evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

Henry Williamson is a frustrating writer. ( You knew that already, so have a cut! )

I also finished Elsie Disnmore, which I was somehow expecting to have more of a climax. Is it in the next book that Elsie converts her father by almost dying? This one is full of horrifying Horaceisms, but eventually settles into a warm pool of syrup when I was expecting a final crisis. Horace Dinsmore is the devil in human form and should not be allowed to talk to children unsupervised, let alone make up a lot of dietary restrictions for them and forbid them to sit on the floor because it looks sloppy. He's just nuts. Where did he get his ideas about total obedience? (Oh, right, he tells us: England, where they know better than to let children eat jam on toast before the age of 10). Poor Elsie fits right into the canon of isolated outsiders in children's lit, whether the rest of them like it or not.


What I'm Reading Now

Disowned by my father— I had never been close to him and often fantasized that my real father was one of the early American astronauts, and that I had been conceived by semen ripened in outer space, a messianic figure born into my mother's womb from a pregnant universe— I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography (I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by their unsuspecting secretaries)— yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique idenitity out of this defective jigsaw.

Moving right along in 99 Novels - not chronologically for now but based on what I already have on my shelves— The Unlimited Dream Company (by J. G. Ballard) has to be read to be believed. I've already recommended it to two people, and I'm only on Page 21.

I'm also enjoying An Experiement in Criticism by C.S. Lewis, which might just as well be called A Treasury of C.S. Lewisisms.

What I Plan to Read Next

Here's where I need some advice. Should I stick to the 99 Novels theme with A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (acquired by accident of the the library's adopt-a-book shelf), read a SciFi Dudebro Classic (Neuromancer by William Gibson), or read Faust, a tale in RHYME by my gifted new friend from the past, J.W. Goethe?

What I've Finished Reading

Yes, dear Lotte, I shall arrange and order everything; give me as many things to do as you like, and as often as possible. One thing, though: if I might ask you not to use sand to dry the notes you write me. . . ? Today I raised it hastily to my lips, and was left a gritty crunching in my teeth.

I needed a break from Phil Maddison's semi-coherent crankiness, so I read THE BEST POSSIBLE BOOK for that purpose and also, as befits its role as a Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight antidote, one of the shortest non-picture books I have ever read. It's called The Sorrows of Young Werther and it's the sad tale of an adorable doofus who never reckoned on having to live in an imperfect world when his skin and his summer days have always been perfect heretofore. I mean, he knows there's such a thing as the inherent tragedy of all life, because it gets name-checked in all his favorite songs, but no one told him it would hurt this much!!

The plot is very simple. Thackeray put it best:

( Werther had a love for Charlotte. . . )

If it's wrong to receive a story about a promising young dude who idiotically talks himself into shooting himself with his beloved Charlotte's own pistols, ostensibly to "make her life easier," as a hilariously delightful breath of golden springtime, well. . . at least I'm not the first? Werther's crazy emo charm is real, and so is Charlotte's very human equanimity. She's not heartless, and she likes Werther - but life has its way of going on. This story was based partly on a real suicide, partly on Goethe's own hopeless crush on a married friend, and uses the best parts of pity and wry self-awareness.

"We shall see each other again!" I cried. "We shall find each other, we shall pick each other out from among the many. I am going," I continued, "going of my own free will, yet if I thought we were parting for ever I could not bear it. Farewell, Lotte! Farewell, Albert! We shall meet again."
—"Tomorrow, I expect," she countered in jest.

<3

What I'm Reading Now

I didn't give up on the Chronicle, of course! A Solitary War and Lucifer Before Sunrise are both perfectly tolerable 90% of the time, though Henry Williamson seems to have more or less given up on the ensemble cast - as Phil gets crankier and more frustrated, the people in his life fade into catchphrases and cardboard antagonists and one or two pairs of beseeching feminine eyes. The scope of narrative sympathy narrows along with Phil's own. Phil is exhausted trying to live his ideal of honest farm work, whose perfectly predictable failure he is far too inclined to blame on everyone else's decadence. His neighbors spread rumors about him being a German spy, some of which are unfair and some of which he might try to counter by not trying to get other people to listen to his favorite Hitler speeches quite so often. He frets about someday getting the time to sit down and write his generation's War and Peace, and maybe out here beyond the book we're supposed to realize that he has! but it's not enough just being as big a crank as Tolstoy; War and Peace gets its power from its soapiness, and HW is committed to making his narrative as repetitive and nearly joyless as Phil's true experiences of running a farm and failing to write a novel because he's too tired from running the farm. I added that "nearly" because every now and then there is some joy, usually in the form of some grass or a bat or the feeling of being awake at night in an inexpressibly complex living world. HW's nature writing was always his strong point, even back before he developed all these weak points.

