Poquette's Glorious Adventure

January 1, 2015

Welcome to my Glorious Adventure in reading! This year I am breaking my pattern of Bookaccinos (2011), Bibliomondes (2012) and Bibliomanias (2014). The new title is inspired by Richard Halliburton's Glorious Adventure, which I read in 2014 and which traced the travels of Odysseus around the Mediterranean. Both Odysseus and Halliburton indeed experienced thrilling adventures, and in my advanced years, books and what they contain represent the finest adventures still available to me.

In 2015 I am doing something different. In the past I have resisted setting goals requiring me to read a prescribed number of books because I am more interested in quality than quantity. This may explain my high proportion of 4 and 5-star reads: 44% in 2011, 50% in 2012 and 78% in 2014. But this year I am expanding my horizons to participate in the 2015 Category Challenge. In order that my reading goals relate in some reasonable way to "2015" I have committed to reading 20,150 pages and 66 books — that's three books in 22 categories. This seems doable as even with a late start I managed to read 63 books in 2014. If anyone is interested, you can look at my setup here. When I created that monster back in September wasn't I too pleased with myself by half! After the passage of time, I hope I haven't hemmed myself in too much or bitten off more than I can chew! Time will tell.

So my reading is pretty well laid out for the entire year, and almost all of the books I plan to read are already on my shelves. Inevitably there will be changes along the way — best laid plans, etc. Even though I am doing the category challenge, Club Read will continue to be my home base.

In the meantime, here's to another great year of reading and chatting with you all!

Happy New Year everyone!

Current Reading




Flanders Road by Claude Simon (1947?), 224 pp.
Heresy by S.J. Parris (2010) 450 pp.
Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson (1966), 256 pp.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (2011), 512 pp.
Symposium of Plato
A Loeb Classical Library Reader







Ratings. The reality is I rate books mostly on the basis of how well I like them. My evaluations are entirely subjective. And I like books that are not only well written but that have something to say that speaks to me:

★★★★★ A+   — Sent me over the moon!
★★★★½ A   — I really, really liked the book!
★★★★ A–   — Kept my interest, well-done but didn't quite reach the A level.
★★★½ B+   — Mixed feelings; good book but is uneven or contains serious flaws IMHO
★★★ B   — Not memorable.
★★ C   — Why did I read this?
★ F   — Why the heck did I read this????

2015 Books Read
January
Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido (2013), 100 pages, Read 1/3/2015 ★★ (Review)
The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric (2003), 490 pp., 1/9 ★★★½ (Review)
Bound to Please by Michael Dirda (2005), 525 pages, 1/30 ★★★★½

February
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353), 1072 pp., 2/14 ★★★★½ (Review)
Ecclesiastes, 14 pp., 2/16 ★★★★½
Gorgias by Plato (5th C. BC), 206 pp., 2/23 ★★★★½
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi, (2004), 240 pp., 2/26 ★★★★ (Review)

March
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (1839), 502 pp., 3/1 ★★★★
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (2008), 256 pp., 3/5 ★★★★ (Review)
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel (1992), 868 pp., 3/17 ★★★½ (Review)

Plopping my star here.

Good to see you here. Dropping a star.

Look forward to reading your reviews.

I'm sure I ought to know where that landscape is, but I can't bring it to mind. Where is it?

Wow! That's an impressive category challenge Suzanne. Some great books there and so I will look forward to your reviews when they come.

The picture at the start of your thread looks familiar, where is it?

Wow! I agree with Barry that that's an impressive, and clever, challenge. As someone who is hopeless at planning her reading, I'm in awe. And eagerly looking forward to following your progress.

Good to see you here Colleen, Vivienne, Oandthegang, Barry and Rebecca! It seems like old home week!

>6 baswood: and >7 rebeccanyc: Glad you liked my challenge! It was fun to do. Turns out I enjoyed writing doggerel, but I could never aspire to turning out real poetry.

>5 Oandthegang: and >6 baswood: Now, as to the picture on top, I purposely did not identify it hoping someone would recognize it. I was going to give a prize to the first one who did but then realized that was impractical.

So I won't keep you in suspense any longer.

The picture is of the grounds, the Palladian Bridge in the foreground and one of the several follies at what is to me the most beautiful place in the world — namely, Stourhead in Wiltshire, a 17th century estate, the Palladian house designed by Colen Campbell when the British passion for Palladian architecture was at its peak. I spent a whole day there in 2005 walking around the lake and grounds and house. It was early spring when I was there, and even though it was drizzling a light mist and was 55º, I was in absolute heaven. In fact, I almost named my thread "Poquette's Idea of Heaven" because I cannot imagine a heaven without books, and the surroundings of this estate are absolutely glorious. Not much in the way of flower gardens, but the landscaping is divine, and who would not want to live there?

Of all the great houses and estates I have visited, this one was not so imposing that it seemed impossible real human beings could actually have lived there. On the contrary, the house is quite grand to be sure, but it is not palatial. The rooms are proportioned so that one can imagine being comfortable there if one had the wherewithal, of course. And of course I do not have the wherewithal, but it is, to me anyway, a magical place.

So now you know.

Looking forward reading to your wonderful reviews again!

Beautiful photo up top, and I guess I have a reason for feeling like it was familiar to me, although I have never been to England - the style is what struck me. I visited the Palladio Museum in Vicenza last year (well, I guess it's not "last year" anymore, but in November 2013). While I was there, I also saw a number of his buildings in town, including the Teatro Olimpico.

I hope your reading plans work out for you! I am not much good at planning or keeping an orderly TBR or anything like that, so I'm always vaguely amazed by people who do that.

>9 mabith: Hi Meredith! Pleased to see you here.

>10 ursula: When I was in Italy years ago I was quite unfamiliar with Palladio and consequently did not seek out any of the places you mentioned. Alas!

As to my reading plans, this is the first time I have made such a structured plan. I think it will work out because I already own all of the books and it is still up to me to decide what to read when. A couple of years ago I listed fifty or so books that I hoped to read and only made a dent. So you are right to question whether I will actually follow through, but I am hopeful and we'll see how it goes.

Is Stourhead the one with the very political garden? There's a grand house somewhere, which I think is now associated with a famous public school, which has a garden laid out as a commentary on the politics of the day, and I keep forgetting which one it is. If it's not Stourhead, and anyone out there knows, I'd be grateful for the answer.

12 I believe you may be thinking of Stowe, and the temple of British worthies. Stowe school owns the major buildings on the site whilst the National Trust owns most of the grounds.

I always link Stourhead and Stowe in my mind too, they appear to have a similar look as well as similar names. Having said that, I've never visited Stourhead, although Suzanne's description makes me want to. I've visited Stowe many times as we live quite near it and, at one time, my son used to be in a riding school that was able to access part of the landscape gardens on the weekends. I used to walk around behind the horses and riders in dreamy contemplation.

Suzanne looking forward to your book reading, I always learn a lot from you. Thanks also for linking to your Challenge thread, I would not have come across it otherwise.

>1 Poquette: Well done on your category challenge thread! I participated in 2008 and 2009, enjoyed the setting-up of it, the possibilities, seeing connections among books. The reading was good too :) Looking forward to your comments there and here.

>2 Poquette: First book added to my wishlist in 2015: Bound to Please, which no doubt will add a dozen more.

Happy New Year, Suzanne -- you're on my starred list ;-)

Just to avoid confusion, this is a picture of the Palladian house at Stourhead. The distant structure in >1 Poquette: is one of several follies picturesquely scattered around the lake. As you can see, the house is relatively small by 17th century estate standards, and rather unprepossessing, but the interiors are quite nice.

>12 Oandthegang: >13 zenomax: Thanks, Dennis, for furnishing the requested information. I, unfortunately, have not been to Stowe and could not have answered O's question.

>13 zenomax: Thanks for your kind words. I am glad you liked my challenge. ;-)

>14 detailmuse: Thanks to you as well for your comments about the challenge. It is an entirely new experience for me. And I am honored to furnish your initial addition to your wish list!

>15 janeajones: It is good to have you here, Jane! I always appreciate your comments.

Suzanne, I am so, so impressed with your category challenge! Incredibly creative and such a diversity of interesting books. I have read a few of them and own a few more unread, but am mostly fearful of how many more may get added to my TBR piles as I follow your reviews!

Just stopped by to hang my star here and was treated to some gorgeous pictures! I got a big kick out of your A-F grading system.

"Why the heck did I read this?" LOL!

ETA: Hopefully there won't be too many of those. :)

>17 Linda92007: Thank you, Linda! Yes, that terrible TBR! I shall have the same problem, I fear!

>18 avidmom: "Why the heck did I read this?" LOL!

Indeed! I do hope to avoid those one-star wonders!

The Landmark Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert B. Strassler (411 BC)

I did manage to finish reading Thucydides the day before New Year's Eve, but all the end-of-year activities — especially here on Library Thing — caused me to delay doing a review. And even though I knew how it was going to turn out, that Athens was going to suffer a complete and utter defeat, I still felt an overwhelming sense of loss at the end. I wandered around here for a couple of days with that overhanging sadness one feels after a funeral. This reaction rather surprises me in view of the fact I had no dog in that hunt. The conventional attitude is that Athens and her allies were the good guys while Sparta and hers were the equivalent of the forces of evil. But this is a gross misrepresentation as it turns out. We in the West are heavily invested in a belief in Athenian democracy, and while Athens was indeed a democracy at home, she ran a rather oppressive and authoritarian empire abroad, and therein lay the seeds of her undoing.

The twenty-seven-year struggle between Athens and Sparta cannot be summarized — easily or otherwise! In a brief review such as this, one can only speak in generalities and perhaps mention a highlight or two.

The main reason Sparta decided to muster her forces against Athens was because she feared the growing strength of the Athenian Empire which had ballooned in the fifty years following the Persian wars described by Herodotus. And Sparta's decision occurred at a time when many of Athens' subject city-states, especially those in and around western Asia Minor, were beginning to chafe under the financial demands exacted by Athens to maintain her enormous fleet and commercial interests. Athens needed her Aegean allies to protect the grain trade emanating from the Black Sea region. And with a growing population at home and abroad, Athens needed that grain not only for commercial purposes but to feed the people.

The war began when Sparta marched across the Isthmus of Corinth for the first time and invaded Athenian territory. Pericles, who was one of the Athenian leaders at the time, believed the best policy was for people from the countryside to move inside the city walls and wait until Sparta went home. There were skirmishes to keep Sparta well away from Athens proper, but Pericles deemed it was better to absorb property destruction than to risk losing people. This routine was repeated every summer for seven years running. Incidentally and ironically, a large part of the Athenian population died in at least two visitations of a devastating plague, which may have resulted from overcrowding in the city caused by Pericles' policies. He, too, succumbed to the plague in the second year of the war.

At the same time allies on both sides scattered around the Greek mainland and the Aegean engaged in more skirmishes. Battles were not fought to the death. An attack would be made, and when daylight was evaporating, the parties would stop fighting, declare victory whether on land or at sea, and return to their camps to fight another day. It seemed that both sides frequently took the attitude they had won the day's campaign.

