Books read since last post: 6 (almost)
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Nick Cohen, What's Left?
J.M. Coetzee, The Life and times of Michael K
H. Hesse, Siddhartha
P. Leigh Fermor, The violins of St Jacques
C. Thubron, The Shadow of the Silk Road
Unlike Andrew, I am not missing Marcel and could so with a somewhat longer Proust break. In particular I could do with reading a cluster of books about China I have acquired. But in any case, I had intended to be hitting the S&G road by now, but am still stuck in Iran with Mr Thubron. The book is excellent (much better than In Siberia), but is taking a little longer to read than I had anticipated when I picked it up on Tuesday. Still, we travel to Liverpool tonight which should give me time to polish it off.
In other reading, Siddhartha was predictably a bit rubbish and Coetzee brilliant (I would recommend this book of his many times over). The others contained flaws: Leigh Fermor let down by a silly end, Cohen by sloppy logic, and Brown - the best of the three - couldn't quite make up its mind if it was a lament or a history - nonetheless should be read.
Sodom tonight.
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1 comment:
Your reservations about restarting will be lifted the moment you trot off the first few sentences. It's hilarious! I'm ten pages in, and so far it's been one camp sexual innuendo after another. One can almost hear the mellifluous tones of Stephen Fry or Richard Griffiths (a la Uncle Monty) narrating it.
What's more Proust's natural history and endocrinology (yes, really!) references are spot on. He clearly has a far better grasp of science than Houllebecq claims to... possibly even better than my students claim to! I'm frankly staggered that, as a non-scientist writing this in the 1920s, Marcel was aware that the thyroid gland regulates adiposity... his father was a physician of course, but this doesn't detract from his having an acute awareness of, what was then, cutting edge physiology.
I'm going to enjoy this book.
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