There is also Emma Dunning Banks's Original Recitations With Lesson-Talks, an 1896 handbook for the elocution student or dedicated amateur. It's exactly what it says: 54 monologues chosen for their popularity as recitations (as opposed to their literary merit, the introduction is quick to point out - too many budding elecutionists pick their favorite poems only to have them sink like stones because they're too delicate or specific for general audiences) with stanza-by-stanza instructions on how to get the best performance out of each. It's a fascinating look at a lost world.

What I Plan to Read Next

That's the real question! osprey_archer posted about C.S. Lewis' book An Experiment in Criticism a few days ago, so when I was in the library looking for something else, I saw it and took it home. Maybe that! Almost certainly more Phil, until the Phil runs out. Maybe cats who solve mysteries?

What I Technically Haven't Finished Reading

I started The Power of the Dead with all good intentions, but about a hundred pages in, a strange thing happened. A chunk of about 40 pages was duplicated, in place of the chunk that was supposed to be there. So instead of pages 129-160, pages 97-128 repeat themselves and then the book resumes with Page 160. I went on reading anyway, thinking that when I went to the library on Tuesday I would get another edition of the book and read the missing chapter. But in the meantime I finished the book, and by the time Tuesday rolled around I was so annoyed with Phillip Maddison and his author that I didn't feel like doubling back. So I've finished reading it in one sense and not in another.

Phil's parents are still the best and most memorable characters in this novel sequence, and it was moving, in a hopeless sort of way, to see how Phil and his dad - who really was unrelentingly awful to Phil, his sisters, and his mother - mellow toward one another. Phil wants to arrange it so that his father can live in the country when he retires, away from the ruined landscape of the suburbs which is like an insulting costume-party caricature of the country. They have a nice talk about it, and even though they don't really understand each other and never will, they understand this one thing, and it's enough to get by on, at least for a short visit.

Apart from it being just generally all over the place in much the same way as The Innocent Moon, there is a lot of business in which Phil wrestles with his lust for a young secretary and his guilty dissatisfaction with his wife Lucy, with narrative asides about the secretary's desperate love hunger and need for a father figure. It feels far too much like H.W. trying to explain a real-life affair at unwelcome length, which is exactly what it is.

There is also the occasional passing reference to International Finance, but most of these are so clunky that it feels like they are being shoved into the dialogue out of a sense of obligation.

Next: The Phoenix Generation, a title that bodes probably about as well as you think it does. The back cover copy tells me this is the one where Phil Meets the Reichsparteitag. I can't wait?

What I Really Did Finish

I was planning to give away Things to Do With Your Apple Computer after I finished it, but found I couldn't. It's just too charming. I've already shared it with two separate social groups. BE PREPARED to have it imposed on you if you ever meet me in real life. Did you know that one of MANY magazines available for Apple enthusiasts in 1983 was called inCider? YES IT WAS. The Apple predilection for mixing up lowercase and title caps in wacky FUTURISTIC ways has been with us from the beginning. Other magazines in the market: NIBBLE (alluding both to "bits and bytes" and what you can do if you have a bunch of apple slices in front of you) and the comparatively straightforward Apple Orchard. I also learned that dial-up modems in 1983 1) existed, and 2) were really expensive! If you wanted to check your stock prices or scroll through the digital news during off hours, you could do it for $5.75-$7.75 an hour, but if you wanted to do anything during office hours, the price jumps to $20.75 an hour.

Also, Elsie's Girlhood.

Then as if a sudden thought had struck him, "Elsie, have you ever allowed him to touch your lips?" he asked almost sternly.

