Dan has posted his list of what he has read this summer. I’m such a snoop. I love to know what people are reading at all times.
My summer has gone this way and that, in terms of what I’ve read. I’ve been a big juggler this summer, keeping a bunch of books going at all times – which is rather unusual for me. But I’ve been moody these last couple of months – and not consistently in the headspace for the same book, day after day, or even hour after hour – Hence. I carry a huge backpack everywhere I go, filled with “toooo many books”.
So let’s see.
All along, I have been working on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. I read about a chapter or two every morning, although I did take a break from it for about a month. The book is not something I just want to barrel through, because it’s so damn long! It’s also the kind of read where it is okay to put it down, and then pick it up again. The story does not depend on momentum. I just picked it up again this morning. So that’s been a constant for me, this summer.
Other books read:
Under the Banner of Heaven – by Jon Krakauer
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Carnage and Culture – by Victor Davis Hanson (not finished with that yet – It’s another book which I don’t feel the need to barrel through. I’m also DEFINITELY not always in the mood to read about war. So when I’m in the mood for some vigorous challenging reading – where I am in the headspace to learn about hoplite maneuvers and the invention of the stirrup and what it all means, then I’ll pick that one up)
My Dark Places – by James Ellroy
Black Dahlia Avenger – by Steve Hodel
Notes from the Underground – Dostoevsky
Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790 – Edmund Burke
Winner of the National Book Award – Jincy Willett
Moneyball – Michael Lewis
Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
The Book of Abigail and John – John & Abigail Adams
Founding Brothers – by Joseph Ellis
Evenings with Cary Grant – by Nancy Nelson
Cary Grant – by Graham McCann
Cary Grant – by Richard Schickel
(I tore through those last three books in a feverish 48-hour period.) I don’t think I’m missing anything else there.
Books I began this summer but eventually put down because of sheer lethargy and crushing boredom:
Madame Bovary – uhm, yeah, I read it before, but … well. WhatEVER!!
The Whistling Woman – AS Byatt (what a huge bore.)
Er – Edmund Burke and Evenings with Cary Grant?? Okay, Sheila, you’re a freak.
Okay … between the incessant blogging and apparant nonstop reading … Do.You.Ever.Sleep.Ever?
“It’s extraordinarily rich, you want to absorb it all … takes my breath away – I want to savor every word.”
I’m resisting the temptation to read into that other “breath-taking” things about Dame Rebecca you’d previously mentioned thoughts of savoring. You see, I have more tact, not to mention maturity, than to project innuendo onto absolutely everything. ;-)
Oh God, what did I say – something incredibly inappropriate I’m sure. Something about tying Dame Rebecca up and stomping on her with my stilettoes or something?
I can’t keep track of my own inappropriate-ness.
Jezus that’s some heavy duty reading! Edmund Burke? Damn.
You’re welcome to snoop. And with your fascination with Central Asia I’d highly recommed ‘The Great Game.’
Actually, come to think of it:
Cary Grant always defined himself politically as a “traditional conservative” – so maybe he and Edmund Burke do belong on the same list.
I have clearly lost my mind.
If I remember correctly, she was actually the one tying YOU up, on a mountainside or something.
That book by Edmund Burke (well, really it’s just a long long pamphlet) was as fantastic as I had heard. He almost made me want to put down my pen forever. Very galvanizing, exciting writing.
Great great stuff.
Dave J:
I apologize profusely for whatever inappropriate thing I said about Dame Rebecca – however, I do admit I am laughing right now. How in the world did it come about that she was tying me up on the side of the Albanian mountains?
I’m insane.
I certainly don’t remember, but I don’t think there’s any need to apologize for that. I mean, I feel no need to apologize for my newly-found and ever-deepening love of women’s beach volleyball, something I may not have mentioned in a blog comment for at least two or three hours. ;-)
2 or 3 hours, huh? Thank you for your restraint.
And speaking of restraints … Dame Becky, could you let me go, please?
For the past four years I’ve used my 2 hours a day on public transportation as pleasure reading time, which has allowed me to get through quite a few books. But now I’m worried, because in two weeks I start a new job and am actually going to have to drive to work. Yikes.
But to the question: my summer reading consisted of “The Michael Connelly re-read project” (Blood Work, The Black Echo, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, The Last Coyote, Trunk Music, Angels Flight, A Darkness More Than Night, City of Bones, Lost Light, and The Narrows), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Founding Brothers, and currently Under the Banner of Heaven (aka “the Redhead reading project”).
I opened the comments box to report on my summer reading, but now have to compete with Dame Becky fantasies. Not sure I can do it.
I’m like you – too many books. This summer I’ve been reading –
–the last in the Phlip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. You know, the children’s or YA version of Paradise Lost, in which, um, Satan wins, God is first debunked and then killed and other oh so age-appropriate things happen
–The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman, mystery which seemed derivate of The Secret History
–Uncle Silas by Sheridan LeFanu
–Middlemarch, for the second time
–Villette by Charlotte Bronte
–The Madwoman in the Attic (famous feminist litcrit book)
–The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt, which is about the relationship of law and war
–a history book about the murder of Lord Darnley (husband of Mary Queen of Scots), as well as re-reading the MQoS biography by Antonia Fraser
–God’s Englishman by Christopher Hill (about Cromwell)
I think that’s it…
The Redhead Reading Project. I like that. I should get some kind of commission thing set up with Amazon!!
