Showing posts with label Diana Wynne Jones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diana Wynne Jones. Show all posts
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Comfort reading for day 8
I forgot to put this in my diary post, but I think that my next favorite comfort-read author is Diana Wynne Jones. Some of her books for younger children are very good reads (the Chrestomanci Chronicles are superb - Witch Week is my favorite - and would work well to read to the under-10 crowd). But my three absolute favorites are really written more for adults: which is to say, Howl's Moving Castle, Fire and Hemlock and (maybe my favorite of all - rec #2 for the week of comfort reading recommendations) Deep Secret.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Logophilia
At the LRB, Colin Burrow reviews a new book about the history of philology. Of interest to me in a general sense as well, for obvious reasons, but I particularly enjoyed this bit at the end:
This layer of general interest in knowing about humanity – call it culture – can all sometimes go wrong when academic specialisms waltz into the room. My mother, who was the children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones (and whose eightieth birthday recently prompted what must be the ultimate public recognition in the form of a Google doodle: the techies in California clearly like reading fantasy), once said at a dinner with a group of American academics that she loved The Faerie Queene. ‘Oh, are you a Spenserian?’ came the eager reply. When my mother said, no, she just liked reading Spenser and liked his fantastical imagination, the light went out in her dining companions’ eyes. Yes, academic disciplines are a wet sock to the imagination, but not everything we do is contained within their soggy outlines.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Week of culture!
Too many evenings out this week - I really do better when I have a lot of time at home with books and cats! That said, I saw the most amazing set of things this week.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is completely captivating - I endorse Ben Brantley's rave for the Times.
Hearing Nico, Sam and Nadia perform "The Only Tune" live at Carnegie Hall was absolutely exhilarating (it is the most transcendently beautiful piece of music, both in its composition and in its remarkable instantiation through Sam's amazing voice); bonus for the evening was some stuff I really liked and didn't know at all in the form of The Uncluded, a collaboration between Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock (here is one of my particular favorites - I have to say, I feel like this song could have been written by me, and it is certainly the best song about candy that I can think of - "the other good news is an apple Jolly Rancher"!).
Then last night I saw the most amazing film, not quite like anything I've seen before but in another sense perfectly the kind of thing I most like - my old friend Sean Gullette's feature debut Traitors, which was showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Gripping female noir, a thriller with a mesmerizing protagonist and the most beautiful visuals and soundscapes - really exceptional. I feel very lucky I am in a position to see so many longtime friends making the most incredible stuff!
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of a very busy week: Laini Taylor's conclusion to her Smoke and Bone trilogy, Dreams of Gods and Monsters (now I want to go back and reread the whole thing in one swoop); Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones, The Islands of Chaldea. Also, Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fire, which for some reason I have never read although I think I remember seeing the paperback on my mother's shelf. It is very good, only it makes me extremely glad that given I am stuck being female, I am living in the English-speaking world in 2014 rather than the late 1940s!
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is completely captivating - I endorse Ben Brantley's rave for the Times.
Hearing Nico, Sam and Nadia perform "The Only Tune" live at Carnegie Hall was absolutely exhilarating (it is the most transcendently beautiful piece of music, both in its composition and in its remarkable instantiation through Sam's amazing voice); bonus for the evening was some stuff I really liked and didn't know at all in the form of The Uncluded, a collaboration between Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock (here is one of my particular favorites - I have to say, I feel like this song could have been written by me, and it is certainly the best song about candy that I can think of - "the other good news is an apple Jolly Rancher"!).
Then last night I saw the most amazing film, not quite like anything I've seen before but in another sense perfectly the kind of thing I most like - my old friend Sean Gullette's feature debut Traitors, which was showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Gripping female noir, a thriller with a mesmerizing protagonist and the most beautiful visuals and soundscapes - really exceptional. I feel very lucky I am in a position to see so many longtime friends making the most incredible stuff!
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of a very busy week: Laini Taylor's conclusion to her Smoke and Bone trilogy, Dreams of Gods and Monsters (now I want to go back and reread the whole thing in one swoop); Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones, The Islands of Chaldea. Also, Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fire, which for some reason I have never read although I think I remember seeing the paperback on my mother's shelf. It is very good, only it makes me extremely glad that given I am stuck being female, I am living in the English-speaking world in 2014 rather than the late 1940s!