"No, papa, not even my cheek. I would not while we were not engaged, and that could not be without your consent."

"I am truly thankful for that!" he exclaimed in a tone of relief; "to know that he had-- that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact with his-- would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune." And lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and again.

This book is batshit insane. Horace Dinsmore will return to the subject of his daughter's lips being unpolluted several times during the course of it. Elsie will go from twelve to fifteen to eighteen to twenty-one with zero corresponding change in dialogue style, behavior, or outlook on life. The guy whose lips did not pollute Elsie's pure lips is an unscrupulous gambler hoping to marry her for her money. He sizes her up right away and decides to present himself as a reformed sinner who needs her love to stay on the straight and narrow, and of course Elsie eats it up. There is a wonderfully melodramatic series of coincidences by which Elsie's dad's best friend Travilla recognizes the falsely reformed real sinner from "a gambling hell" and the f.r.r.s. claims he has an identical cousin who looks just like him but isn't as reformed (Elsie eats this up, too). Her dad comes to get her (she has been visiting an aunt, but ELSIE OBVIOUSLY CAN'T BE LEFT ALONE) and makes her wear a veil so she can't even look at the man as they ride out of town. So she sits under the veil and weeps, crushed between her irresistible love for the first smooth-talking rando who comes sniffing around her money and her immovable obedience to her beloved Daddy Dinsmore.

There is a nice bit early on where Elsie is given, and happily loses herself in, an earlier Victorian weeper, The Wide, Wide World. It's nice when an author acknowledges her roots. Elsie herself is a clear spiritual foremother of Twilight's Bella Swan, a hopeless case who constantly has to be rescued from herself by imperious men with strong jaws.


What I'm Reading Now

The Tombs of Atuan is a nicely creepy story about a High Priestess who is really too young to be a High Priestess, just as A Wizard of Earthsea was about a wizard who was too young to be a wizard. Well, everyone's got to start somewhere.

I'm enjoying A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - a breezy, mildly wacky, very mildly trippy semi-adventure that bears its wackiness with lightness and aplomb. There's this guy, Our Narrator; he works in advertising. He's a regular guy, but life isn't regular; life is bizarre, so what's a regular guy to do? That's about the shape of things so far. There is a woman with preternaturally beautiful ears; there is a chauffeur with a direct phone line to God; there is ill-advised architecture and city planning against nature, and a mysterious sheep who is very important to the fabric of reality for some reason. These elements collide gently, like bubbles in a screen saver, except it's 1989 and screen savers may not have been invented yet. It reminds me a little of my memories of Tom Robbins before I made the mistake of rereading Tom Robbins.

What I Plan to Read Next

More Williamson, more Leguin. Probably something else.

ETA: What am I saying, of course screen savers have totally been invented.

I really need to stop procrastinating by checking up on the history of different inventions. :|

It's busy season again! so I'm putting off talking about Last Things by C. P. Snow (poor C. P. Snow never gets his due), U is for Undertow, and the Poetry redesign. I've started It Was the Nightingale, which is book number TEN! in Henry Williamson's Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight! The ancient sunlight is being name-checked! We are in the home stretch!

Phillip Maddison, a thinly veiled autobiography, is still writing thinly-veiled autobiographies and having important thoughts, most of which are repetitive (but sometimes thoughts are just like that). He's acquired an unconvincing young wife and an exceptionally convincing baby otter.

What I'm Reading Next is a whole lot of work reading. But also A Wizard of Earthsea! which is pretty delightful, one chapter in. A young wizard-to-be accidentally learns a spell to make goats follow him around, and is pleased with himself until he realizes he doesn't know how to stop the goats following him around. This incident of the goats made me feel I was in good hands with Ursula LeGuin.

Not terribly much to report today. For those of you who like long lists of books, there will be a "books read in 2018" post soon.

What I've Finished Reading

I finished the last book of 2018, The Charioteer (by Mary Renault) and the first book of 2019, Another Country by James Baldwin.