Both sides had many opportunities to achieve a decisive end to the war, but either through delay or misunderstanding did not follow through with their advantage. Each side believed it could wear the other down by attrition. There were a number of significant conflicts in various parts of the Greek world that lasted for many months or even several years — such as the infamous and ill-fated Sicilian Expedition, which occurred during the 17th, 18th and 19th years of the war and came close to being the ruination of Athens — but after the twenty-one years of Thucydides' account, neither side had been able to deliver the coup de grace.

Thucydides stopped writing almost mid-sentence, and no one knows why he did not complete his book, for he was still alive in Athens at the end of the war. It has been left to others to provide details of the war's conclusion. In the Landmark edition, the editors provide an epilogue that outlines the events of the final years and the ultimate destruction of Athens' fleet in an overwhelming and devastating defeat. Sparta was magnanimous enough not to sack and burn the city as the Persians had done eighty years before. What was left of the Athenian army was allowed to return home, but this marked the end of the great Athenian Empire.

The Landmark Thucydides is replete with introductions, maps, illustrations, outlines, appendices, notes and a descriptive index. It is a tremendous resource for an informed reading of Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War. It is a tribute to those who produced it, and in almost every way it equals The Landmark Herodotus. The story seems to go on and on with one skirmish after another, but the description of battle tactics both on land and sea are fascinating. And Thucydides' relentless reporting reveals how Athenian superiority at sea was gradually surpassed by the inventiveness and ingenuity of her opponents, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Thucydides is still studied in war colleges everywhere.

Fantastic first review! It looks like that edition is very highly rated by LTers. I could definitely tell from your review why the war lasted 27 years! Looking forward to reading more about your glorious adventure.

It sounds a very fine edition. You've resonated with some of my old studies I never seem to get to develop as I'd like. I've an interest in peace, did Thucydides have any wise words on that?

As always, I learn a tremendous amount from your thread; your Thucidydes review is fascinating. Not that I will ever read it, but I love that your edition has all those maps, illustrations, notes, etc.

Fabulous review, Suzanne. It is intriguing to me that writings from such a distant period are still capable of feeling so relevant today. I have Plutarch's Lives: Volume One waiting, which compares the individual lives and character of Greek and Roman leaders. It looks fascinating but will need a quieter period for some concentrated reading time.

Wonderful review, Suzanne. I read a bit of Thucydides decades ago in college and will probably never get around to it again, so your review was very useful.

Well Suzanne your review of The Landmark Thucydides was worth waiting for.

Great review- I gave that book to my brother- I have the Herodotus to go through at some point.

Welcome, everyone! It is good to see all of you! As I said above, it's like old home week. ;-)

>21 DieFledermaus: Thank you! Thank you! The high rating given to The Landmark Thucydides is well-deserved. This was the first of the Landmark editions, and the concept really helps the amateur historian understand the context and realities of ancient Greek warfare.

>22 tonikat: I've an interest in peace, did Thucydides have any wise words on that?   Not really. He was a general himself at one point — or at least a battle commander — and his interest was in causes and effects and the way conflicts great and small played themselves out. Interestingly, he was exiled from Athens in the tenth year of the war because of his poor showing in a critical conflict.

>23 rebeccanyc: As in the case of Herodotus, I suspect Thucydides is not everyone's glass of Marsala!   ;-)

>24 Linda92007: In your absence last year I read several of these heavy duty Classics, and I was also struck by how human nature and human history never seems to change.

>25 janeajones: Ditto what I said to Rebecca. I hesitate to rave about Thucydides and Herodotus, etc., because one has to find oneself in a certain frame of mind to want to tackle these books. It has taken me seventy-plus years to get there myself!

>26 baswood: Thanks for waiting, Barry!   ;-)

>27 torontoc: If you have The Landmark Herodotus I highly recommend reading it before the Thucydides. Much of the foreground to the Peloponnesian Wars is informed by Herodotus' account. The Landmark editors refined the techniques used to produce the Thucydides, and the maps are placed better and there are a number of subtleties that made the Herodotus even better than the Thucydides. At any rate, I obviously enjoyed them both.

>20 Poquette: >And even though I knew how it was going to turn out,
This. It's a terrific work that can push what you know to the side. Great review.

>29 detailmuse: It's a terrific work that can push what you know to the side. And it is surprising that a work of history could have that effect. It is one thing to know the outcome, but it is quite another to read the stark details in context of what had gone before.

Thanks!

Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido (2013) 100 pages

At my age I should know better than to judge a book by its cover, but the fact is that the only reason I bought this book was because I not only liked the cover, I was enchanted by it. But to say that I am less than enchanted by the contents is an understatement.

Stay, Illusion is a collection of poetry. There are so many things to like about the physicality of the book, beginning with the title which is a scrap from Hamlet of all places (Act 1, Scene 1) in which Horatio addresses the ghost, to the Rapunzel-like photo on the back cover of the author with her golden mane, and of course the truly enchanting cover reproduction of the iconic white buck in repose. Leafing through, the individual poem titles seem to give hope of more enchantment inside: "Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room," "A Meadow," "You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World," "Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse," "Dove, Interrupted," "Dear Shadows," "For a Clouded Leopard in Another Life" — to name a few. If this were a menu, the fare must surely be sumptuous.

After this build-up, it is with great sadness that I report the poetry herein falls somewhat short of my expectations.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that poetry is not my favorite genre, although I am not a total Philistine in that department. What is not to like about Shakespeare's Sonnets, or various poems by Keats, Wordsworth, John Donne, or even Baudelaire? And you may be thinking that I am a fine one to criticize someone else's poetry in view of the pile of doggerel I dreamed up to introduce my challenge! Doggerel is one thing. It doesn't pretend to compete in the realm of serous poetry. And Lucie Brock-Broido has certainly not written a book of doggerel, and this is not her first published collection. She is obviously a serious poet.

She is admittedly capable of producing evocative imagery, and there is quite a lot of it here. But it is hard to find a poem that takes a theme and carries it through to the end. The poems seem disjointed. A single disjointed poem is not a bad thing. But a whole book of them is a bit much. There is a sameness to it all that is wearying in the end. The stream-of-consciousness is carried too far. Yet, still, some of the poems are quite like dreams that move from one image to another.

The Pianist

Ivory sailcloth of the nuptial bed, the last fantasia, pulsing, lit.
I was besotted with the fever of the setting free.
Feedbag of meal, the feeling of oats, so soft at the muzzle of me.
Then they moved me to a sow-shaped exurb; I did not prosper there.
If you would leave at daybreak, by night I'd wait for you, at everywhere.
    Your licensed massage therapist
Loves you more concretely than I do. I, abstract, adoring, distant
And unsalvageable. She said, Give up, be palpable—all Hand.
I took to the tawny river and swam into the theater
    Of the darkened chamber music hall.
    I loved with all my heart my fear.
You were just an hallucination on my own slow way to sea.
    On the common, there were swans
Pretending to be boats that carried people
      Who imagined they felt joy.

The indentations are inexplicable, and there are many throughout that seem meaningless. If a poem is read aloud, does such preciousness even matter? But perhaps these poems are meant to be seen and not heard.

There is actually one poem in the book that I think I understand: "Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse." It is not ostensibly about what the title states, but rather I believe it represents the kinds of random thoughts one might have while doing something else. And it is one of the few poems, along with "The Pianist," that doesn't deliver an unpleasant jolt amidst all the flowery language.

And to the curious I say, Don't be naïve.
The soul, like a trinket, is a she.
I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night. I did not like the wool of him.
You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat.
They can take you down for that.
Did I forget to mention that when you're dead
You're dead for a long time.
My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering.
The chimney swift flits through the fumatorium.
I long for one last Blue democracy, which has broke my heart a while.
How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful.?
I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondely on his mouth.

As these examples show, it is difficult to connect the poem titles with the actual content.

Poetry is a very personal affair, and so the fact that I do not relate to much of Brock-Broido's poems should not be a deterrent to others for whom references are less obscure or even unappealing. I read many of the poems more than once to give them every chance, but the truth is that this poet does not really speak to me. It may be that I am too much stuck in pre-modernity.



* * * * *

I did consider giving it one star but ended up awarding an extra point for presentation!

Off to a roaring start on my challenge! 100 pages — woohoo!

Anyone familiar with Brock-Broido? I would love to hear another opinion and am more than willing to be educated. What am I missing?

Oogh, I don't think I would have liked that poetry collection either (and I enjoy modern poetry quite a bit). Those examples though, they sound like the "look how smart I am" style of a college philosophy graduate. Poetry is personal, but it's also universal in theme, or at least the great poetry is.

Messy, sloppy poetry.

Great to see a review of a poetry collection. I think poems can be admired for many reasons, but if you pick up a collection by a single author unknown to you then it is a bit of a gamble. Giving examples of poems is valuable so that other readers can see if the poems are for them.

My initial thoughts on reading those two examples are that the poems strive to come up with new images to express how the speaker feels through touching and feeling "the wool of him" and "the muzzle of me" are phrases that stand out along with "Your licensed massage therapist/loves you more concretely than I do"... This touch sensitive theme might appeal to some people.

At least the book will still look nice displayed on your shelf

Great review of The Landmark Thucydides!

That "poetry" collection sounds awful. Thanks for taking one for the team.

>32 mabith: Poetry is personal, but it's also universal in theme, or at least the great poetry is.   That's my feeling as well.

>33 janeajones: Good to have your affirmation, Jane!

>34 baswood: Thanks for your comments, Barry. I see what you mean about the tactile element. I hadn't picked up on that in particular. And by the way, I do give her a lot of credit for striking turns of phrase. She does produce some great lines. I may be expecting too much, but I have a preconception that there should be a unity within a poem, especially relatively short poems like these, and I was not able to recognize it in the poems in this collection. I will look at the book again after a passage of time and see whether I can observe anything I missed. If I do, I shall report.

>35 kidzdoc: Hi Darryl! Thank you for stopping by. We win some and lose some, inevitably. ;-)

>32 mabith: >36 Poquette: - I like the idea that what is most personal is most universal (which got initially through Carl Rogers and find again and again (though there must be exceptions to prove the rule).

>31 Poquette: - poetry eh! reminds me of many books i have tried, some i have come to like much better, some a work in progress, some no way.

She has published book of poems people have put a lot of good effort in to designing, i am guessing a lot of work went into them, it may not be Shakespeare, but I'm wondering if there is a key/s to them that might help them. i heard The waste Land last year and it helped me get it no end, he does indents.

I understand what you mean about the indentations - but they can be very important to the person that wrote them. I like them more than i used to and they don't put me off as they did, they may pace me through a poem, break things up and may also just make a nice pattern...but i am not a user of them, I'm still deciding what i think, and others may know more of what they are about. it's interesting the first is with a comment that is very destabilising of the situation, but i don't see this altogether with the later ones.

I liked The Pianist (is that it complete? it tells me a story beautifully). For a poem to be like a dream may be the highest praise -- and i get many best when I am kind of dreaming. I quite like the other excerpt too, i'm interested to see what i'd make of one of the others that have the unpleasant jolt...but they do seem of a piece with the book's title, potentially, if they give jolts. I'd have bought the book after your review but I saw the price, after pay day, I am curious to read more and it does look so beautiful. I hope it doesn't put you off swimming more in modern poetry. Have you read Sappho? I got her (clicked to her) last year and loved it and in a way found her very modern yet at the same time very ancient, effectively she has big indents. I didn't know until but many ancients saw her as their greatest poet.