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
At midnight
this long-awaited book was delivered to my Kindle - hmmm, might be I will read it right now....
Wednesday, December 04, 2013
Longing
This is the book I wish I could have in my hands right now: The Islands of Chaldea, left incomplete by Diana Wynne Jones when she died and completed by her sister Ursula Jones.
Picking up where her sister left off was an "odd journey", said Jones. "Diana was very much my eldest sister, and I was very much aware of a fury from her, either that I was doing it, or that I was not doing it fast enough. I had awful nightmares about it. It was curiously traumatic," she said. "I was conscious of her looking over my shoulder in many different ways. To start with, there was this disturbing feeling of fury. Then once I'd got under way there was almost a moment of rather grumpy 'oh all right then'. I'm not a believer in any of this sort of thing but I tell you it was palpable, and quite uncanny.
"Then it went ahead very easily. I did notice I was moving things around and changing structures or settings almost at her prompting, possibly because I knew how to get right inside the book at that stage. I certainly managed to erase my style."
And writing the last sentence, she said, "was an unbearable second parting from her: as if she had died again".
Monday, October 22, 2012
Catch-up
Six more teaching Mondays between me and the end of the semester, with a Monday holiday the week of the election as a respite. I am weary!
Today in the classroom: two de Man essays, "Semiology and Rhetoric" and "Literary History and Literary Modernity"; also, for my afternoon lecture, the opening stretch of Swann's Way!
My apartment is full of books various publishers have sent me that I don't want to read - there's a stack of thirty or so currently awaiting donation - but then I get one that is the thing I most want to read in the world, and am delighted again at the influx: in this case, it was James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. I read it in two short sittings, partly because of the gripping nature of the topic (the way the internet has hugely amplified stalking possibilities for the sociopathic and borderline, as exemplified in a terrible multi-year experience Lasdun himself had with a student who turned into his passionate stalker). In some sense, I deem the book a failure, although because the topic is so interesting and because Lasdun is such a good writer, it remains quite worthwhile. But I don't think he's had enough time to process the experience into a book-length piece (and of course he has the horrible irony of the fact that his novels are about this already, uncannily and avant la lettre, though I have certainly myself found it to be more generally the case that things in life happen that are like things one already wrote in one's novels); it probably would have been better saved as draft and then rewritten as more like a ten-thousand-word essay another few years down the road. He wants the book also to be about anti-Semitism, despite his nagging suspicion that both his stalker and the letter-writer who once sent an obscenely defaced missive to his father are really "just" mentally ill, and there is a general feeling of Lasdun (quite understandably, I hasten to add) still being in the grip of the experience rather than having moved away from it to shape it into something with the clarity and perfection of his fictions.
In other news, Tough Mudder on Saturday was great. (Although I should note that my knees and shins are ridiculously scraped and bruised, as though I have become an unruly five-year-old!)
Light reading around the edges: two more old novels by Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke and Archer's Goon. It is strange, this notion she has of a person being split up into constituent parts and losing memory of him- or herself: it's very consistently developed across a wide number of different books. I really love her novels more than almost anything else I can think of.
Today in the classroom: two de Man essays, "Semiology and Rhetoric" and "Literary History and Literary Modernity"; also, for my afternoon lecture, the opening stretch of Swann's Way!
My apartment is full of books various publishers have sent me that I don't want to read - there's a stack of thirty or so currently awaiting donation - but then I get one that is the thing I most want to read in the world, and am delighted again at the influx: in this case, it was James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. I read it in two short sittings, partly because of the gripping nature of the topic (the way the internet has hugely amplified stalking possibilities for the sociopathic and borderline, as exemplified in a terrible multi-year experience Lasdun himself had with a student who turned into his passionate stalker). In some sense, I deem the book a failure, although because the topic is so interesting and because Lasdun is such a good writer, it remains quite worthwhile. But I don't think he's had enough time to process the experience into a book-length piece (and of course he has the horrible irony of the fact that his novels are about this already, uncannily and avant la lettre, though I have certainly myself found it to be more generally the case that things in life happen that are like things one already wrote in one's novels); it probably would have been better saved as draft and then rewritten as more like a ten-thousand-word essay another few years down the road. He wants the book also to be about anti-Semitism, despite his nagging suspicion that both his stalker and the letter-writer who once sent an obscenely defaced missive to his father are really "just" mentally ill, and there is a general feeling of Lasdun (quite understandably, I hasten to add) still being in the grip of the experience rather than having moved away from it to shape it into something with the clarity and perfection of his fictions.
