Quick'n'dirty utterly superficial Readsday update because I don't want to get out of the habit.
(Scratch my name on your arm with a fountain pen
(This means you really love me....)
What did you just finish reading?
Joyce Maynard, After Her: an utter and total misfire. Easily THE worst book I have read all year. I thought it would be at least cheaply entertaining, since I love true crime and grew up in California in the eighties; it was tone-deaf, utterly fake, so badly written it was nearly unreadable.
Rebecca West, A Train of Powder.
Justly famous for the long (long, long) Nuremburg New Yorker
articles, but my favourites were actually the shorter ones about the
flashy gangster's murder and the would-be Russian spy, which is like a
Smiley novel in miniature. There's a blurb on GR about how in
her writing diffusion sort of turns into diamond, which is right on point.
Even when I don't agree with her politics, her writing is just so fantastic I
have to admire it.
What are you reading now?
Coming to the end of Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, Kathleen Jones, which is just about as bad as the redoubtable Hermione Lee decrees it is. I thought I hated John Middleton Murry before I read this, but now I want to go back in time and smother him in his cradle (read along with my increasingly incandescent rage here!).
What do you expect to read next?
Might try to get back to Die Zauberberg, AAAAAAHAHAHA. Might try The Glass of Time, Wolf Solent, the other stuff I mentioned wanting to get to last time. sigh.
descensus Averno facilis est