>37 tonikat: Thanks so much, Tony, for your thoughtful post. You made me have to think about this a bit and return to the book to see exactly where my negative reactions are focused.

• Interesting point about The Waste Land. I had forgotten about the indents. I have read that poem many times and there are parts of it I enjoy, especially the short section about Madame Sosostris. ;-) Quite a lot of it is too obscure for me, but there are bits of evocative imagery that make the poem quite compelling. One of these days I will take the time to find some commentary on it. And I can imagine that hearing it read would be a wholly different experience! I have always enjoyed hearing poetry read aloud.

• Both poems above are quoted in full.

• Regarding the "unpleasant jolt" — she seems to be preoccupied with death and loss, but also just a seamy undersided take on life. Of course, many poets write about this, even poets I understand and like. The jolt comes because the poems seem to be about something else and then a word or a line is interjected that seems out of place. I would like the poem better without them. Here is an example, the last part of a poem called "Three Memories of Heaven," including indentations:

"THIRD MEMORY

     It was all before the bleating or the tears

That I knew the animal must know, before his mistress does—
When she will cut the path toward where he is,
Must know the scent her footprints leave in straw
Must know no heaven, even if it's there in its saffron
Slice, circled with thimbleberries, quick-silvering.
       Put your hands
Into the sheets and tell me where the needles are."

Needles?

• After rereading some of these poems, I have to reiterate that she creates some fine imagery, and I may have been too critical in my review, but still I think I shall look elsewhere for something that really grabs me.

Here is a poem that begins well enough, but then midway it starts to go downhill:

"Gaudy Infinitesimal

          By morning, you will be invisible, mon dream—
You are every rush-moth in your story, every torso, every bitch.
                     Now, you are distracting Moi.
This is my work, the infidelities of me, my own ivory hillocks, my toy
Pram filled with slippery mice, my own mares fetlock-deep in squalls
Of snow. This was at a time when certain vocables were wearing
           Out, torn from being said too much.
When you come home again, each slightly lamed creature will gather
           At our garden door. If I listen hard I'll hear the unsewn
Stitching of their improbable and awkward gaits, each one
A little wobbly from the cruelty of the husbandry; your will be done."

The imagery at the end is not pleasing to me.

• For a poem to be like a dream may be the highest praise   I completely agree.

• It has been a long time since I read any Sappho. I should look her up.

I could go on and on . . . but Tony, do you have anything further? Comments, anyone else?

I think now I'm amazed you made it through the whole book! They do seem so disconnected and completely unlikely to really MOVE a reader. A reader might dissect and study them, might come up with dozens of subtleties and references, but they seem unlikely to speak to anyone's heart or even immediately speak to their intellect.

Loved reading your take on The Landmark Thucydides.

Interesting to read all the different response to these poem peices by Brock-Broido. I'm still in learning mode with poetry. Just "listening" and taking it all in.

The poems didn't do anything for me, but I'm not much of a poetry person. I'll admit, I snickered a bit about the licensed massage therapist.

Quick reply before work - I'm glad if i wasn't coming over as a know it all -- learning mode necessary for poems I think.

I like the second new poem, I'm reading since the first (original) as these about the breakdown of a marriage maybe, and loss of illusion and Gaudy Infinitesimal about him away at work, her working on her poems, words even wearing thin and then what happens when he comes home with them, I quite like it and the idea of her words as animals (I think, maybe), beautiful gathering with her to greet him...I wondered if that (words as animals) applied to the other, but haven't clicked about that yet and also not sure I get needles, but seems linked to thimbleberries. Excuse me for inflicting my reduction, if the imagery is not for you then it's not, but that reduction made me like it. (ah i may understand third memory better if i saw it all...must buy it). Poetry has to be about the underside too -- I forget who it was, Pablo Neruda perhaps said there must be shit in poems, words to that effect.

(I'm also hoping I remember indents in The Waste Land, must check)

Sorry - I did type quickly earlier (her poetry got me going)...I have no right to say Neruda said that, someone quoted it to me once, but i have never read that. It does seem to me that this jolt may be exactly her purpose.

I hope I have not said too much giving my gloss of that poem, it is what it is to each of our eyes/ears.

Hearing the eliot was really helpful to me to stop me over reading it, especially hearing the voices I think in a pub. i put a link to the production on my thread last year, but it may not be available after a certain date or maybe outside of the uk.

Well, I had responses to everyone typed and was proofreading when the power went out and I lost it all. So I'll try again.

>39 mabith: You are speaking my language.

>40 dchaikin: Thanks so much, Dan!

>41 DieFledermaus: Yeah, "licensed massage therapist" seems too concrete for the otherwise ambiguous mood established in the poem. IMHO

>42 tonikat: I am very interested in your gloss! It helps me to see what I have missed, or to understand why my reactions are negative or positive.

A quite different image was elicited by "Gaudy Infinitesimal" for me. But that just underlines the notion that a poem means different things to different people, depending on life experience, etc. Actually, I was never able to see a cohesive theme, it seemed to jump from one image to another.

Re the Neruda reference — accurate or otherwise — poetry about the underside doesn't appeal to me any more than smutty jokes do. I am not a prude by any stretch, but if I am going to take the time to read poetry, which requires more imagination and work than prose, I want to at least have the potential of being elevated by it. Even poems of grief can be elevating.

At this point I run the risk of repeating what I have already said about the good that I saw. I guess the bottom line is that Brock-Broido's vision is different enough from mine that her poetry doesn't fully register. And that cannot be helped. It is entirely subjective and shouldn't reflect on her or me or anyone else. I am glad that you are energized by these poems.

Here's something that may amuse you in view of all this. Near the top of this thread I was talking about Stourhead and how it represents to some degree my idea of heaven. And the following lines somehow made me think of this:

"When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for
A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was,

It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly,

                     One thing, One thing, One thing:

      Tell me there is
      A meadow, afterward."

—from "A Meadow"

That is very beautiful.

I will read it, and can come to a conclusion then for myself, your thread s preface -- very good to speak of this last couple of days.

Thanks so much, Tony, for discussing all this with me.

By the way, are you going to start a poetry thread?

Ah, i hadn't thought about it yet, it kind of went out of fashion last year I think with few posting, I found another elsewhere that was thriving, I wondered if folks just go there, forget which group it was in.

I also wondered if the "your will be done" part was what you meant about the imagery at the end, because I am less sure of that too. But I'll stop until I read more.

>48 tonikat: No. It was

"each slightly lamed creature will gather
           At our garden door. If I listen hard I'll hear the unsewn
Stitching of their improbable and awkward gaits, each one
A little wobbly from the cruelty of the husbandry"

I did not get how that related to what went before, and to me it was a downhill turn. But that's just me. Hard to get into the poet's head and figure out how all the separate thoughts hang together. Frankly, beyond the initial dream, I didn't understand it. Why "bitch"? We are lulled into a dream, then a somewhat startling "bitch," then lame animals concluding with a reference to the Lord's Prayer. I could not put it together. But perhaps the fault is with me and I am just too dense to get it.

Maybe I have unrealistic expectations. I think of a poem as a kind of microcosmic snapshot of a moment, or idea or inspiration or feeling. Quite often the last line or two ties it all together. If Brock-Broido's concluding lines are meant to do this, I am not perceptive enough to get the connections. When there are too many unrelated thoughts that I am unable to put together into a meaningful whole, it doesn't work for me because I don't understand it, even taking all the built-in ambiguities into consideration that I can think of. Eventually it becomes too difficult to fathom and I have to move on. But perhaps this is too narrow a view?

Certain stream-of-consciousness types of poems don't fit that preconception, obviously, but the poem quoted above, "Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse," works for me for the reason I mentioned in the review. At least that's how I interpreted it. There are probably other ways to see it which would be interesting to know. But it still captures "a moment in the life of," if you will. Or am I on the wrong track?

>49 Poquette: Not dense, its not a question of dense, never, but it's not touching you, its not gaining your sympathy perhaps and not following hers...maybe that's a good thing for you, not to see things this way.

I'm thinking I see something in it but cannot be sure, I need to read it all -- and even if I do that's just for me maybe, I can make some very dodgy interpretations sometimes, but they may work for me.

Having written that I did have a couple of thoughts relating to what you have said, but I hesitate to share these unless you're interested. I do read bitch as ironic, a comment on the dream/dreamer, possibly, it is only part of the hypothesis I float through the poem on, who knows if I am correct, is there a correct.

The poem you like I like very much - it is a hope for a positive aimed for again, after all her loss of illusion, that such may exist, it seems to me. And I understand how perhaps her dwelling in / sharing her loss of illusion maybe not be for you, nor everyone and in fact when that is done it may not even always be for people that don't mind it.

I think it is good to be able to talk in such detail, many do not, but also do not want to take up too much of your thread, hope this does not.

I think it is good to be able to talk in such detail, many do not

I love ploughing the depths and digging for deep meaning. Someone said that the measure of an artist's temperament is his/her tolerance for ambiguity. I fear that I fail miserably by that standard because I apparently have little or no tolerance for said ambiguity as demonstrated by my relentless desire to find clarity. This may go far in explaining everything!!!

>42 tonikat: Poetry has to be about the underside too -- I forget who it was, Pablo Neruda perhaps said there must be shit in poems, words to that effect.

Perhaps the real origin of that thought was with the Roman poet Catullus who said the following:

A true poet must be pure but his works have no need to be so. On the contrary, the very thing which gives them wit and zest is that little spark of filth . . .

This quote serendipitously appears in a book I just finished reading, review to follow.

I read somewhere that some of Catullus' work was very indebted to Sappho - it's just that we don't have much of her work.

I think the filth idea and the underside idea (which may be different) may be there for lots of poets. I look forward to your review.

The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric (2003) 490 pages

In 1470 Venice everyone was unhappy in his own way. At least that is the impression left by The Floating Book. A finer collection of miserable, unhappy, unpleasant characters could not be found gathered in one place than reside here.

Ostensibly a novel about Wendelin of Speyer and his brother Johann, the first printers in Venice, that is merely one of the frames that hold this otherwise rather sordid book together. Couched in elegant prose, the base affairs connecting historic figures Wendelin Speyer and artist Giovanni Bellini to a fictional sideshow of emotional dwarves, psychological cripples and other misfits dominate the narrative.

Purported letters of Catullus, the Roman poet whose star shone briefly at the time of Julius Caesar and Cicero forms the other frame, the two stories overlapping around the initial publication in Rome and the first printing in Venice fifteen hundred years later of his voluptuous poetry which had somehow survived in manuscript form the totalitarian ravages of Church dominance.

The Floating Book contains a combination of elements that interest me a great deal — the history of printing, the Renaissance, Venice herself and her art and customs — and I was therefore prepared to like the book and looked forward to reading it. However, although it represents a massive amount of research and polished writing and is replete with a surfeit of factoids and Renaissance lore, it fell short of expectations. The fact is, the story Michelle Lovric has written is filled with people who are not only flawed, but they commit the most egregious literary sin of all: they are boring.