In other news, Tough Mudder on Saturday was great. (Although I should note that my knees and shins are ridiculously scraped and bruised, as though I have become an unruly five-year-old!)
Light reading around the edges: two more old novels by Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke and Archer's Goon. It is strange, this notion she has of a person being split up into constituent parts and losing memory of him- or herself: it's very consistently developed across a wide number of different books. I really love her novels more than almost anything else I can think of.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Closing tabs
Friday night I went to Doveman's Burgundy Stain session at LPR. It was magically good: here's the set list and here's a highlight.
On Saturday, dinner was infinitely better than the play, which was possibly the most abominably bad piece of theater I have ever had to sit through! I am currently having a minor obsession with the dessert known as affogato - both Esca and Petrarca have particularly good versions, though I think it's something you can't really go wrong with...
Had a cold all last week, which was depressing and necessitated woefully reduced exercise volume, but it's pretty much gone now. My class on "Plato's pharmacy" yesterday was highly enjoyable, but the afternoon Golden Bowl session was a little bit like the labors of Sisyphus! Must finish rereading the novel this afternoon and do a more dramatic retool of old lecture notes to see what can be done for the final discussion tomorrow. It is possible that it just suffered by dint of my having been up since 6am to revise a book review and make sure I had time to run before my first class; tomorrow I'll have more attention for that session exclusively.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Diana Wynne Jones's Aunt Maria (reading her posthumous collection of essays on writing has given me irresistible urge to immerse myself in Spenser, Sidney, Tolkien etc., but I am also pleased to see how many more of her own novels are available on Kindle compared to the last time I checked - there are a couple I've never read, so I'm looking forward to those last few also); Thomas Enger's Pierced. About halfway through the fascinating The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle's account of doping in the Tour de France (and more, via DC Rainmaker, whose lovely bride's new business enterprise makes me wish I could pay a quick visit to Paris!).
My former student Paul Morton interviews Katherine Boo at The Millions.
Dwight Garner praises Benjamin Anastas's Too Good To Be True.
Finally, unanticipated uses of the Fluksometer....
On Saturday, dinner was infinitely better than the play, which was possibly the most abominably bad piece of theater I have ever had to sit through! I am currently having a minor obsession with the dessert known as affogato - both Esca and Petrarca have particularly good versions, though I think it's something you can't really go wrong with...
Had a cold all last week, which was depressing and necessitated woefully reduced exercise volume, but it's pretty much gone now. My class on "Plato's pharmacy" yesterday was highly enjoyable, but the afternoon Golden Bowl session was a little bit like the labors of Sisyphus! Must finish rereading the novel this afternoon and do a more dramatic retool of old lecture notes to see what can be done for the final discussion tomorrow. It is possible that it just suffered by dint of my having been up since 6am to revise a book review and make sure I had time to run before my first class; tomorrow I'll have more attention for that session exclusively.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Diana Wynne Jones's Aunt Maria (reading her posthumous collection of essays on writing has given me irresistible urge to immerse myself in Spenser, Sidney, Tolkien etc., but I am also pleased to see how many more of her own novels are available on Kindle compared to the last time I checked - there are a couple I've never read, so I'm looking forward to those last few also); Thomas Enger's Pierced. About halfway through the fascinating The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle's account of doping in the Tour de France (and more, via DC Rainmaker, whose lovely bride's new business enterprise makes me wish I could pay a quick visit to Paris!).
My former student Paul Morton interviews Katherine Boo at The Millions.
Dwight Garner praises Benjamin Anastas's Too Good To Be True.
Finally, unanticipated uses of the Fluksometer....
Thursday, October 04, 2012
If Rambo were a liberal
Great interview with Lee Child at Playboy. (Tip courtesy of L. who picked up the magazine at her hipster hairdresser's!)
