Sodom Eve (or Gomorrah Tomorrah)

Days Reading Proust: 109 (16, 64, 29)
Page: 1 S&G (nominal)
Pages Read Since Last Post: 0
Books Read Since Last Post: 8 and a bit
The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald;
The Genie in the Bottle, Hugh Montgomery;
Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad and Other Stories, Howard Norman;
Atomised, Michele Houllebecq;
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho;
Death and the Penguin, Andrei Kurkov;
Here is New York, E.B.White;
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy;
some of Eating for England, Nigel Slater

April may (officially) be the cruellest month, but February has been my first Proust-free month since we started this venture, and I tell you what, I'm missing the old bugger.

I have, nevertheless, had a productive month reading-wise, albeit with no consistency in quality. The low-point of the month with the wishy-washy, pseudo-mystic, badly written tripe that was The Alchemist. This book has sold > 60 million copies worldwide, which suggests that it might even be more widely read than Proust... heaven forbid! Atomised wasn't much better - the first 100 pages grabbed my attention, but the novelty of literary porn soon wore off when I realised that Houllebecq didn't have the first clue about science and was waffling like an undergraduate who hasn't done the reading.

The Emigrants was an enjoyable, semi-factual set of stories about displacement, which neatly tie together in the last section. I will read more Sebald. The other book of short stories I read this month: Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad was a purchase of a few years back from a secondhand bookshop, largely on strength of its title (although it turned out to have nothing to do with Gene Simmons and his popular music outfit). It was OK, nothing special, couple of nice stories but none of them especially profound. The title remains the best thing about it.

No Country for Old Men, which I finished last night, was gripping and at times horrifically so. Sadly it was let down by a weak ending, and I'm still not sure about the author's use of narrative breaks during key events to relate the outcome through character's experience of the aftermath - maybe genius, maybe just confusing. I like McCarthy, as readers of earlier posts will note. The Road was excellent and I plan to read the rest of his oeuvre, but I do wish he'd use punctuation - we have it for a reason. Death and the Penguin was also good fun. Relentlessly black humour and, to this date, the only book I have ever read which juxtaposes the Ukranian mafia with Antarctic birdlife.

The real highlight of the month was E.B. (Charlotte's Web) White's short essay, Here is New York. I bought it from a stall outside the Met on my first visit there in 2002, promptly shelved it and forgot about it until I sorted out my books after moving in December. It is nostalgic and overly sentimental, and as such is a complete delight. It takes no more than about 20 minutes to read and copies should be handed out to everyone waiting in those tedious lines to have their passport inspected at JFK. Like any great travel writing, it is very much of its time and is largely out of date by the time it enters the canon. White tells us of people giving that once popular suicide spot the Empire State Building a wide berth because of falling bodies, brass bands in Central Park being accompanied by the horn of the Queen Mary, smokestacks in the Bowery and the plans for building the UN that were to turn NY into the capital of the world. There were more glorious images and glimpses of the recent past in this book than nearly all the others I have read this month put together.

By contrast, The Genie in the Bottle, was a bleak look at our near future. The book, which is a key part of Project Genie, is intended to educate schoolkids about global warming, and the author, a friend and research collaborator of mine, wants to give every child in the UK aged 7-11 a free copy. This is important stuff - spread the word!

Still, my one and only Proust reference of the month came from Eating for England, where Nige points out the differences between the petite French madeleine "delicately ridged like a scallop shell" and the English madeleine "a dumpy castle made out of sponge, doused in raspberry jam and sprinkled with dessicated coconut [which] then gets a cherry on top, and if it's really lucky, wings of livid green angelica." He concludes, "It's a case of Proust versus Billy Bunter".

So, tomorrow we start again. The novelty of being halfway through has worn off and I'm itching to restart. We have, optimistically, been considering possible future projects, including Anthony Powell's 12 volume Dance to the Music of Time. We may, of course, be getting ahead of ourselves here - I had a crisis with volume 2, Will struggled a little to start volume 3 and former-Proustanaut Alexis seems to have given up reading altogether. Only Elliot has progressed unhindered and has already finished S&G to boot - contracting pneumonia must surely constitute cheating. Robert Proust, who edited the final 3 volumes after his brother's death, certainly saw it as an advantage, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time." Do I feel a cold coming on?