I could go on, but why bother? Aside from the stylish writing and the historical setting, and Catullus's poems that serve as chapter epigraphs, I found little in the way of enjoyment in these pages.

The Floating Book sounds so promising, but boring, sordid characters can certainly kill a novel -- I think I'll skip this one. Thanks for the review.

>56 dchaikin: too bad it didn't work.

>46 Poquette:, >47 tonikat: - oops, i already started a poetry thread here.

Suzanne - i was very entertained to come across Brock-Broido's name in the October 2014 issue of Poetry. In the e-version of the issue there is a page on what the authors are reading and authors use it as an excuse to praise the works they are reading. This issue was entirely British authors and one was reading Brock-Broido. I don't remember who.

>57 dchaikin: and so what did they say?? if not the details, the thumbs up or down in this arena?

>56 dchaikin: thank you, se you there

Oye. Can't find it now. I'm pretty sure her book was just mentioned as something that author was reading. Arguably just mentioning her name is high praise.

>55 janeajones: You won't miss much.

>56 dchaikin: By now you know I discovered it. Thanks, Dan, for setting it up.

>58 tonikat: and 57, >59 dchaikin: If you run across it again, do let us know.

I think I enjoyed The Floating Book more than you did Suzanne, but I also rated it at 3.5 stars. I enjoyed the historical detail and wasn't so put off by the characters.

>61 baswood: I might have enjoyed The Floating Book more without the first person blatherings of Wendelin's absurdly stupid wife. I reached a point where I thought I would scream if I had to read another word from her! I did soldier on but that was amost the limit.

Stay, illusion
I do love that, the thought and the forced pause. And enjoyed this discussion VERY much.

>63 detailmuse: Thanks, MJ! Yes, the title Stay, Illusion is one of the most pleasing attributes of the book.

>58 tonikat:, etc. - found thr Brock-broido reference in the October 2014 issue of Poetry. It was Toby Martinez de las Rivas, a very young English and Catholic poet who lives in Spain. Poetry Magazine seemed gaga about him. But his one poem there was about three poeple i have never heard of who were associated with a religious denomination i have never heard of, so it was tough for me to say anthing except that he seems to have some detailed knowledge base about what to me is obscure stuff. That is not meant as a criticism.

Anyway, all he says is : "Other poetry i have been reading includes..." and lists six poets and four books, including Soul Keeping Company by Lucie Brock-Broido. Hope that was informative. : /

This sounded possibly appealing -

In 1470 Venice everyone was unhappy in his own way. At least that is the impression left by The Floating Book. A finer collection of miserable, unhappy, unpleasant characters could not be found gathered in one place than reside here.

but this was a no -

The fact is, the story Michelle Lovric has written is filled with people who are not only flawed, but they commit the most egregious literary sin of all: they are boring.

a good laugh though.

>65 dchaikin: thanks Dan, I searched for her in the TLS and only found a catty comment about one of her blurbs for someone else's book in NB, suggesting it didn't really say anything I think.

>66 DieFledermaus: You got that just about right! ;-)

And now for something completely different . . .

Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education; Essays on Great Writers and Their Books by Michael Dirda (2005) 540 pages

This is not a review yet, but I have been reading this collection of more than one hundred essays about literature and the arts written by Michael Dirda, a columnist for the Washington Post Book World over the fifteen or so years just prior to publication. One might think that a collection of book reviews might be out of date ten years on, but this is not the case here. Perusing the table of contents, it is clear that the reviews selected for this collection have been well chosen for their timelessness. I am about 70 pages in, and I am loving this book.

Last year I did a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of Calvino's The Uses of Literature as I went along to preserve a record for myself and to share with you all. Since then I have been keeping reading notes fairly regularly and have done the same with Bound to Please. These reviews or essays are so rich and full of captivating literary lore that I cannot resist following a similar course. At least I will begin and see if my enthusiasm holds up. Thus far I cannot help coming away from each essay with the thought that I want to read the book or books described.

StevenTX has his wonderful collection of lists, and I have Bound to Please which, as the title suggests, has already contributed to my own literary education.

Michael Dirda started out as a Medievalist but somewhere along the way switched to modern literature in which he earned a PhD. His erudition and scholarship are apparent without resulting in dry and boring analysis. He makes these books sound appealing without crying out "Read this book!" But his essays, which are organized in twelve groupings, manage to convey that message anyway. Here is a synopsis of the first group which concerns books by and about the "Old Masters." I got wordier as I went along!

I. Old Masters
Herodotus: The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield —
I already had plenty to say about Herodotus last year in my book-by-book synopsis, and Dirda points out many of the charms of this ancient classic. The main takeaway here is this translation, which I suspect is excellent. Robin Waterfield translated the edition of Plato's Republic that I just read in December. His introduction, notes and running commentary were invaluable.

"The Bible Tells Us So" —
An excellent survey of the many authors out there treating the Bible as literature, including Frank Kermode, Robert Alter, Northrop Frye, Gabriel Josipovici and others.

Tales of Ovid by Ted Hughes —
Hughes did a partial verse translation which Dirda praises highly and quotes extensively. I am sticking with my complete edition.

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity A.D. 200-1000 by Peter Brown, 2nd Edition —
Dirda praises Brown's writing for its clarity and succinctness. This period of Medieval history has been neglected until recently and this book provides a good introduction. Brown "conveys a real sense of the dynamism of these centuries" despite the cultural catastrophe of barbaric invasions. Scholarly but accessible.

The Arabian Nights: A Companion by Robert Irwin —
Dirda calls it "superlative." Irwin recommends the Husain Huddawy translation. "It is all too easy to underestimate the degree to which Arabic culture, and more specifically its literature, was heir to the Hellenistic civilization of late antiquity." How many of us have actually read The Arabian Nights? Entering therein "is like being lost in a funhouse," which is a literary bazaar that surprisingly displays modern literary techniques including "early and exotic examples of framing, self-reference, embedded references, hidden patterns, recursion and intertextuality . . . Robert Irwin provides a wonderful, genial guide to all these worlds of wonder, and any page of his Companion offers plenty of its own marvels."

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco —
"This novel can be read as a poetic synthesis of the early fourteenth century and oblique commentary on the excesses of the twentieth." A luminous review! May be time for a reread.

The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance by John Hale —
The author calls it "a guide for time travelers." Emulates Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. An "investigative impression" with a "flair for the striking factoid." Plentifully illustrated. PS: There is a "Renaissance Reading List" in an appendix to Dirda's book which I will deal with when I get there.

William Tyndale: A Biography by David Daniell —
Tyndale's translation of the New Testament and much of the old preceded the King James version which cribbed heavily from it, complicating Tyndale's simpler prose. The Church's deadly opposition to vernacular translations was based on the fact that "neither the Seven Sacraments nor the doctrine of purgatory, two chief sources of the Church's power," are to be found in the New Testament. Tyndale was burned at the stake for his efforts. Useful as this bio is, Dirda says it is flawed by a strident anti-Catholic polemical tone.

A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess —
"A fictionalization of Christopher Marlowe's firecracker life." Many allusions or even direct quotes from Elizabethan literature: "We are but the guests of life, we begin aghast and end a ghost"; "I learned in Naples how to poison flowers." Who killed Kit Marlowe? Burgess is vague, others have speculated far and wide. Marlowe was a victim of his own temperament. "As Harry Levin wittily observed, Christopher Marlow — atheist, homosexual, free thinker, tobacco smoker, spy, brawler and poet — was the embodiment of all the proscribed excesses." By age 26, Marlowe had written six plays — Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine among them, and "perhaps the most famous lyric poem of his generation, 'Come live with me and be my love.'" Other fictional accounts of Christopher Marlowe: The Reckoning by Charles Nicholl, Entered from the Sun by George Garrett. Nonfiction: Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury by William Urry.

The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais, translated by Donald M. Frame —
"The most difficult of French writers . . . a Renaissance James Joyce pushing language beyond the brink of sense . . . like Dickens, like Joyce, Rabelais revels in the way people talk . . . for a book about giants, Rabelais's 'veracious history' manages to be remarkably encyclopedic . . . At times you'd swear you were reading Alice's Adventures at Finnegan's Wake." Pantagruelism, according to Erich Auerbach, "represents a grasp of life which comprehends the spiritual and the sensual simultaneously, which allows none of life's possibilities to escape." "Chaucer's Middle English is a rough equivalent."

But Rabelais remains more than a kind of rowdy vaudeville comedian. Because he presses everything to the limit — language, acceptable behavior, taste, narrative technique, scholarship — he stands among the world's most provocative and subversive writers, a perennial disturber of the peace, a carnival in himself. To read the man's work is to climb onto the literary equivalent of a country-fair tilt-a-whirl. You laugh, you get dizzy, you lose your bearings or even your lunch. But what a ride.

Extensive annotations, large glossary of proper names.

* * * * *
That's it for the first section. I hope I have managed to convey something of the appeal of these essays and the subject books.

Could find no touchstones for some books. Will investigate.

Michael Dirda ended his review of Burgess's novel about Christopher Marlowe with this scrap from Tamburlaine (Act 2, Scene 7), which I like very much:

Nature that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand'ring planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest . . .

Somehow it puts me in mind of Boethius and Chaucer and even the Dream of Scipio.

Some great stuff there Suzanne. I have The Civilisation of Europe by John Hale on my list to read soon. I Have read the Burckhardt which is free on the internet.

Looking forward to more.......

Ah -- a compendium of delights.

>71 baswood: Burckhardt is on my list to reread this year. It's been about fifty years so I don't mind coming back to it. Then I would like to read Hale's book.

>72 janeajones: It is indeed, Jane!

More from Bound to Please. Every one of these reviews/essays is a small masterpiece and the subject books seem to fit that category as well. I can only hint at what a pleasure it is to read Michael Dirda. Most of the books in the second section are biographies.

II. Professionals at Work
Vermeer: A View of Delft by Anthony Bailey —
Dirda points out that over the past century Vermeer has gradually replaced Raphael as "the most serenely perfect of all great masters," that The Girl with the Pearl Earring has become more alluring to the modern eye than the Mona Lisa. He believes "we harried moderns are drawn to his meditative stillness, to the intense feeling of mystery in his work . . . to his refusal of all visual grandiloquence." Anthony Bailey relates the scarce details of Vermeer's life in the context of seventeenth century Delft.

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin —
Pepys only kept his diary for nine years. "He records a tumble with Betty Lane with the same strict accuracy as he does his pleasure in a production of Hamlet . . . a careerist on the make in Restoration London . . . Pepys also possesses an irrepressible gusto for life itself." "An almost inadvertent genius," says Tomalin. "Highly agreeable reading," says Dirda.

Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman —
"A sprightly and touching portrait of Boswell." How did he manage to capture so much of Johnson's personality? "Apparently the young lawyer trained his mind to remember any conversation's give and take, to jot some rough notes as soon afterward as possible, and then over the next few days to expand these into detailed journal entries. As he spent more and more time with Johnson, so he learned to emulate his hero's turns of phrase. Thus, when people related rough anecdotes or half-remembered stories, he was able to recast them, when necessary, into Johnsonese." "An ingratiating introduction to Boswell's masterpiece."