(NB I did think it highly implausible when Lee Child said in a recent interview that Reacher would vote Democrat!)
Teaching Madame Bovary was utterly exhilarating. I am increasingly convinced that every year I should just teach a seminar called "Interesting Books" whose only rationale would be that everything on the syllabus is something I think you can't afford to miss if you love novels! I think the main purpose of my spring-semester leave will be reading a ton of novels for the ABCs of the novel book (especially the classic Chinese and Japanese ones I mostly don't know), but it also should mean that I could roll out a couple new courses next year without it inducing a nervous breakdown.
We decide on curriculum as early as November for the following academic year, which is often tough (what will I feel like teaching in September 2013?!?), but I'm thinking I should repeat an old graduate seminar I only taught once - the Idea of Culture class (I have a new one I want to develop, on eighteenth-century modernities starting with Hamlet/Descartes and moving through Swift, Sterne, etc., but I need to get more work done on the ABCs of the novel project before I teach something that puts all sorts of interesting new ideas in my head!). Maybe do the MA seminar one more time, as it counts as a service course (otherwise I need to teach two lecture courses if I don't want to teach in the Core). An undergraduate seminar on voice in fiction that would include Sebald, Bernhard, Ishiguro, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, various others. And - this is the duty I am feeling, but it would also be a pleasure, though a lot of work! - a new lecture course, for undergraduates primarily but graduate students also, on eighteenth-century nonfiction. Perhaps just focused around Boswell and Johnson, as I have never taught Boswell's Life of Johnson and suspect that, rather like Clarissa, it is a book that students probably won't read at all if I'm not teaching it!
Absolutely gripped by Diana Wynne Jones's reflections on writing, which are giving me a huge hunger for some serious time immersed in Sidney and Spenser - that, too, is on the agenda for sabbatical reading. (There's also an early essay that makes me keen to reread LOTR!)
Miscellaneous other light reading: Dani Shapiro's Devotion; Reed Farrel Coleman's Gun Church.
(NB I did think it highly implausible when Lee Child said in a recent interview that Reacher would vote Democrat!)
Teaching Madame Bovary was utterly exhilarating. I am increasingly convinced that every year I should just teach a seminar called "Interesting Books" whose only rationale would be that everything on the syllabus is something I think you can't afford to miss if you love novels! I think the main purpose of my spring-semester leave will be reading a ton of novels for the ABCs of the novel book (especially the classic Chinese and Japanese ones I mostly don't know), but it also should mean that I could roll out a couple new courses next year without it inducing a nervous breakdown.
We decide on curriculum as early as November for the following academic year, which is often tough (what will I feel like teaching in September 2013?!?), but I'm thinking I should repeat an old graduate seminar I only taught once - the Idea of Culture class (I have a new one I want to develop, on eighteenth-century modernities starting with Hamlet/Descartes and moving through Swift, Sterne, etc., but I need to get more work done on the ABCs of the novel project before I teach something that puts all sorts of interesting new ideas in my head!). Maybe do the MA seminar one more time, as it counts as a service course (otherwise I need to teach two lecture courses if I don't want to teach in the Core). An undergraduate seminar on voice in fiction that would include Sebald, Bernhard, Ishiguro, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, various others. And - this is the duty I am feeling, but it would also be a pleasure, though a lot of work! - a new lecture course, for undergraduates primarily but graduate students also, on eighteenth-century nonfiction. Perhaps just focused around Boswell and Johnson, as I have never taught Boswell's Life of Johnson and suspect that, rather like Clarissa, it is a book that students probably won't read at all if I'm not teaching it!
Absolutely gripped by Diana Wynne Jones's reflections on writing, which are giving me a huge hunger for some serious time immersed in Sidney and Spenser - that, too, is on the agenda for sabbatical reading. (There's also an early essay that makes me keen to reread LOTR!)
