evelyn_b

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I'm posting this week's Reading Wednesday early, because my internet access is still uncertain and I don't know if I'll have any tomorrow. Comments will get replied to eventually!

What I Bought on My Trip

More Anthony Powell, the sequel to Titus Groan, Sodom and Gomorrah (the next Lost Time volume), plus a whole bunch more of my 99 Novels. Special thanks are due to osprey_archer for enabling introducing me to her beautiful (in parts nearly impassable) local used bookstore, and also for encouraging me to leave before I got sucked into the mystery section again.

What I've Finished Reading

( Eugenie Grandet )

Also: The Caine Mutiny, another of the 99. It was suspenseful and thought provoking - I kept thinking it would make a great book club selection (and probably was, back in its bestseller days). I enjoyed it a lot, even though I'm not at all sure I followed the author to the conclusion he was leading me to.

Jo Walton's The Just City ends just when things are getting really interesting, which disappointed me a little. There's a lot of time spent on the premise (Athena uses time travel to re-create Plato's Republic, peopling it with children purchased from slave markets and Platonists from all eras) but the story picks up a tremendous amount of steam once Socrates shows up and, despite repeated assurances that they won't answer, persists in trying to engage the robot workers in philosophical debate. I have a little more to say about The Just City, but I think I'll leave it for the near future.

ETA: I just looked up The Just City to make sure I was spelling Jo Walton's name correctly, and apparently it's the first in a three-volume series, which might change how I feel about the pacing -- actually, I'm not sure yet if it does or not, but it may explain some things.

What I'm Reading Now

Nana by Emile Zola! I may have mentioned before now that I have some difficulty believing that the past really is another country - as a child, I read nearly all vintage fiction, and spent at least as much time reading as I did doing anything else, so in a way my mind was formed by early twentieth-century juvenile fiction at the same time that it was being formed by the present, and with something like a similar weight. Even now, it's easier for me to see correspondences than differences, for whatever reason. Nana is fascinating because its moral landscape really is alien to me - all the sex is mercenary, all the marriages are political, no one is faithful to anyone else and only a handful of characters from this cast of dozens - a middle-aged man, portrayed as blighted by religion and a narrow upbringing, a couple of naïve and melodramatic young men - are even a little put out by it. It's not wildly different from some of Proust's milieus (Saint-Loup's Rachel could have been one of Nana's friends), but in Proust there is always a familiar sensation or a funny observation or something else to distract me from the strangeness; Nana is unfamiliar sexual mores all the way down.

Nana is a courtesan who got her start in the theatre; she could have snagged herself an advantageous and safe marriage by now (like M. Swann's Odette) but she's still young and there's money to be made, so she's holding out for more. Like Balzac, she is magnificently successful and completely incapable of saving anything, or even of spending her money in ways that most of her patrons would consider "in good taste." Balzac might have appreciated the gigantic bed she commissioned, crowned by a life-sized nude sculpture of herself in the person of Night uncloaked. Oh, and one of her suitors was inconsiderate enough to stab himself on the new white carpet, so now there's a big old bloodstain right on the threshold, how SYMBOLIC ridiculous and droll! Nana is not a nice person, or a particularly admirable one unless you count "total lack of scruples and common sense" as an admirable trait, but I like her. The book is rapidly running out of pages, so the promised downfall can't be far, but maybe it won't be so bad? I'd love to read a sequel from the point of view of her hapless little son, whom she occasionally totes along to major social events and who seems utterly forlorn and bewildered by everything on earth.

What I Plan to Read Next

Speaking of things that remind me of Balzac, The Cure of Tours, by BALZAC! - and speaking of Terry Pratchett, I now have Feet of Clay, the next book about Sam Vimes and the Watch! After I finish that, I'm going to take thisbluespirit's advice and read one of the books about witches; I will have to go back to that comment thread to figure out which one, because I can't seem to keep Pratchett's books straight in my head.

Archived from Livejournal

( Do you like this way of doing eggs? )

Today I flipped through a book called Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. I thought about getting it to read along with LT and then didn't, for the very shallow reason that the prose wasn't as interesting as Lost Time's so I didn't feel like letting it hang around. Maybe later! Some context would probably do me good.

I think I need to make a catch-up post of some kind, either when I finish Guermantes or just when I get back to regular internet access in a couple weeks. So much has happened! But this is Proust we're talking about, so by "so much has happened," I mean, M. spent a terribly awkward afternoon watching Saint-Loup fight with his mistress and had a lot of mixed feelings about both of them and then tried to pretend he'd had a good time but couldn't quite stick the landing, and now he's at a party with the elusive Mme de Guermantes and LEGRANDIN is there, busy practicing and disavowing his snobbery (like everyone else, only more so and at greater pains). The scale of events is human and quotidian, and limitlessly expanding the way days do before they close.

SPEAKING OF BOURGIE FRENCH PEOPLE, though, guess what I found at the thrift store, to take with me on my last trip of the summer (along with M. and friends, of course)?

EUGENIE GRANDET

by

HONORE DE BALZAC!

I am excited to finally meet some fiction by BALZAC. If it's even a quarter as entertaining as his biography, it will be one of the highlights of 2016.