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon —
"A marvel-filled historical novel" set largely in colonial America concerning the disputed border between Maryland and Pennsylvania which was surveyed by astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon and became known as the Mason-Dixon line and which incidentally divided America culturally between North and South. "Mason & Dixon is a paean to friendship, a buddy book about an English Don Quixote and a Scots Sancho Panza at large in the New World, a 1760s On the Road . . . exceptionally funny . . . a dark carnival of a book . . . still no boundaries to Thomas Pynchon's genius."

Blake by Peter Ackroyd —
"Where should an ordinary reader enchanted by the simpler poems or the sardonic proverbs go to begin exploring Blake's complex universe? Peter Ackroyd's new (1996) biography provides just the right starting place . . . Ackroyd emphasizes Blake the visionary Londoner . . . makes Blake live for the modern reader . . . Blake was always a poet of eternity as well as of the eighteenth century."

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World by Jenny Uglow —
"A grand story" of some of the last Renaissance men in England. Centered in and around Birmingham, the Lunar Society was an informal association of friends who gathered for dinner once a month at the time of the full moon so that they could easier see to travel at night. Many individuals attended at various times, but the most important featured are "scientist, dissenting minister and revolutionary thinker" Joseph Priestley, "immensely fat physician" Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather), "swashbuckling manufacturer and businessman" Matthew Boulton, "one-legged master potter" Josiah Wedgwood, "depressed and hypochondriacal" inventor James Watt and a few others less well known. "Like a good historical novel, The Lunar Men bustles with colorful minor characters (typeface designer John Baskerville, American founding father Benjamin Franklin, chemist and inventor Humphrey Davy, artist George Stubbs) . . . a book you can live in for a month or longer."

Gaah! Stop this! My wishlist is going to explode!

I'm going to have to come back to >69 Poquette: and >74 Poquette: when I have more time to read them carefully! Thanks for sharing these detailed comments with us.

Great comments on Bound to Please, Suzanne! I'm very much looking forward to the rest. I love collections of essays about books and authors, although I tend to dip into them rather than read straight through. This is a book I will definitely need to find.

I read the Arabian Nights a few years ago, in a new French translation that purported to be the original document stripped of later addition. Apparently several tales were added to the text as we know it now. In particular, all the best-known stories (Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, Sinbad the sailor) were not included in the original text. The text I read was interesting, but not great, some parts were a bit boring and the last story was strangely different from the rest.

After that, I read Sinbad the Sailor, translated by the same person I think, and a book called in French Les aventures de Sindbad le terrien (The Adventures of Sinbad the Landbound) which I gave 4 stars and really felt like a novel. Clearly it was my favorite of the three, since I gave it 4 stars (2.5 for Sindbad the Sailor and 3.5 for Arabian Nights).

75, >78 FlorenceArt: I feel your pain regarding the wish list. The whole book amounts to a new list! Re the Arabian Nights, Dirda mentioned that Sinbad seems to be a later addition. I remember reading a children's version — undoubtedly abridged — when I was a kid, but I may want to give it another look one of these days.

>76 rebeccanyc: Hope you will find these notes useful eventually.

>77 Linda92007: Thanks, Linda. I seem to have dipped into this book sometime in the past because I have found underlinings here and there, but reading it straight through now seems to make sense because of the way the book is organized. The more I read, the more I want to read!

In a brief introduction to this next section of Bound to Please, Dirda recommends The Romantic Agony (1933) by Mario Praz as the classic guide to the Romantic era. These selections seem to be more and more appealing as we go.

III. Romantic Dreamers
Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon —
Great-grandson of an African slave given to Peter the Great who eventually became a general, Pushkin "too often conducted himself like a lout and vulgarian," yet produced the "sparkling" verse novel Eugene Onegin; was killed in a duel at age 37, a hundred thousand rubles in debt. These and countless other facts are revealed in Binyon's "astonishingly detailed" biography. Binyon, a former reviewer of mysteries at the Times Literary Supplement, also wrote Murder Will Out, a study of the mystery genre.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki, tr. from the French by Ian Maclean —
Reads like The Arabian Nights ("magical"), The Decameron ("Italianate"), Melmoth the Wanderer ("weird") and Foucault's Pendulum ("sinister paranoid"). "Its fugal structure describes an elaborate interlaced pattern of tales within tales within tales . . . by turn lascivious, farcical, scary, or neatly sardonic." Only the first third was available before 1989, but the complete work has been pieced together from several manuscripts as described in translator Maclean's introduction. "Mysterious polymath" Jan Potocki (1761-1815) also published scholarly works in history, ethnology and linguistics.

Victor Hugo by Graham Robb —
"'Victor Hugo,' said Jean Cocteau, 'was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.' A shrewd joke, but Cocteau didn't take it far enough . . . the most famous writer of his time also managed to convince the entire world that he was Victor Hugo"! For sixty years Hugo dominated French literature and politics, he participated in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, he exiled himself to the Channel Islands for fifteen years, returning in 1870 in the midst of the German invasion. Not only a prolific writer, he answered 150 letters a week and left several thousand superb Mervyn (Gormenghast) Peake-like drawings. An "unquestionably magnificent biography."

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, tr. from the French by Richard Howard —
"Indubitably the English edition to acquire . . . Howard captures the modal music, the sickly sweet fragrance, the startling modernity . . . first half of the book presents translations only, the second half the French originals . . . Baudelaire's poetic universe—evocations of autumn days, sunlit memories, dejection alternating with ecstasy, satire, black humor, jagged surreal imagery, Debussy-like musical effects . . . a very human masterpiece."

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, tr. from the French by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky —
So many questions raised, aside from the one staring the reader in the face — why? do the ends ever justify the means? is suffering the basis of religion? does crime stem from the soul of the environment? what is the relationship between impulse and reason? under what conditions is suicide permissible? how much do we live in dreams? why did Raskolnikov kill and why no remorse? Detective Porfiry Petrovich is the reported model for Columbo of TV fame. "Crime and Punishment may look like a novel of realism but it possesses a disorienting hall-of-mirrors artificiality . . . sentences brim with foreboding hints." First read in grad school in Constance Garnett's translation — time for a reread in this new translation.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert (1830-1857), selected, edited and tr. by Francis Steegmuller —
One of those books "a kindly uncle ought to put into the hands of a young person who wishes to become a writer . . . soars above all other works in setting forth the proper ideals and accompanying rigors of art. Flaubert: "I envision a style . . . that would be beautiful, that someone will invent someday, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind . . . An author and his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." The letters of Flaubert "should both inspire and discourage writers of any age."

The Postumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro by Joaquin Maria Machado de Assis, tr. from the Portuguese by John Gledson —
"Brazil's greatest novelist." Machado rose from poverty to become president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. At his death he received an official state funeral. Machado "possessed an almost postmodern sensibility — playful, ironic, tricky . . . Bras Cubas is a highly original, bittersweet novel." But Dom Casmurro is "a heartbreaking masterpiece." Dirda says the Dom Casmurro is excellent but the Bras Cubas is full of typos and the intros to both are in hopeless academese. These were the first editions back in 1997. Presumably later editions, if any, have been fixed.

Tantalizing vignettes, Suzanne. Thanks.

Suzanne I said you had put Bound to Please onto my wishlist ... I'm really enjoying your snips and feel like I'm reading it already.

Enjoying reading these - there are some choice quotes in your mini-reviews.

Random comments: Glad to see they're comparing The Manuscript found in Saragossa to Melmoth the Wanderer, I usually see it compared to The Decameron and Melmoth seems like a much more apt comparison. Besides the overt Gothic/supernatural tone, the structure of various embedded stories is more like Melmoth than The Decameron.

I actually preferred The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas to Dom Casmurro - I think the latter was mostly fun and entertaining and random until the very end, where bad stuff happens.

>81 janeajones: Stay tuned! There is more to come.

>82 detailmuse: The funny thing is that I clearly dipped into this book probably when I first got it c. 2005, but my perceptions seem to have changed considerably since then. It must be due to the fact that my reading has become a lot more sophisticated in the last ten years. At this point I cannot imagine putting this book down now that I have gotten into it.

>83 DieFledermaus: Dirda did mention The Decameron, but I am now intrigued by Melmoth the Wanderer which believe it or not I had not heard of before. Something else to look into! Regarding the Machado books, it must be the end of Dom Casmurro that Dirda was referring to. Also, apparently the Bras Cubas was very poorly edited, bad enough to be distracting. Surprisingly these were Oxford publications!

As I ponder more what I said above, the mistake I made years ago when I "dipped into" this book was exactly that — dipping. I think now that one of the things that makes this book work so well is the grouping of reviews into mini-collections of books that lend at least an illusion of unity. Even though the reviews were written at widely varying times, the groupings create a context in which to think of the individual works.

The following group consists of mostly British Victorian biographies: "Be prepared to discover that Victorians led lives and thought thoughts far more unexpected, original and disconcerting than commonly believed." These subjects seem kind of dry, but the reviews make them sound more interesting than one might expect. Two that are real standouts for me are the Trollope autobiography and the William Morris bio, which are specifically going on my wish list.

IV. Visionaries and Moralists
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. —
"One of those exciting books that flash bolts of lightning across an entire intellectual era and up and down modern history." Harold Bloom: "The mind of Emerson is the mind of America." Emerson: "What is the end of human life? It is that he should explore himself." Need I say more?

Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morton N. Cohen —
Somewhat controversial because of his extraordinary attention to young girls (although never acted upon) Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's "true glory: a perfectly cadenced prose, chock-a-block with imaginative wordplay. Almost anything the man wrote . . . mingles cleverness and kindliness in one of English literature's most engaging styles." Dodgson nearly collaborates with Arthur Sullivan on an Alice operetta. He visited Charles Babbage hoping to acquire one of his analytical engines. An "altogether engrossing biography."

John Ruskin: The Early Years by Tim Hilton (1985)
John Ruskin: The Later Years by Tim Hilton (2000) —
"Of all the Victorian sages \including Carlyle, Arnold, Pater, Newman\ Ruskin may be the least read nowadays . . . he wasn't really a literary eminence at all" despite his collected works running to 39 volumes, and he "ended his life as a gentle, white-bearded madman . . . remembered mainly for the poetry of his prose and for the oddities of his personal life . . . Can any biography, no matter how fine and authoritative repair the crumbled edifice that is John Ruskin? Perhaps not . . . Hilton tells as enthralling a story as any triple-decker Victorian sensation novel." A "superb and capacious two-volume biography."

An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope —
"Nowadays one would be hard put to name a more sheerly enjoyable Victorian novelist than Trollope. Or one who in this engaging no-nonsense autobiography offers greater insight into the maddening, incomparable profession of letters . . . perhaps the only mild critique lies in the faintest hint of smugness." But Trollope is "as wise about human nature as Jane Austen — and often as deliciously comic . . . his autobiography should be read by any world-be author fir it reveals that a writer is a man (or woman) who sits down at a desk each morning — and writes."



