celebratory reading -- Saturday

WHOOO I FINISHED that Wharton bio! ....oh man, this readsday posting schedule is all fucked up, just like my sleep schedule. ("Delayed sleep-phase disorder," actual diagnosis, not just me "refusing" to go to bed! -- anyway....) 


What did you just finish reading?
That ENORMOUS Wharton bio. Did I mention I finally FINISHED that Wharton bio? Yeah, I might be casually dropping that into conversation all this week, maybe. "Grocery store shopping list? ....did I mention I finished that Wharton bio, so now I'll have time to make it?"

Sadly it was....just not that good. Hermione and Edith are my girls, I can't diss them, but my GOD that was a long awful slog. It wasn't just that the book was long (I love long books, especially long, long biographies), more that it was overstuffed with details about Italian gardens in the US, French gardens in the US, French country estates, giant English houses, English gardens, French gardens in France, on and on....and, you know, I love hearing about what writers are interested in other than writing, but I didn't pick up an eight-hundred-page-long biography of Wharton to read about gardening. The thematic, as opposed to chronological, organization really didn't work for me, and there was much less discussion of Wharton's fiction than I wanted -- occasionally there was a sparkling bit on, say, "Roman Fever," or the excellent analysis of House of Mirth, but then there would be another two hundred pages about gardens.  There's a penultimate chapter on Wharton's library that I loved, and which reminded me of the beautiful chapter on Woolf's reading in the Hermione bio I absolutely fell in love with, but sadly in this book it felt like too little, much too late.

Also: Rose Under Fire, which I greatly disliked, and two three! people on GoodReads unfriended me right after I posted my review of it. Oh dear. Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, which was incredible. (God, only posting to GoodReads is making me incredibly lazy about just remembering which books I've read, let alone summarizing what I thought of them. I need a break from that site so very badly.) Coming Clean, Kimberly Rae Miller's plainly written and surprisingly touching memoir of her hoarding parents, which is a lot more sensitive and even poetic at times than you might expect from her perky-as-hell food and exercise lifestyle blog.

What are you reading now?
Haven't quite decided yet -- I need something lighter, after that bio, and I'm tired of nonfiction. I've been meaning to read Byatt's Children's Book since it came out, but that's not lightweight, or maybe Cox's The Glass of Time, or Chevalier's Falling Angels; I love Victoriana and Highgate Cemetery, and her idea of showing the shift in Edwardian England through funerary customs is fascinating. Her prose style isn't all that and a bag of chips, but I'm looking to relax.

What do you expect to read next?
Maybe the Byatt. Or maybe Klaus Mann's Mephisto -- I don't think I'm going back up Die Zauberberg anytime soon. I do still want to read Doktor Faustus, though.


ETA And then after all that dithering I picked up Dick Francis instead. Do you know, he is pretty good!

ETA 2 And then I did read Falling Angels. Wow, was that terrible.