Miscellaneous other light reading: Dani Shapiro's Devotion; Reed Farrel Coleman's Gun Church.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
How to write a novel
At the TLS, Tim Shippey on a posthumous collection of nonfiction by Diana Wynne Jones. To write a novel,
What you need (she says) is, first, the “flavour” of the book, second, the detail of at least two central scenes, and third, the voice that shouts “NOW”.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Closing tabs
Amazing interview with Ed Park, who is basically currently serving as the angel on my shoulder coaxing me not to stop until the novel is as good as it possibly can be! I have a slightly insane project now for the next week, which is to rewrite the final hundred pages in the first person and see if that solves various lingering difficulties...
In loosely related news, the perpetrator of the "'Encyclopedia' Brown" books has died. (I do not endorse the punctuation of the series title in that obituary.)
Why Pauls Toutonghi uses a wireless keyboard when he writes. (This piece and the interview with Ed both contain a good amount of useful advice for writers.)
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: on the plane home, James Meek's forthcoming The Heart Broke In, which I enjoyed a good deal but which made me wonder how any author can stand to write in this present day and age a novel so thoroughly indebted to George Eliot in its basic approach (same slight problem with Franzen and Eugenides!); Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night, which I am sorry to say I found much weaker and less enjoyable to read than the first installment (that first one fell on the right side of silly, but this one does not); Eva Ibbotson's One Dog and His Boy, which I loved though it is designed for younger readers than myself and which I will send on to my young nephew in Austin (it is sorrow-inducing to think of Eva Ibbotson and Diana Wynne Jones both being dead). Halfway through Kurt Anderson's True Believers, which I like quite a bit (teen spies!) although it strikes me as a fact-checker's nightmare - and I am still not altogether convinced that the narrator is actually female....
In loosely related news, the perpetrator of the "'Encyclopedia' Brown" books has died. (I do not endorse the punctuation of the series title in that obituary.)
Why Pauls Toutonghi uses a wireless keyboard when he writes. (This piece and the interview with Ed both contain a good amount of useful advice for writers.)
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: on the plane home, James Meek's forthcoming The Heart Broke In, which I enjoyed a good deal but which made me wonder how any author can stand to write in this present day and age a novel so thoroughly indebted to George Eliot in its basic approach (same slight problem with Franzen and Eugenides!); Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night, which I am sorry to say I found much weaker and less enjoyable to read than the first installment (that first one fell on the right side of silly, but this one does not); Eva Ibbotson's One Dog and His Boy, which I loved though it is designed for younger readers than myself and which I will send on to my young nephew in Austin (it is sorrow-inducing to think of Eva Ibbotson and Diana Wynne Jones both being dead). Halfway through Kurt Anderson's True Believers, which I like quite a bit (teen spies!) although it strikes me as a fact-checker's nightmare - and I am still not altogether convinced that the narrator is actually female....
Monday, February 20, 2012
More tabs
Fiendishly busy through the end of next week, and a little worried about snowballing March commitments also - but it's only two and a half weeks from now until spring break, at which point I will dig my head down hard into novel revisions...
A great profile of Vanessa Veselka.
A feast of sounds at the British Library.
Dave Lull kindly forwarded Tom Shippey's amusing 1982 review of Martin Amis and others on videogames.
On Friday night (I'm giving a talk in Boston on Thursday) I am going to stay with a dear old friend and see this production of one of my favorite plays!
Have hardly even had any time to read a novel, too much other work and other reading, though I did reread Diana Wynne Jones's Enchanted Glass on Friday night as most soothing available option and also, on the subway, Charlie Williams's appealing latest installment of bouncer noir, Graven Image.
A great profile of Vanessa Veselka.
A feast of sounds at the British Library.
Dave Lull kindly forwarded Tom Shippey's amusing 1982 review of Martin Amis and others on videogames.
On Friday night (I'm giving a talk in Boston on Thursday) I am going to stay with a dear old friend and see this production of one of my favorite plays!
Have hardly even had any time to read a novel, too much other work and other reading, though I did reread Diana Wynne Jones's Enchanted Glass on Friday night as most soothing available option and also, on the subway, Charlie Williams's appealing latest installment of bouncer noir, Graven Image.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
And
Neil Gaiman's post about Diana Wynne Jones brought tears to my eyes!
Alas, my afternoon's family meet-up has been canceled; it might be that I should go to the bookstore and see if I can find a few of the bits of the DWJ oeuvre that I have not read so many times I've practically memorized them...