William Morris: A Life for our Time by Fiona MacCarthy
"Morris could weave tapestry by hand, cut woodblocks, fabricate stained-glass windows, do needlework and embroidery, create intricate wallpapers, paint murals, edit a radical newspaper, travel to the interior of Iceland, found the Socialist League, and marry Jane Burden, the most beautiful of the Pre-Raphaelite 'stunners.'" Not to mention produce 24 volumes of writings. Best known to me for his designs and as founder of the Kelmscott Press and publisher of "that most sumptuous of all fine press books, the Kelmscott Chaucer, for which he made the type, borders and ornaments."

Despite his socialist philosophy this was his quite unobjectionable view of "the real nature of wealth":

Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment, and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful — all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly and uncorrupted. This is wealth.

A "superb biography — a book that one can live with for weeks."

Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman —
Wilde's life is almost legendary and the facts and the legend are surveyed in a "capacious, deeply sympathetic and vastly entertaining new life by Richard Ellman." Wilde: "Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious." And the rest is history.

A.E. Housman: A Critical Biography by Norman Page —
Housman failed his Oxford exams but went out and got a job at the Trademarks Registry. Ten years later he applied for the professorship of Latin at University College, London. In the intervening years he had published 25 important papers in the scholarly journals and his application was accompanied by 17 testimonials from classicists all over the world. He got the job and came to be recognized as a great textual critic. He is perhaps better known today for his poetry. "An extremely pleasant and enjoyable study."

Bernard Shaw, Volume 2, 1898-1918: The Pursuit of Power by Michael Holroyd —
The first volume of "Holroyd's biography has already been much acclaimed and when complete will certainly become the standard life of Shaw . . . Holroyd generally prefers analysis to narration, ideas rather than wit, the intellectual to the anecdotal. He never forgets to present a play's ideas but sometimes fails to give its plot"!

Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington —
"Excels in its anecdotal vivacity, tempered sympathy and relatively sharp focus . . . looks at Theosophy and its descendants as relatively serious attempts to enhance the spiritual dimensions of human life." Of Helena Blavatsky, "no one is quite sure how much of her biography is propagandistic myth." Annie Besant, "a vibrant former Fabian, women's rights activist with a love for pomp and ceremony." G.I. Gurdjieff, "irresistible, came from Central Asia, looked like Fu Manchu and possessed remarkable personal magnetism." Later chapters depict Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Rudolph Steiner.

Those bios sound tempting...who wouldn't want to read about someone who "could weave tapestry by hand, cut woodblocks, fabricate stained-glass windows, do needlework and embroidery, create intricate wallpapers, paint murals, edit a radical newspaper, travel to the interior of Iceland, found the Socialist League, and marry Jane Burden, the most beautiful of the Pre-Raphaelite 'stunners.'"?

I really need to read Trollope's Autobiography - I've read a pile of his books and want to read another pile, but haven't read the Autobiography yet.

Dodgson nearly collaborates with Arthur Sullivan on an Alice operetta.

Too bad about that, it probably would have been worthwhile to see. I know there's an operatic version by Unsuk Chin, but I only heard a couple clips, very contemporary.

>84 Poquette: - I thought Melmoth was pretty good and a page turner - I was just irritated by some of the anti-Catholicism in the book. The title character is a sort of Wandering Jew/Faustian-type and there is a lot of gloomy angst-ing. I usually think of it as one of the last Gothic-Gothic novels - have an interest in those, even though I thought some of them were rather bad (Otranto was paper-thin and I had issues with the anti-Catholicism/misogyny in The Monk).

With Dom Casmurro, the ending was so abrupt that it was hard to make an impact. Also, it seemed like there was some possible ambiguity, but nothing was done with that.

>86 DieFledermaus: Well, obviously at this point I cannot comment intelligently on either Melmoth or Dom Casmurro, but now that they are on my radar screen I hope to get to them eventually. You have definitely increased my curiosity about them!

>86 DieFledermaus: >87 Poquette: I admired Dom Casmurro more than I liked it, and it had a surprising (to me) modern, almost metafictional style, for a book written in 1900. I haven't read The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, although it's on the TBR, and I wouldn't necessarily think of Machado de Assis as the best Brazilian writer I've read (not that I've read that many).

>88 rebeccanyc: Good to know your assessment of Machado de Assis. I doubt I'll get to him this year, but will give him a try soon.

It should have been easy enough to breeze through this book and by all rights I should have finished it by now. However, this little exercise of producing a pithy (I hope) summary of each review has slowed me down, forced me to think about what has been written and hopefully it will stay with me better than my earlier "dipping," of which I have no recollection but for underlinings here and there and checkmarks in the table of contents showing I read a particular essay. In Dirda's words, I am living with this book for weeks! And perhaps this is as it should be for a book that purports to be "an extraordinary one-volume education"!

This next grouping presents a bit of a puzzle. Dirda titles it "We Moderns," but it is unclear why the "we" since they were nearly all born in the 1800s. Dirda was born in 1948. He says in his head note to the section: "For most of my life the 'modernist movement' defined the twentieth-century artistic enterprise, at least for Anglo-American readers. These are the writers — building on the achievements of Baudelaire and Flaubert — who first aimed to capture in words the jagged, largely urban modern, sensibility."

V. We Moderns
• Marcel Proust: A Life by Jean-Yves Tadie, tr. by Euan Cameron
• Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume 4, 1918-1922, ed. by Philip Kolb, tr. by Joanna Kilmartin
• Proust's Way A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time by Roger Shattuck
• Remembrance of Things Past, abridged and read by Neville Jason —
Reading at age twenty A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was for Dirda "a surprisingly personal adventure . . . it is no mere novel; it is a world, a universe that alternately expands into every layer of society and then contracts back into the Narrator's consciousness . . . Some people complain about the length of In Search of Lost Time. This is a little like saying that one's life is too long."
• Tadie's life of Proust is organized as a kind of "Encyclopedia Proustiana . . . a monumental piece of scholarship."
• The fourth and final volume of Proust's letters "makes a good adjunct to Tadie's biography.
• Shattuck's Proust's Way — "a critical overview of the novel's ways and means . . . a good if slightly ramshackle book."
• A massive recording on CDEs by Neville Jason features "intelligent cutting, amazing command of accents and tones and choice of musical interludes . . . an ingratiating alternative" to reading the 3,000 pages.

Memoir of Italo Svevo by Livia Veneziani Svevo, tr. by Isabel Quigley —
Svevo is most famous for his book Confessions of Zeno and for having been taught English by James Joyce. In fact, some scholars suspect that he was the model for Leopold Bloom. This memoir by Svevo's widow "cannot be bettered."

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898-1922, ed. by Valerie Eliot
Eliot's New Life by Lyndall Gordon —
Eliot admirers may want to think twice before delving into his personal life. Not that he was wicked, but Dirda's comments leave me with a sense that he was unappealing. I'll stick with his criticism and poetry.

Ford Madox Ford by Alan Judd —
"Every generation rediscovers 'Fordie,' but somehow the man just won't stay rediscovered. Partly this is because he simply wrote way too fast and far too much — 82 books, at least half of them potboilers with the second-rate tending to overwhelm the superb . . . founding editor of the English Review which, during his tenure, he made the best literary magazine ever . . . The Good Soldier . . . this anguished, beautifully achieved masterpiece, the greatest French novel in English." Judd's biography "should be read, must be read."

The Complete Short Stories by Ronald Firbank
"The name Ronald Firbank too often provokes a snicker or a giggle when it is recognized at all . . . For many an all too gay writer, fiction's pastry chief . . . In fact, he should be honored as a great master of twentieth century literature . . . he stands to later English fiction precisely as early Hemingway does to American . . . Over ten years he published a half dozen small masterpieces." His short stories apparently are not nearly so good and most were written in his teens. This collection we apparently can pass, but his novels — "very nearly the most amusing novels in the world" — might be fun.

The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and tr. from Portuguese by Richard Zenith —
"Pessoa is generally regarded as Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century . . . he invented a series of poets and essayists, gave them names, literary styles and philosophies, and then composed pages of verse and prose by 'Alberto Caeiro,' 'Ricardo Reis,' 'Alvaro de Campos,' 'Antonio Mora,' 'Bernado Soares' and others . . . Most of Pessoa's reputation is posthumous: he left a trunk full of manuscripts that have gradually been winnowed and published over the past forty years . . . one of those writers as addictive and endearing as Borges and Calvino. Certainly adventurous readers will want to explore this astonishing life's work."

No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien by Anthony Cronin —
"Never wanted for admirers . . . his first book At Swim-Two-Birds, published on the recommendation of Graham Greene: "a book in a thousand." James Joyce: "a really funny book." S.J. Perelman: "the best comic writer I can think of." A novel with a dizzying number of narrative planes . . . remains a show-stopping performance especially for a writer in his mid twenties . . . Any admirer of O'Brien will want to read Cronin's biography."

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, tr. from Spanish by Andrew Hurley —
This is the first of three planned volumes, the other two of which eventually were published as Collected Non-Fictions and Collected Poems. The translation is new and different from Labyrinths. "Borges enthusiasts hoping for an English equivalent to the French Pléiade edition, which brims with notes, bibliographical information, appendices and other scholarly aids, will be disappointed. This is basically a reader's edition . . . contains the major work . . . If you haven't ever read them, here is your chance."

Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes by Phillip Herring
Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts by Djuna Barnes, ed. by Cheryl J. Plumb —
"One of the last surviving giants of twentieth century literature \died 1982\, author of the legendary novel Nightwood, and a woman who counted James Joyce among her drinking buddies and T.S. Eliot among her admirers . . . \he\ once extravagantly declared her the greatest living writer . . . If the soaps ever need any new plot lines, Djuna Barnes's life and work will supply plenty of naughty ideas . . . Like so many of the artistically ambitious she hied herself to Paris and the Left Bank where she got to know everybody . . . Pound, Stein, Hemingway and Joyce . . . Plumb's edition of Nightwood provides useful textual and explanatory notes."

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson —
"Susan Sontag called him the sexiest man she'd ever met . . . kindness to others and hatred of cruelty and suffering were Beckett's defining personal characteristics . . . If James Joyce sometimes appears the great hero of modern letters, the introspective Beckett almost seems its saint. And not only of literature. Becket served in the Resistance during World War II . . . not enough people read Beckett simply for pleasure . . . The new biography is thorough, meticulous, sometimes revelatory, always readable . . . immensely long and detailed \800 pages\ . . . Anyone seeking a reliable and very brief life with lots of illustrations should look to Enoch Brater's Why Beckett.

Dirda titles it "We Moderns," but it is unclear why the "we" since they were nearly all born in the 1800s. Dirda was born in 1948.

Heh heh heh

I need to find a good bio of Proust - I have a short one (I think it's the Penguin Lives or something) but don't know where it is and I wanted to read that first before getting a longer one. The Tadie sounds pretty good, if very long.

Wow, didn't know Ford Madox Ford wrote 82(!!!!) books - I loved The Good Soldier and had Parade's End on the list and didn't think he'd written that much more.

I had Djuna Barnes's Nightwood on the list for a long time, but I read a review here that was very bad, so it dropped off. Sounds like she had an interesting life though.