What these books have in common: sad gay men with problems. Otherwise, they are pretty different from one another. In The Charioteer the question of who Laurie ends up with is of paramount importance, because Laurie is young but also because it's just that kind of book. In Another Country it doesn't matter who anyone ends up with, because none of us can know ourselves and we're all doomed to go on tearing each other to ribbons like so many Edwards Scissorhands. The characters in Another Country, like James Baldwin, are very concerned with the impossibility of authentic interpersonal relationships in America, a nation built on hypocrisy. I am not convinced they wouldn't find a way to disappoint themselves and one another in any country on earth, but that isn't a defense of America. I don't know exactly how I feel about Another Country, but it sucked me right in and I appreciated its messiness.

Holiday Book Gifts

The Cat Who Had 14 Tales (a short story collection by Lilian Jackson Braun), A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - another ubiquitous writer whom I've never gotten around to reading - Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years: 1865-1871 by Joseph Frank. I started the latter on the plane back home and it has been fantastically difficult to put down. Frank's readings of Crime and Punishment are almost as good as reading Crime and Punishment. Dos has just married his second wife (the famous stenographer) and the Dostoevskys have gone to Germany in an attempt to save their marriage from the stress of his judgmental in-laws. Unfortunately, Germany is Roulette Country and Dos is a compulsive gambler. :(

Also In the Vicinity

Pale Fire is very silly and fun so far - exactly the kind of self-indulgence I can never help but like. An academic exile of Ruritanian background has generously stepped forward to edit his neighbor's last long poem, but surprise! his notes are mostly long stories about himself. The Innocent Moon is getting a little tedious now that Phillip has time to think and reflect in his diary, but not so much that I want to stop reading. I bought (at John K. King Books, the enormous and dusty four-story bibliocosmos in Detroit) Last Things, the very last C.P. Snow in 99 Novels.

What I've Finished Reading

Stardoc was exactly the book I wanted it to be, except when it really, really wasn't. Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil proves herself as a space doctor, does her best to ignore her creepy mad scientist dad, finds love, and learns to believe in herself. There's a pretty cool medical mystery for Cherijo to solve (unfortunately it's a deadly epidemic, but that's how medical mysteries are sometimes) and it ends with exciting plot twists and a flight into the unknown. The exobiology is inventive, the narrative voice is brisk and bright, the characters are on the flat side but not in a bad way. It's like watching a fun, light TV show set in space.

Except for the rape plot, which was like watching an incredibly stupid TV show set in space.

I'm putting this under a cut AND breaking out the whitetext because it's spoiling time!

( One thing leads to another )

Other than that, it's fun. On balance, I liked it a lot; if it weren't for Captain Convolution and his sorry telepath excuses I would have loved it. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to actively seek out the next book, or just wait and see if it falls into my path.

What I'm Reading Now

I wasted all my time complaining about Stardoc and now it's after noon and I have to get back to work. What I'm reading now is Love and the Loveless (subtitled A Soldier's Tale and the third Book of the War), which is knees-deep in mud, and A for Alibi, which is just as good as C for Corpse. Also Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome by Donald G. Kyle, which has a beautiful origin story: this guy was whipping up murderous tales of arena gore for his Gen Ed students, when one of them suddenly said, "What did they do with all the bodies?" He realized he had no idea what they did with all the bodies, and a book was born.

What I Plan to Read Next

Words, words, words.

What I've Finished Reading

My first issue of Poetry (March 2018) arrived last week, and I couldn't be happier with my subscription. Will this be the best $15 that I've ever spent? Maybe! We have stunning poetry, pretty good poetry, poetry that isn't quite my thing but who am I to judge, essays about poetry with laugh-out-loud John Ashbery quotes in them, and reviews of poetry books that make me want to run out and buy the books, which is not always a guarantee when it comes to poetry book reviews. One of the things that makes it so great: it's short. Sixty pages of poetry, twenty pages of prose, with plenty of white space to soothe the eye and heart, and a couple of pictures here and there. It always makes me sad to get a gigantic literary magazine with three hundred pages of densely-packed prose. I feel bad for the contributors because I know that my feelings of ennui and satiation are not their fault, but I can't help feeling them.

I suspect that if you're part of the Poetry World, you might look askance at Poetry because it's rich and popular and even bookstores in Alabama carry it. There are probably aesthetic quarrels involved that I don't understand. Maybe you call it "the Billy Collins of poetry journals," or maybe I just made that up. I am emphatically not part of the Poetry World, which I guess makes me Poetry's target audience. Anyway, it's pure delight and I love it.

