Thursday, February 05, 2009
what i'm reading
0 memoirs, Douglas McArthur (started this in 08 so it doesn't count.)
O Inveighing we will go - Wm F Buckley. I think this was on last years list too, I still haven't finished it, dated but still readable.
1 The Sirian Experiments, Doris Lessing
2 The heart is a lonely hunter, Carson McCullers
3 The Shape of Things, Theodore Seuss (first use of the word "blogg")
(google tells me the title is "the shape of me and other stuff")
4 Long Long Ago, Alexander Wollcott
I first of heard of Lessing as an SF writer when I was in college circa 1982 from a roommate (at the place I lived across the street from the poet who just died, Snodgrass.) I was skeptical, because she wasn't on the shelf of science fiction books at the Wilmington library that I read during junior high, and I'm just now getting around to her. I think she won a Nobel last year. It's genuine science fiction, in an erudite style a little like Olaf Stapledon. Not great, not bad.
I was at my favorite bookstore in Wheeling recently. When the guy who runs it saw the books I'd picked - I don't go there often but when I do I buy a big box, he showed me a stash of good stuff under the counter from which I picked out the McCullers and a Burroughs. She was 23, it was her first novel, it's a bleak look at Southern poverty during WWII. Almost everybody dies tragically, not in the war.
It's good.
Shape of Things - read it in a doctors office in Kalamazoo. I passed the first two rounds of the screening, but flunked the hearing test, so three wasted trips to Kalamazoo in winter,and haven't made any money yet this year.
Long Long Ago. 1943, postumous Woolcott, a series of short peices, probably published in the New Yorker or other magazines.
The first one hooked me - it's a story about Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. telling president Lincoln to "Get Down You Fool!" while they are being shot at by Confederate raiders, as told to Wolcott by Harold Laski, who taught the Kennedy boys at the London School of Economics, and confirmed by Felix Frankfurter.
On page 33, where Orson Wells is telling Woolcott that GB Shaw cheats on his vegetarian diet by taking liver pills, I realized I've read this book before, or heard that story somewhere else. But I'll reread it with pleasure. In another story it's Wells again but he's 19 and Wollcott gets him a job based on a reference from Edward Albee. The are dinner with an old lady, with whom Wollcott has as a mutual friend the illegitimate son of Disraeli. The rest of the book will be similar - name dropping of the New York theater and Algonquin round table crowd.
I have, in the box, some books by or about Nixon and J Edgar that I might get around to over the next couple months,and a book by Cornelia Otis Skinner about Sarah Bernhart. So generally I'm keeping my brain alive while the body continues to atrophy - too cold to ride a bike,and a I'm not a big fan of shoveling snow.
0 memoirs, Douglas McArthur (started this in 08 so it doesn't count.)
O Inveighing we will go - Wm F Buckley. I think this was on last years list too, I still haven't finished it, dated but still readable.
1 The Sirian Experiments, Doris Lessing
2 The heart is a lonely hunter, Carson McCullers
3 The Shape of Things, Theodore Seuss (first use of the word "blogg")
(google tells me the title is "the shape of me and other stuff")
4 Long Long Ago, Alexander Wollcott
I first of heard of Lessing as an SF writer when I was in college circa 1982 from a roommate (at the place I lived across the street from the poet who just died, Snodgrass.) I was skeptical, because she wasn't on the shelf of science fiction books at the Wilmington library that I read during junior high, and I'm just now getting around to her. I think she won a Nobel last year. It's genuine science fiction, in an erudite style a little like Olaf Stapledon. Not great, not bad.
I was at my favorite bookstore in Wheeling recently. When the guy who runs it saw the books I'd picked - I don't go there often but when I do I buy a big box, he showed me a stash of good stuff under the counter from which I picked out the McCullers and a Burroughs. She was 23, it was her first novel, it's a bleak look at Southern poverty during WWII. Almost everybody dies tragically, not in the war.
It's good.
Shape of Things - read it in a doctors office in Kalamazoo. I passed the first two rounds of the screening, but flunked the hearing test, so three wasted trips to Kalamazoo in winter,and haven't made any money yet this year.
Long Long Ago. 1943, postumous Woolcott, a series of short peices, probably published in the New Yorker or other magazines.
The first one hooked me - it's a story about Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. telling president Lincoln to "Get Down You Fool!" while they are being shot at by Confederate raiders, as told to Wolcott by Harold Laski, who taught the Kennedy boys at the London School of Economics, and confirmed by Felix Frankfurter.
On page 33, where Orson Wells is telling Woolcott that GB Shaw cheats on his vegetarian diet by taking liver pills, I realized I've read this book before, or heard that story somewhere else. But I'll reread it with pleasure. In another story it's Wells again but he's 19 and Wollcott gets him a job based on a reference from Edward Albee. The are dinner with an old lady, with whom Wollcott has as a mutual friend the illegitimate son of Disraeli. The rest of the book will be similar - name dropping of the New York theater and Algonquin round table crowd.
I have, in the box, some books by or about Nixon and J Edgar that I might get around to over the next couple months,and a book by Cornelia Otis Skinner about Sarah Bernhart. So generally I'm keeping my brain alive while the body continues to atrophy - too cold to ride a bike,and a I'm not a big fan of shoveling snow.
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