This book seems to be mostly about books about books, or about writers... I think I'd rather read the books themselves, than books about the man who wrote the book. Still, there are a lot of names here I didn't know, and more than one will end up on my wishlist.

You have definitely convinced me, Suzanne! I had a coupon and ordered Bound to Please. I just hope I can find the time and persistence to be as dedicated a reader as you have been.

>91 DieFledermaus: The Tadie bio sounds like it is very topically organized rather than a straight bio. Stick with your Penguin until you can eyeball something else.

I was also surprised about Ford Madox Ford. Apparently he wrote a lot of schlock, which is probably why it isn't mentioned much.

T.S. Eliot's assessment of Djuna Barnes seems over the top to me. But I don't think her book is for me regardless of whether it is good or bad. But she must have been interesting. Dirda says she lived as a semi-recluse in Greenwich Village for the last forty years of her life!

>92 FlorenceArt: You are right, come to think of it, but these were the contemporary books that he was reviewing over a twenty-year period that fit into the concept of this book. Dirda has done other compilations of his reviews, Classics for Pleasure for one. So this is an informal and relatively painless approach to intellectual history, if you will.

What I enjoy about reading these reviews is the very thing you mentioned. It's a way to learn a lot about writers and what, if any, of their output one actually wants to read. The ex-librarian in me enjoys knowing about books even if I never intend to read them. And the wannabe writer in me is interested in the mind and method of the writer, such as the Trollope autobiography or the letters of P.G. Wodehouse, which are coming up. Stay tuned . . .  ;-)

>93 Linda92007: Sorry to be a bad influence on you, Linda! ;-)

This next section has 13 reviews, so I am going to break it up. Here is the first part. Three of these writers I am unfamiliar with.

VI. Serious Entertainers
Hauntings by Vernon Lee —
"Of ghost stories . . . Hauntings is a masterpiece of literature . . . contains only four long stories . . . one based on John Singer Sargent, a childhood friend . . . In nearly all her stories, love erupts as a destructive yet indestructible passion, forever entangled with violence and death . . . Most of Lee's stories are also celebrations of the intrigue-driven larger-than-life Renaissance Italy of our imagination."

Yours, Plum, The Letters of P.G. Wodehouse, ed. by Frances Donaldson —
Hilaire Belloc: "The best living writer of English. J.B. Priestly: "Wodehouse has raised speech into a kind of wild poetry of the absurd." "For anyone interested in how a writer thinks and works, Yours Plum deserves a place on the shelf near Henry James's notebooks, Trollope's autobiography and Flaubert's letters."

Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life by Mike Ashley —
"Blackwood's stories take us to those edges, those cracks in time and space and show us a glimpse of what lies beyond." As a New York Times reporter he interviewed Lizzie Borden and Bram Stoker. He studied Theosophy with Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, he was a spy during WWI, reporting to John Buchan who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (along with W.B. Yeats), and he skied every year in Switzerland. H.P. Lovecraft: "The one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere. Henry Miller: "The Bright Messenger \is\ the most extraordinary novel on psychoanalysis, one which dwarfs the subject."

Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan by John Taliaferro —
Author of ninety novels, "Burroughs is at his best at the beginning . . . when we study literature we turn to the artists \i.e., the likes of James Joyce\. . . but to understand storytelling we must honor another strain of writing, that represented by Zane Grey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie" . . . and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. —
"One of the grandmasters of pulp fiction . . . he virtually established the 'noir' sensibility" with classics such as The Bride Wore Black, Rear Window and Night Has a Thousand Eyes. This bio "will appeal mainly to confirmed fans."

The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection, ed. by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis —
This is a review of a collection of short stories. "Each of the nearly forty stories arrives with a short prefatory essay by a notable writer" — Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg and others. "One of the most original and charming writers of our time . . . generally neglected and under-valued \although he won several awards\ . . . this bearded Orthodox Jewish autodidact wrote what one might call fantasy . . . sometimes drifting into the starry realms of science fiction and sometimes into the wild gardens of the antiquarian essay (Adventures in Unhistory)."

This next section contains quite a variety of fiction reviews.

VI. Serious Entertainers (cont'd)
The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman —
"Before his death \1981\ Aickman was generally deemed the most accomplished writer of classic supernatural tales in English . . . eleven tales reprinted here, chosen from the nearly fifty Aickman wrote . . . enigmatic, disorienting spiritual journeys . . . 'strange stories' — his preferred term . . . most supernatural fiction aims to frighten or shock, or even gross out, but The Wine-Dark Sea inspires pity and terror, wonder and sadness . . . Conrad-like tales of secret sharers and hearts of darkness with the dispassionate clarity of Kafka . . . a neglected master, a superb artist."

Chester Himes: A Life by James Sallis —
"Himes's entire career consists of second acts, as he never stopped reinventing himself: middle-class black kid, halfhearted criminal, jailbird, dapper ladies' man, socialist, dockworker, roustabout, expatriate. But always and everywhere a writer . . . started out with stories of prison life for Esquire, then brought out a socialist/proletarian novel of race and social change (If He Hollers Let Him Go) . . . and finally reconfigured the hard-boiled detective story in the phantasmagorical 'Harlem Cycle,' a series of absurdist thrillers . . . the books most people know . . . Himes clearly hoped to be the successor to Richard Wright . . . Himes most recalls Philip K. Dick . . . \both\ explore the dark absurdities and contradictions of American life . . . Himes stood squarely at the crossroad of tradition and innovation . . . the biography possesses narrative dash . . . but also feels a little rough-hewn. Other books by Chester Himes: The End of a Primitive, A Rage in Harlem, The Heat's On, Blind Man with a Pistol.

Suspects by Thomas Berger —
"A consummately readable and entertaining book . . . if not in the same class as Killing Time, which it loosely resembles . . . Suspects recalls a classic police procedural . . . yet the tone remains slightly Olympian, irony tempered by wistfulness . . . Berger's twentieth book . . . the once tirelessly inventive writer seems to have settled into a niche: when he used to transform genres, now he seems content to work variations on them. A really good, engrossing book, better than any television police show it might resemble. Also by Thomas Berger: Little Big Man, Killing Time, The Feud, Sneaky People.

Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death by Christopher Frayling —
"A biography of the visionary director . . . Leone was born into the movies. His father had been a minor film star and then a director. Leone: "The attraction of the Western for me is quite simply this. It is the pleasure of doing justice, all by myself, without having to ask anyone's permission. Bang Bang!" "Once Upon a Time in the West . . . one of the most spectacular westerns ever made. This wasn't any mere cowboy movie; it was Greek tragedy in Monument Valley; not just a horse opera but an opera seria (with long close-ups of people's eyes functioning as silent but eloquent arias) . . . And then there was the music . . . composed by Ennio Morricone, substituted for dialogue . . . All Leone's Westerns were graced by Morricone's music \he also wrote the memorable score for that Italian television epic The Octopus\, . . . A Fistful of Dollars was Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo reimagined as a western starring Clint Eastwood. He had been a schoolmate in Rome. "Anyone who cares for these violent and poetic films will want to take a look at Frayling's biography."

Grievance by K.C. Constantine —
"A deeply affecting novel — not mystery, whodunit, police procedural, thriller or any of the other code words we use to slot a book into the genre ghetto. There's a murder, there are cops, there's a killer, but figuring out who put a bullet into the head of the wealthy J.D. Lyon merely precipitates the true investigation, one into the troubled soul of Detective Sergeant Ruggiero Carlucci . . . I hardly believe that novels should deal only with 'real' life. But if you're going to write about the way we live now, then you need to do it right. And this Constantine does perfectly."

Second Sight by Charles McCarry —
The fifth and last (?) in a series of five espionage novels featuring Secret Agent Paul Christopher. "Newcomers should probably start with the earlier books (Miernik Dossier, Tears of Autumn, The Secret lovers, The Last Supper) . . . What makes McCarry's work so broadly appealing is that he has managed to crossbreed the spy novel with the historical romance and the family saga . . . as much fun as a visit to le Carre's Circus . . . McCarry is as fine a novelist as the creator of George Smiley."

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett —
"Arguably the leading comic novelist of our time as well as a master of contemporary fantasy . . . The novels, approaching thirty at this point \2002\ take place on an Earth-like planet called the Discworld, where civilization blends the medieval and modern (with touches of the Victorian) . . . Pratchett uses his wit and brilliant talent for characterization and dialogue to attack every kind of intolerance . . . wants to make us feel and think as well as laugh . . . In his range of invented characters, adroit storytelling and clear-eyed acceptance of human foibles, he reminds me of no one in English literature so much as Geoffrey Chaucer. No kidding."

The following section of Bound to Please concerns literary criticism and critics in one way or another. Some of the subject writers seem to be yesterday's literary lions, but others sound appealing regardless of time or place. The Shklovsky and Nabokov seem particularly interesting. I read parts of Harold Bloom's book a number of years ago and am thinking of giving it another look now that I have read more of the Western canon.

VII. Critical Observers
Theory of Prose by Victor Shklovsky —
"Sixty-five years after it first appeared, Theory of Prose remains an exciting book: like an architect's blueprint, it lays bare the joists and studs that hold up the house of fiction." Shklovsky's focus was "on how works of art are made . . . art aims to make us see . . . to make the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this \art\ presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways . . . The art of fiction employs many devices that slow our perception and make us reconsider reality. Shklovsky illustrates by detailing the structure of various fictions — War and Peace, Don Quixote and Sherlock Holmes"! This book is going straight onto my wish list!

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 by Randall Jarrell —
"In his heyday, the 1940s and 1950s, Jarrell told the world exactly why Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams were great poets . . . he reinterpreted the canon of modern poetry . . . he was, until his death in 1965, the wittiest, cruelest, most caring and brilliant reviewer of poetry in the country . . . he could pick out every nuance of a poem . . . he felt it his duty to Poetry, not only to praise the good but to excoriate the bad . . . Jarrell's prose — awhirl with quotation, witticism, comparison and anecdote — requires a shared heritage to be fully appreciated, sometimes even to follow the jokes." This book may be somewhat dated at this point, but Poetry lovers may want to take a look.

Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers —
Nabokov's lectures, delivered at Cornell between 1948 and 1958, were edited and published posthumously in two volumes — one devoted to English, French and German writers and the other to the Russians. "Nabokov exalts fine-tooth reading . . . for him, a great writer requires a great reader, one who completes the text, paying vigilant attention to details and patterns, images, themes and metaphors . . . one must 'caress the details,' so as to reconstruct exactly the world imagined by the writer."

Nabokov on Mansfield Park: "the color of Fanny Price's eyes and the furnishing of the room are important . . . literature consists of such trifles." "Nabokov's enthusiasm for literature renews the passion for reading . . . Because Nabokov assumes familiarity with the books discussed, these lectures are less introductions than brilliant afterwords . . . they deserve to be read and reread as meditations on the art of fiction."