Just in case you were wondering:

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot

-John Ashbery

I liked nearly everything in Poetry March 2018 and was underwhelmed at best by almost all of Free Lunch nos. 3 and 6 (Autumn 1989 and 1990), which makes me worry that I'm overly susceptible to being Of My Time. But who isn't?

I also read a tonne of Anthony Powells over the weekend, but somehow I have even less to say about Powell than I have to say about anything else on Earth. I enjoyed them thoroughly & couldn't remember them very well afterward, except that some of the characters have become old friends, in the diluted Facebook sense (Our algorithm won't rest until you reconnect with: Kenneth Widmerpool). This is an accomplishment poor C. P. Snow has only managed once (with George Passant) though I promised myself/everyone I would say something nice about C. P. Snow in the middle future. I will! But it won't be right now because I had to take all the books back to the library.

What I'm Reading Now

I got Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson from the juvenile section of the library, because I can't deal with how much I love the first half of Williamson's 15-novel novel and I want to make myself extra sad when it turns all intolerably bitter and fascist, I guess. The subtitle, "His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers" is just my flavor of twee. So far the baby otter's relationship with his mother and sisters bears a surprising similarity to that of Phil Maddison in the novels, taking into account that one is a baby otter and the other is a human boy. I'm beginning to suspect that Henry Williamson might have been an oldest child with two sisters? It's very dense and lush and Williamson's love of slightly off-kilter and old-fashioned diction is out in full force.

I'm also reading C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton, because it was the earliest book in the series I could find at Trade'N'Books. It's pretty good! There's a beautiful noir opening in a grody gym, and Kinsey Millhone, the narrator-detective, is tough to the point of comedy. I laughed at her description of how her apartments have narrowed along with her life. Millhone dresses for comfort, but felt inexplicably compelled, when she saw how fancy her new client's house was, to "blend in" by digging around in the trunk of her car for some fancier clothes. So she comes tottering in on a pair of heels last used in an unsuccessful prostitution sting, wearing a skimpy shirtdress with a stain on it, because what the hell, it was the best she could do. No one at the fancy house comments on this dubious decision. I like her.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm taking a month-long break from 99 Novels (at least until Love and the Loveless arrives) and burrowing into my TBR shelves. I came here with every intention of listing a few of them but went away daunted without listing even one. Next time! Maybe!

Cross-posted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

I liked Among Others a lot more than I expected to like it in the beginning, which was the opposite of my experience with The Just City. Mor has to choose between joining her dead sister in the world of the fairies and going back to her living boyfriend and their book club, then finds that she's already made the choice. The odd pacing and messy verisimilitude justifies itself in the end.

There is one strange scene toward the beginning of the book in which Mor's dad (whom she hasn't seen since she was a baby) gets drunk and tries to get in bed with her. Mor records this in her diary, then tries to normalize it with a couple of paragraphs about how there's probably nothing wrong with incest in principle, and she would like to be touched, but it just wasn't for her. Then Daniel goes back to being a normal well-meaning but awkward dad and the incident is never mentioned again. If I had to guess, I'd say that Walton includes these scenes of sexual threat (this one, the rapes in The Just City) because they're part of life and it would be dishonest to leave them out of a story just because the story also has fairies or time-traveling Greek gods. I find this admirable in theory but I also resent it a little.

This is a book that looks like it's going to be escapist comfort reading (young outsider loves books and talks to fairies!) but refuses from the start to conform to expectations. The magic in particular is a confusing, difficult and isolating obligation, like taking care of a sick relative. It can be beautiful - as in the understated final confrontation - but so can anything, once it's written down.

I didn't feel as much love and pain with A Fox Under my Cloak as I have for the others in the Henry Williamson sequence, but I don't know if it's because it's a weaker book or just because wars are less interesting than growing up. The war stuff isn't uninteresting to begin with, but it's starting to feel a little familiar, all the coat lice and bully beef and commanding officers who aren't all they're cracked up to be - which isn't fair of me at all.