Alas, my afternoon's family meet-up has been canceled; it might be that I should go to the bookstore and see if I can find a few of the bits of the DWJ oeuvre that I have not read so many times I've practically memorized them...
Saturday, March 26, 2011
I am mournful
that Diana Wynne Jones is dead.
Really I have read many of her books so many times that they are part of my internal landscape, but my two absolute favorites are probably Fire and Hemlock (that was the edition I had, and I read it countless times as a teenager) and Howl's Moving Castle, which I checked out again and again from the school library (but I can't find a picture of that cover online) and have owned in several different editions since.
The first book of hers I ever read was The Magicians of Caprona, which I found absolutely spellbinding (and continue to do so); her most autobiographical novel (it is not her best, but it is interesting, and it takes up a notion that she revisits so often that it clearly had some special personal significance, of the parts of a person's identity being split up in a way that erodes their selfhood) is surely The Time of the Ghost.
I think of all of these books very frequently, it is difficult to explain how deeply I have been steeped for many years now in Diana Wynne Jones's fiction; the one that I have the strongest urge to reread right now, though, and would download to my Kindle if I could (I don't own a copy, though I have given away several), is Deep Secret, which includes among other good things one of the best depictions EVER of a science-fiction convention...
Really I have read many of her books so many times that they are part of my internal landscape, but my two absolute favorites are probably Fire and Hemlock (that was the edition I had, and I read it countless times as a teenager) and Howl's Moving Castle, which I checked out again and again from the school library (but I can't find a picture of that cover online) and have owned in several different editions since.
The first book of hers I ever read was The Magicians of Caprona, which I found absolutely spellbinding (and continue to do so); her most autobiographical novel (it is not her best, but it is interesting, and it takes up a notion that she revisits so often that it clearly had some special personal significance, of the parts of a person's identity being split up in a way that erodes their selfhood) is surely The Time of the Ghost.
I think of all of these books very frequently, it is difficult to explain how deeply I have been steeped for many years now in Diana Wynne Jones's fiction; the one that I have the strongest urge to reread right now, though, and would download to my Kindle if I could (I don't own a copy, though I have given away several), is Deep Secret, which includes among other good things one of the best depictions EVER of a science-fiction convention...
Friday, June 04, 2010
Friday miscellany
"The famous doctrine of ‘only one fact on one piece of paper’": a lovely and slightly heart-breaking piece by Keith Thomas at the LRB on the trials and tribulations of the note-taking life.
Henning Mankell on the Gaza flotilla attack (via the Literary Saloon).
Peter Terzian's spell of not being able to ride the subway.
Other than that, I got nothin': I've been having a quiet week settling in down here in Cayman, immersing myself in a pile of light reading from the Humane Society Book Loft and clearing a couple bits of work I didn't sort out before I left New York and beginning to think about the ABCs of the novel, the next project I'm going to be working on.
Reading: Nina Kiriki Hoffman's The Silent Strength of Bones, which I enjoyed very much indeed; Mercedes Lackey's Storm Rising, which I suppose I should not have bought as it is the middle book of a trilogy, only I find the Valdemar books incredibly soothingly bland and really most of her books are fairly similar to each other, as though they could have been written by a Mercedes Lackey computer; Val McDermid's Fever of the Bone; Henning Mankell's Before the Frost, which really I read when it came out but I wasn't quite sure enough of having read already not to buy it anyway (and also there are times when it makes more sense to read a very good book for a second time rather than reading something else one will enjoy less).
Another one I got and read was Diana Wynne Jones's lovely novel Charmed Life, which really I have read so many times already that it can hardly bear rereading but which I love anyway. I was very sorry the other day to see her cancer has progressed to the point where she may only have a few months to live; an email address is given there for those who want to send good wishes and messages, and I will certainly write a message myself later today. She is one of a handful of authors who have given me absolutely countless hours of pleasure and delight.
Henning Mankell on the Gaza flotilla attack (via the Literary Saloon).
Peter Terzian's spell of not being able to ride the subway.
Other than that, I got nothin': I've been having a quiet week settling in down here in Cayman, immersing myself in a pile of light reading from the Humane Society Book Loft and clearing a couple bits of work I didn't sort out before I left New York and beginning to think about the ABCs of the novel, the next project I'm going to be working on.
