Readsday returns! On a proper Wednesday even! The stunning shock!
What did you just finish reading?
Summer, by Edith Wharton. I'm trying to get back into reading fiction, and baby-stepping myself with short novels and collections of short stories. This book was short all right, but pretty damn haunting. It's not written in absolutely stunning prose, I didn't even like reading it sometimes (life in a small rural town is all too well-portrayed), but the heroine is amazing and there was something really compelling about it -- about her. I wound up carrying the book around the apartment with me because I kept picking it up when I was supposed to be doing something else. It gets paired a lot with good old Ethan Frome, apparently, but it reminded me more of Chopin's Awakening, except (SPOILER) the girl doesn't die at the end. The top-rated reviewer on GoodReads apparently thought it was about as sexy as a bathtub full of ice cubes, which tells you all you need to know about GoodReads (and its reviewer ranking system) right there. Marilyn French, in an exquisite introduction, argues that Ethan Frome remained in print and on school curricula because in it illicit sexual love is punished (it's also the story of a man. Narrated by another man). Summer was criticized because the lovers seem to "get away with it" -- only it's Wharton, so nobody gets away with anything. She reminds me of that supposed Spanish proverb: "Take what you want, God said, and pay for it." Wharton's stories are a full accounting of the price paid.
What are you reading now?
I was rereading Lords and Ladies, but I might have worn that one out. My period's over (it routinely flattens me for at least a week, EVERY damn month) and I still feel crappy, so I might go back to bed with another Wilkie Collins (recently read The Law and the Lady, and it was fabulous, and simultaneously deeply, cringingly problematic about the mentally ill and the disabled for about the last third. That was some combo). Collins is really ideal sickbed reading, for me. But that's more about
What do you expect to read next?
This always fucking stumps me. I might read Collins, I might try Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales which I haven't reread in over a decade, I might FINALLY pick up Russell Hoban's last book, Angelica Lost and Found. -- But I feel a little sad, and odd, about reading his last book, but also paranoid that even though I have agoraphobia and almost never leave my house, I'll get hit by a bus or something before I can get to it. -- Speedboat, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Hav, Shaggy Muses....just a few in the Kindle queue. So many books! Only two eyeballs!
.....of course, I might get an early start on the brand-new translation of The Magic Mountain, in preparation for the GoodReads group read. AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA. I last read that sucker....God, probably in my late adolescence, when I relentlessly chewed my way through everything I could lay my muddy little paws on. I think I reread most of it in my very late twenties, but not all the way through. My Vintage paperback edition has NO NOTES, too, which will make those long philosophical conversations just fly by, I'm sure. Oh, Mynheer Peeperkorn, how I am not at all looking forward to making your acquaintance again.
(....oooh.)
descensus Averno facilis est