What I'm Reading Now

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene. Here I am, reading Graham Greene when I don't even have to - I don't know what's happened to me. It's short and it was in the free books bin at the used media superstore (along with a beautiful vintage edition of The Victim by Saul Bellow), and it's great so far; there's a guy on a boat who can't relate to anyone who laughs or enjoys a game of cards, and we don't know exactly why he's feeling so burnt out but this is Graham Greene we're talking about so some educated guessing is possible.

Also: it's time to read some poetry! Body Switch is a new book of poems by Terri Witek and it's pretty good. I know how to talk about poetry even less than I know how to talk about paragraphs, but I love the comment on the Portuguese title of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet: Livro do Desassossego:

an SOS hisses through the last gorgeous word (can our eyes take it in?) as if a person couldn't decide whether to ask for help or fall asleep.

I know that feeling! Maybe you do, too.

What I Plan to Read Next

Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood, maybe Portnoy's Complaint if I get to it.

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

How Dear is Life - war comes to Europe, Philip joins the local Territorials, suffers embarrassment and shame, and is marched all over France and Belgium. At home, a familiar situation: the number of news sources has exploded, but no one knows what's true and what's false, and hardly anyone has the time to wonder in the first place. There are stories of atrocities in Belgium, fact mixed with half-truth mixed with pure garbage, all luridly illustrated. There are rumors of children poisoned at random by German bakers. The country is choked with information, while over in Europe no one tells the soldiers anything. Nothing very new here if you've read more than one WWI novel, but Philip and his family continue to be interesting and sympathetic.

What I’m Reading Now

So far in Clea: Justine has recounted how Pursewarden cured her of her “neurosis” about being raped as a child by telling her she enjoyed it and probably asked for it, and we have had this wonderful Durrellism:

She was, like every woman, everything that the mind of a man (let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself) – that the mind of man wished to imagine. She was there forever, and she had never existed! Under all these masks there was only another woman, every woman, like a lay figure in a dressmaker's shop, waiting for the poet to clothe her, breathe life into her. In understanding all this for the first time I began to realise with awe the enormous reflexive power of woman – the fecund passivity with which, like the moon, she borrows her second-hand light from the male sun. How could I help but be anything but grateful for such vital information? What did they matter, the lies, deceptions, follies, in comparison to this truth?

There's probably a sense in which this is more or less accurate, if you're Not Lawrence Durrell.

There's more to it than that, of course. Our dogged narrator Not Lawrence Durrell has dropped down out of the cloud cover of the past into a mangled, alien, and anxious wartime future. Justine and Nessim's plan to run guns to Palestine has led to them being trapped together under house arrest, and Justine is crackling with boredom and philosophy like a lot of frayed wires. It's very Durrell. My feelings about Durrell are still mixed.

Is anyone going to care about Clea when there is THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO on the same page? Maybe not, but I care about Clea.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, things fall apart; the center cannot hold. ( SPOILERS through Chapter 95 )

Next up: a conference between Danglars and his daughter Eugenie! I'm a little behind on Monte Cristo this week due to work, but should catch up again next Wednesday. We're almost to the end of the book! And we're down to the two least sympathetic of Dantes' original antagonists, which may or may not mean anything for how the next few chapters play out.


What I Plan to Read Next

The Golden Notebook? For 99 Novels, and it's already in my house. Probably The Secret Country, which I've been meaning to finish for a while.

Archived from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

Donkey Boy is heartbreakingly specific and as inexplicable as childhood. Not much has changed since we last saw the Maddison family, except that there are two more children now and everyone is a little more bitten and a little more shy. Hetty tries to make Dickie happy, but he doesn't believe he can be happy and he won't let anything go; he blows up horribly at his whole family over some toast that was spoiled by the coal fire; everything that ought to be a funny story feels like an assault on his dignity. Meanwhile, little Phillip, lonely and confused, acts out in ways nobody understands, himself least of all. He sings to himself at night a song of the world that no one can be allowed to hear. What he's becoming, who can say? He might be grown up and married himself before he knows, if he ever does know. It's not like the years did his father any good.

What I'm Reading Now

I never got around to making a separate post for The Count of Monte Cristo, but rest assured it's still the best thing since freedom young love living parents finding a pile of gold in a grotto. Spoilers below through Chapter 30!