Reading: Nina Kiriki Hoffman's The Silent Strength of Bones, which I enjoyed very much indeed; Mercedes Lackey's Storm Rising, which I suppose I should not have bought as it is the middle book of a trilogy, only I find the Valdemar books incredibly soothingly bland and really most of her books are fairly similar to each other, as though they could have been written by a Mercedes Lackey computer; Val McDermid's Fever of the Bone; Henning Mankell's Before the Frost, which really I read when it came out but I wasn't quite sure enough of having read already not to buy it anyway (and also there are times when it makes more sense to read a very good book for a second time rather than reading something else one will enjoy less).
Another one I got and read was Diana Wynne Jones's lovely novel Charmed Life, which really I have read so many times already that it can hardly bear rereading but which I love anyway. I was very sorry the other day to see her cancer has progressed to the point where she may only have a few months to live; an email address is given there for those who want to send good wishes and messages, and I will certainly write a message myself later today. She is one of a handful of authors who have given me absolutely countless hours of pleasure and delight.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Miscellany redux
I was lucky enough the other night to read two books of utter captivating charm. Both are strongly recommended!
They came in a box from Amazon, ordered by me (unlike many of the books which come my way from publicists and publishers - some of these are delightful too, but some of them are not at all what I would ever read...).
I had an Amazon hiatus earlier this year, in an attempt to adopt habits of frugality (John Waters: "Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it" [!]), but it did not really stick, I am trying to get a higher proportion of things from the library but there are occasional brand-new books that I really cannot get from the university library system and that I must have....
In this case, it was Diana Wynne Jones's latest book, Enchanted Glass, which is so very much exactly the sort of book I most like to read that I was almost ready to weep when I finished it - but fortunately what awaited was Elif Batuman's extraordinarily appealing The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
The Samarkand essays are particularly moving and funny (the descriptions of her two teachers there are especially well-written), but really there is something on almost every page that made me laugh out loud - a thoughtful and moving and hilariously amusing book that for reasons I cannot quite explain (something about the diction and also the argument about the relationship between life and literature?) reminded me of my favorite novel of all time, Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows.
I am in a sense the perfect audience for this book - I too was bit by the Russia bug long ago, only in my case the thing I found enchanting in elementary Russian language classes was the nature and range of the answers one is allowed to give to the question "How are you doing?" (Kak dela?) The cheeriest permissible is "Not bad," but really all the words in the textbook range from "Pretty awful" to "Absolutely ghastly"! (I paraphrase.) Elif's book is really a delight from start to finish - it will definitely go on my notional and/or actual best-of list at the end of the year.
They came in a box from Amazon, ordered by me (unlike many of the books which come my way from publicists and publishers - some of these are delightful too, but some of them are not at all what I would ever read...).
I had an Amazon hiatus earlier this year, in an attempt to adopt habits of frugality (John Waters: "Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it" [!]), but it did not really stick, I am trying to get a higher proportion of things from the library but there are occasional brand-new books that I really cannot get from the university library system and that I must have....
In this case, it was Diana Wynne Jones's latest book, Enchanted Glass, which is so very much exactly the sort of book I most like to read that I was almost ready to weep when I finished it - but fortunately what awaited was Elif Batuman's extraordinarily appealing The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
The Samarkand essays are particularly moving and funny (the descriptions of her two teachers there are especially well-written), but really there is something on almost every page that made me laugh out loud - a thoughtful and moving and hilariously amusing book that for reasons I cannot quite explain (something about the diction and also the argument about the relationship between life and literature?) reminded me of my favorite novel of all time, Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows.
I am in a sense the perfect audience for this book - I too was bit by the Russia bug long ago, only in my case the thing I found enchanting in elementary Russian language classes was the nature and range of the answers one is allowed to give to the question "How are you doing?" (Kak dela?) The cheeriest permissible is "Not bad," but really all the words in the textbook range from "Pretty awful" to "Absolutely ghastly"! (I paraphrase.) Elif's book is really a delight from start to finish - it will definitely go on my notional and/or actual best-of list at the end of the year.
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