my more disposable murder mysteries.
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What I've Finished Reading

Nothing this week! How did that happen? A massive pearl of fatigue, anxiety, and procrastination, spun industriously around a tiny grain of actual work.

What I'm Reading Now

Possession is such a treat! I'm just about to start Chapter 14, for [personal profile] osprey_archer's reference. It's all the surprisingly suspenseful fact-finding fun of The Daughter of Time, only more leisurely and expansive, and about fictional characters rather than the historical Richard III, so there can be a fact of the matter eventually if Byatt feels like it. Plus Byatt's digs at 80s/90s academia and feminist criticism are a little more enjoyable to me personally than Alan Grant's gleeful disgust about not enough people getting killed at Tonypandy. Roland and Maud find a cache of letters from the intense, previously undiscovered correspondence between poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte (all the names are great) and are now combing through related documents, trying to find out what happened between them and
osprey_archer this might be a spoiler for you
whether it has anything to do with the suicide of LaMotte's companion (probably yes)
. Byatt's Victorians are as surprising as real Victorians.

And now
Mild but possibly important spoiler!
suddenly Maud has had Christabel LaMotte's significant mermaid brooch pinned to her turban all along, as though their search made it real somehow, like the duplicate objects of Tlön -- little beads of desire hardening in the air like amber. Or maybe it's just a coincidence?
Is something terrible going to happen to Roland's girlfriend Val, by the same alchemy of coincidence? The text is hinting at it, but I hope not. I am petulantly sorry for Val and feel angry every time she comes into the frame. I hope she runs off with that mildly stupid rich guy who seems to like her. She can feel superfluous on a yacht!

I'm enjoying watching the significance of the title creep slowly into focus, like a distant figure in the fog. I don't know what it is yet, but you can feel it moving toward you anyway, and eventually all will be revealed.

Apparently Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time was influenced by Proust. I like Proust! The first book, A Question of Upbringing is ok so far. The influence isn't as obvious as I expected. I don't think I would have noticed it at all if it hadn't been pointed out to me ahead of time -- there's a kind of boat-ramp beginning where the narrator sees a thing and is reminded of another thing, and then there's the vivid encounter with a hapless contemporary (Widmerpool, famous at school for trying too hard and for once having worn a mildly outlandish overcoat), but beyond that the memories of Powell's narrator "Jenkins" are much more orderly and signposted than Little M.'s: bricks and topiaries of time, rather than kudzu and groundwater.

And I got drawn into Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet while hunting for quotes, in one of these procrastination scrambles. It's the "factless autobiography" of an assistant bookkeeper bearing a non-coincidental resemblance to Pessoa himself (who is sort of the Portuguese Franz Kafka and sort of not). It's full of lines like, “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful,” and "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life." If that sort of thing makes your heart sing along as if to a song by Morrissey, then maybe The Book of Disquiet is for you.

What I Plan to Read Next

Exactly the same as before!

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