IT WAS REAL YOU GUYS.

No tricks, no metaphors, just a big pile of diamonds in a trunk. And no Sierra Madre sadness, either; Dantes fills his pockets with diamonds and boards the ship, no questions asked, no diamonds inconveniently rolling out onto the deck and prompting inconvenient curiosity. This is completely plausible! Sailors don't live cheek by jowl or anything. Why would anyone notice a thing like that? He's also able to sell a bunch of jewels to the first dealer he runs across without tripping any kind of “where'd you get 16 giant diamonds buddy” wire in the local law enforcement and bandit communities. I'm kind of in awe of Dumas' handwaving skills here. In order to roll the plot forward, he needs to sidestep any trouble about the money, so he blithely informs us there's no trouble about the money. NEXT PLOT POINT.

Of course he can't take the whole haul with him; there's too much of it, so we're treated to a description of how carefully he hid the secret entrance to the secret treasure grotto. There's no count in evidence on Monte Cristo, unless DANTES HIMSELF IS THE COUNT. Unless someone else manages to steal his carefully hidden secret GIANT TREASURE HOARD or take over the island by force I don't see what's stopping him from calling himself whatever he wants.

So Dantes is suddenly incredibly wealthy, with a big box of more wealth waiting for him to come back and scoop it up. Triumph soon gives way to SADNESS, though, as Dantes returns to his hometown and is overcome with emotion. It's time for Dantes to learn what we've already been told: his dad is dead. Mercedes has vanished. It's a nice touch that the people now living in his father's apartment are a very young couple, just like he and Mercedes were supposed to be – a ghost of the life that was stolen from him.

Then, Caderousse is back! Dantes goes IN DISGUISE (as his own dead abbe friend) to the house of everyone's my favorite spineless drunk to get the deets on his father, Fernand, Danglars, and Mercedes. He tricks Caderousse into spilling the dirt on everyone by luring him into a fake Dumas plot. Here Dantes learns that Danglars and Fernand betrayed him, that they're both super wealthy and successful, and that Mercedes is married to Fernand . :(

We also learn that M. Morrel, who tried to help Dantes and failed so spectacularly, is now in dire financial straits – he's lost all his ships but one, and that one is missing, and he's on the verge of bankruptcy.

Then there's a stunning interlude, possibly my favorite thing that's happened in the book so far. Dantes buys M. Morrel's last remaining ship, the missing one (in a different disguise) and then visits M. Morrel, presenting himself as his largest creditor and offers to delay his debts so that he can put off declaring bankruptcy – even as he learns that the last ship has been destroyed. The way the debts are eventually forgiven is amazingly baroque – he delivers the receipts to Morrel's daughter Julie via clandestine appointment at the last minute; why not a week before the bill was due? SUSPENSE, of course. “This is the most ridiculous melodrama I have ever seen,” I thought, even as I could hardly breathe because I didn't know if Julie was going to come back in time to prevent Morrel from shooting himself. I was afraid to keep reading! But of course I had to keep reading or I would be in suspense forever, and that's no way to live. SPOILER: SHE'S JUST IN TIME. As if that weren't enough, Dantes has built a replica of the lost ship, brand new, with its name in new paint, and sailed it into harbor full of its lost cargo. A miracle! Anything at all could happen from now on, but I already love Alexandre Dumas forever. How does anyone dare to write something so beautiful and shameless? I haven't felt this way since Gallifrey came back to life.

Now, apparently, it's time for REVENGE. Dantes informs us of this change of focus in a monologue as he slips quietly out of town. I don't know if I'll like revenge as much as Doing Nice Things for the Morrel Family, but Dumas hasn't failed me so far.


THE BEST. I can't wait to see what Dumas has up his sleeve this week.

What I Plan to Read Next

Young Phillip Maddison: more like Phillip SADdison. Another one I'll probably have to purchase new through Faber Finds, since the university library's Williamson coverage is patchy (and the city library's nonexistent), though I'll check used first. Someone actually bought the copy of The Dark Lantern that I took to the bookstore! So at least one other person is reading these, even if they're unlikely to come back and talk to me about it.