Oh, and some of these on my list (In Cold Blood, Notes from the Underground, Abigail and John) are re-reads. In the case of In Cold Blood and Abigial and John I’ve read them multiple times – so in that case the reading is much faster.
Anne-
Thank you for wading through the S&M Rebecca West fantasies …
I wince to tell you this (and my dad has already lambasted me): Never read Middlemarch.
I feel tired sometimes, just looking at the length of it, but I KNOW I will love it.
“I feel tired sometimes, just looking at the length of it, but I KNOW I will love it.”
Er, speaking of innuendo…
;-)
Oh, and another thing:
I read Madame Bovary and yawned my way through it in high school – when I re-read it, I still yawned.
I read Notes from the Underground in an acting class in college, actually (the teacher thought that even though it’s a BOOK, it is one of the best examples of a distinctive specific “voice” ever to be put on the page) – But I don’t feel like I really GOT it. I re-read it, and it was as though it was the first time. I must have been asleep when I read it that first time.
The thing about Middlemarch is that it’s sort of two novels in one – one being about Dorothea Brooke (who kind of has a variation of the Marianne problem – I swear, half of all 19th century novels do), and then the other bit is about a country doctor named Lydgate. I love pretty much everything to do with Dorothea, but some of the Lydgate stuff, being about English country politics circa 1832, gets a bit boring. And I confess I skipped through some of those bits this time around. Although, erm, maybe they are the point of the book, since it’s supposed to be about the early 19th C spirit of reform. But hey, what do you want from me, I like the love stories. (I think I confessed to you once that I re-read War & Peace just for the peace bits, and you told me to do an abridged version and just call it “Peace.” Similar issue here.)
The love stories in Middlemarch really are smashing, though. Quite interesting enough to propel you through it at great speed.
“the peace bits”
heh heh heh
“peace bits” reminds me of one of the funniest scenes in Notting Hill (a movie I adore) – Hugh Grant finds himself in conversation with someone – who has just done a film with the Julia Roberts character. Hugh Grant has not seen the film, but is too embarrassed to admit it. All he knows is that it takes place in outer space.
This actor says to Hugh Grant, “So … what bits of the film did you like best?”
Hugh Grant has this mortified blank look on his face … and he says in this utterly flat voice, “I liked the bit in space.”
I don’t know. Guess you had to be there. It makes me laugh every time I see it.
I like how he panics and says he’s from Horse & Hound.
Sheila,
Have you ever read What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt? It’s a beautiful, beautiful book. I’m just finishing it up now.
“…some of the Lydgate stuff, being about English country politics circa 1832, gets a bit boring.”
Funny, that sounds like the part I would find most interesting. I mean, the Great Reform Act, the biggest change in the structure and character of British government since (at least) the Glorious Revolution of 1689…that’s monumental stuff. But to each their own, of course.
It’s not that the Reform act stuff is not interesting, just not so engrossing that it would draw me back a second time. Only love & drama & real involvement with the dilemmas of character can do that for me.
In retrospect, maybe I went too far in saying what I did earlier. I don’t know if I would find that the most engaging part of the book, just probably more than you do, if that makes sense.
Red, have you seen the US Postage stamp of Cary Grant?
Awesome, I bought up every set from one post office here in Texas. I send them sparingly to people I think could use a little lust in their life! My girlfriends all wrote me back right away and so did a woman from the phone company I sent my check in to pay my bill. It’s really cool to send them to a few bill collectors…rent, mortgage, name it!
Oh I am sooo TWITTERPAINTED with CARY!!!
(twitterpainted, two little critters in Bambi that feel in immediate love…you know I am sure, the Honeymoon stage)
Anne – that reminds me a bit of Anna Karenina. There’s that 100 page discourse on farming practices in Odessa or whatever, right in the middle of the damn love story. I mean, I read it, and yes, it was interesting – but I wanted to get back to the action.
Emily – I do not know it. What is it? I will have to look it up.
Oh, and did you know that a new book was just publishede about Dylan Thomas’ early writing? I read a review of it in the Boston Globe when I was home
Sheila – I gacked this about What I Loved from some review:
“a deeply touching elegiac novel that mourns for the New York artistic life, which was of a time but now has gone – by extension, it is about all losses swept away by mischance and time. Half-blind and alone, Leo tells us of marriage and friendship, and makes the sheer fragility of what seemed forever not only his subject, but perhaps the only subject worth considering. Scholars Leo and his wife Erica admire, and befriend, artist Bill and his first and second wives–their respective sons Matthew and Mark grow up together until the first of a series of tragedies strikes. And things get gradually worse from then on, both because terrible things happen and because people do not get over them.”
And the author is a lovely writer. It’s one of those books where the characters can name-drop artists, philosophers, etc. and they don’t sound like pretentious twits.
I haven’t heard about the Dylan Thomas book. I’m just now getting started on the biographies…
Emily – that book sounds gorgeous. I will have to check it out. Thanks.
About half-way through the thing, you totally lept to mind. I promise you’ll love it.
Your recommendations haven’t let me down yet.
Er – can you say Screwtape Letters??
I can! But I’m afraid here I will have to settle for merely typing it…