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom —
Written in his mid sixties, The Western Canon is in many ways a summation a Bloom's accumulated wisdom regarding the classics. The main part of the book consists of essays on 26 major writers — Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare through Proust, Woolf, Joyce and Beckett. "Shakespeare is the ultimate touchstone," to whom nearly all subsequent texts relate in some way. "Besides Shakespeare, the other element common to canonical texts is their strangeness: 'a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange . . . when you read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations' . . . In each of his essays Bloom zeroes in on an author's particular strength." For example, Shakespeare "discovered 'self-overhearing,' which allows his characters to grow by listening to themselves talk." Bloom is no friend of the ideological approach to literature under the guise of cultural studies, feminism, new historicism "and others in what he calls the School of Resentment: 'To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all . . . The true use of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, Dante, Chaucer or Rabelais is to augment one's own growing inner self . . . All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.'"

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
My Ears are Bent by Joseph Mitchell —
Up in the Old Hotel gathers nearly all of Mitchell's mature journalism consisting mostly of New Yorker profiles. My Ears Are Bent collects his youthful newspaper reporting from "the 1930s New York of newsreels, speakeasies and immigrant dreams . . . In the pantheon of New Yorker writers Joseph Mitchell is among the least widely known but, I think, the most haunting. There aren't many books that can make you reflective yet happy just to be alive, but this is one . . . A smart librarian would categorize these as wisdom literature, like Ecclesiastes."

One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux —
"No other postwar American poet is so generally admired, so deeply revered . . . she received the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for North & South and A Cold Spring . . . Bishop's selected letters is the sort of book that's easy to pick up and hard to put aside. Read one page and you'll want to read them all."

The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972 by Edmund Wilson, ed. by Lewis M. Dabney —
"Wilson treats the books he reads as he does women: they are for use, solace and amusement." Known for Axel's Castle and To the Finland Station among other books of criticism, the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s were covered in previous journals. "Edmund Wilson may not inspire warmth, but he does inspire."

United States: Essays, 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal —
Dirda calls Vidal "the master essayist of our age \1993\ . . . he divides his grandiosely titled collected essays into three parts: 'State of the Art' focuses on books and their writers; 'State of the Union' on politics and its discontents; and 'State of Being' on matters autobiographical . . . contains about two-thirds of the pieces he has published over the past four decades . . as an essayist, Vidal is frankly a provocateur and partisan."

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 by Martin Amis —
"The War Against Cliché showcases Amis the reviewer and essayist . . . the man's a genius with words, and there's an end to it . . . In his introduction to this irresistible goody bag, Amis declares that 'all writing is a campaign against cliché, not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.'"

Some lovely stuff here -- I can recommend the Bishop and Nabokov. I keep hearing about Terry Pratchett, but I've never read anything by him -- maybe someone to explore in retirement?

>97 Poquette: "to make the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived."

I like that!

>97 Poquette: I might try Harold Bloom. "The proper use of one's own solitude" : I like that - and I certainly could use a guide for English/American litterature.

>98 janeajones: I would like to read the Nabokov. Like you, I have never tried Terry Pratchett. My taste for fantasy is somewhat limited, but Dirda does make him seem more interesting than I had realized.

>99 FlorenceArt: That really is an enlightening notion, which I like as well.

>100 h-mb: Bloom has his own list of the Western canon at the back of the book, which you also might find interesting.

I should have been including the date of all these reviews, most of which in this following section were written as long ago as 1990. Dirda did not include publication dates for the books he reviewed, but he does give the date of each essay. If some seem a bit passé, the passage of twenty-five years might explain it! From now on the year of the essay will be included.

The following section includes "some older writers for whom love \or let's be clear: sex\ was central to their lives or to the lives of their characters."

VIII. Lovers, Poets and Madmen
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (1999) —
"During her eighty-one years she blithely ignored all the usual boundaries. Just look at her various personae: tomboy, ingénue, wife, kept woman, lesbian, mime, music-hall performer, crime reporter, advice columnist, beautician, and one of the chief glories of modern French literature . . . This biography by Judith Thurman will be hard to top, not only because it deftly summarizes the current state of Colette scholarship but also because its prose is smoothly urbane, at times aphoristic, always captivating." Thurman's life of Isak Dinesen won the National Book Award.

Robert Graves: The Years with Laura by Richard Percival Graves
Between Moon and Moon: Selected Correspondence (1946-1971) by Robert Graves, ed. by Paul O'Prey (1990) —
"Robert Graves always counted his prose as little more than a means of subsidizing his poetry." To that end he wrote many different kinds of books — Good-bye to All That, I Claudius, The White Goddess, The Greek Myths. "Poems, he maintained, should be inspired by and written for a simple person, and the best should be invocations of the Muse, accounts of her awesome power to grant love or deliver death . . . Graves led an exceptionally stormy life . . . a rocky marriage turned into a sturdy ménage á trois \with Laura Riding\ . . . the ménage turned into a menagerie . . . In despair Laura sipped Lysol . . . leaped out of a fourth-floor window . . . Robert jumped out a window after her . . . surprisingly both survived . . . following the advice of Gertrude Stein they settled on the island of Mallorca . . . After Franco came to power they fled Mallorca for London . . . traveled to America . . . Riding started sleeping with \someone else\ . . . Graves found himself on a boat back to England." Graves: "Funny life, ain't it?" Between Moon and Moon is the second volume of Graves' letters, the first being In Broken Images. "For anyone with a taste for outrageous, deeply amusing literary scandal, books about Robert Graves and Laura Riding are quite unputdownable."

The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell
The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell
Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell (1990) —
"Powell wrote thirteen novels \between 1948 and 1962\ and was sometimes unkindly called the second Dorothy Parker. She spent most of her life in Greenwich Village where much of her fiction takes place . . . she claimed that the Satyricon was her favorite novel, and she adopts very much its style in her own work: life as a sideshow; terrific party scenes; easy sexual liaisons; an atmosphere of brittle wit, desperation and venality; an airy, tart prose; plot developments growing out of continual misunderstanding; mini-disquisitions about art, life, fortune . . . turning the pages is like listening to Gore Vidal at his most serenely malicious." She was his protégé, by the way. Still, Dirda says she deserves to be read.

A Howard Nemerov Reader (1991) —
Selections from his poetry, short fiction and essays. He was our third poet laureate (news to me) and served as poetry reviewer for the Kenyon Review. He wrote a useful introduction to Proust, The Oak in the Acorn. "His poems are clear and musical, sometimes funny, sometimes religious, always engaging . . . a very good book, worth buying, reading and keeping."

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt (1990) —
Finally, a book everyone knows, either through actually having read it or at least seen the movie! "At once highly traditional and eminently postmodern, this is a fiction for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable supernatural mystery that starts with an old book in a London library and ends on a storm-wracked night in a churchyard before an open grave. It is above all an uncanny work of literary impersonation, for Byatt recreates the letters, journals, poems . . . of a dozen characters . . . Possession is in every way an altogether magical performance, a prodigious act of literary ventriloquism."

The Complete Fiction of W.M. Spackman, ed. and with an afterword by Steven Moore (1997) —
"Hardly a writer to every taste — some women readers in particular may find him objectionable — but he possesses what every writer yearns for: an unmistakable voice . . . sometimes books and authors such as this are fatuously dismissed as outside the mainstream. In fact, masterpieces are always outside the mainstream." A former classics professor, he wrote An Armful of Girl (1978), his most famous novel; A Presence with Secrets (1980); A Difference of Design (1983), A Little Decorum, for Once (1985), and others. I had never heard of this writer.

Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy by Ben Sonnenberg (1991) —
Here is another writer who is completely unknown to me, and I suppose he will thus remain. This is the autobiography of a wealthy New York rake who spent his youth chasing skirts, married in his thirties, came down with Multiple sclerosis, founded a literary magazine called Grand Street, and he stopped only when he could no longer turn pages. In his mid fifties \1991\ he dictated his autobiography: "Reading books, buying art, writing unproduced plays, seducing women: not much of a life." Whatever.

Licks of Love: Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered" by John Updike (2000) —
I started to read one of his "Rabbit" novels when it first came out many decades ago and decided I didn't care for Updike. I've never tried again, and now Dirda tells me, us, that "John Updike is our Flaubert"! He calls him "a word artist whose fifty and more books are all beautifully, carefully written: he may be the only American novelist one could happily read just for his turns of phrase and handsomely tailored sentences." This sounds like my kind of writer, but I think it comes down in the end to differences in point of view. Updike's world and mine are separated by a great divide. Updike fans will surely have already read this collection of short stories which includes a novella-length sequel to the "Rabbit" series.

I wish I could reproduce Dirda's headnote to this next section entire because his words resonate, but let me hit the highlights:

Every reader learns to recognize his 'fatal type,' the writers to whom he automatically loses his heart. Mine goes out to those who play with language and attempt something new with form. The resulting books may be difficult to read, or seemingly unserious or gamelike, or even requiring decipherment. But these original artists are often the ones who matter most.

Calvino: "Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement."

A novel is a realm of words . . . What matters is aesthetic delight, the shape of sentences, the myriad arrangements of light and shade, black and white, architectonics.

Some of these highly creative novels are also the most difficult and they aren't all for everybody. Even those of us who are attracted are often disappointed. So we must still know ourselves well enough to find the novels among them that speak to us.

IX. Magicians of the Word
Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau, tr. by James Sallis (1993) —
Queneau, who died in 1976, is probably best known to Americans as one of the founders of OULIPO, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or the Workshop for Potential Literature, of which Italo Calvino and Georges Perec were members. Queneau was the founding director of Gallimard's Pleiade Encyclopedia. His Exercises in Style and Zazie in the Metro have been available in English for some time, but he also wrote more than a dozen other novels, ten books of poetry plus several collections of essays. His novel Saint Glinglin came out in 1948 but was just translated into English in 1993. One cannot say it is typical Queneau because "each of his books is an original, each has its boisterous fans . . . Playfully ingenious, witty, Queneau's novels tend to focus on holy fools who participate in ordinary life with a kind of inner detachment that comes to seem like the deepest wisdom."

Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. by Matthew Yorke
Loving / Living / Party Going by Henry Green
Nothing / Doting / Blindness by Henry Green (1993) —
Often labeled as comedies of manners, Green's books "all share certain characteristics: a highly dramatic structure, light punctuation and languid syntax, elusive symbols, a vaguely hallucinatory feel, and an uncanny ability to reproduce the way people — millworkers or millionaires — actually talk. Updike and Eudora Welty regarded Green with something approaching awe." Evelyn Waugh: "Henry is a genius. I am not a genius." V.S. Pritchett: "better than anyone living about sexual life." W.H. Auden: "the best novelist alive." Dirda asks, "if Green is so good why isn't he as famous as (Henry) Graham Greene? . . . he somehow manages to turn the 'broken bottles of our lives' into art." Green: "Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuations . . . Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers . . . it should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of stone." "Readers who care about the art of fiction will always, sooner or later, make their way to them. Start with Loving."

Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos (1994) —
As a member of OULIPO, Perec was interested in exploring new methods of literary composition. Surprisingly — and this is wonderful — the adoption of formal constraints resulted in an "unexpected freeing of the imagination." Something to think about. Perec's best known work is Life a User's Manual (La Vie Mode d'Emploi), a demonstration of how OULIPian methods could be applied to an 800-page novel. This is on my list of books to read this year. Bellos' book is "an ideal, if leisurely introduction to Perec's work as well as a deeply engrossing biography."

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (1979) —
In a postscript Dirda points out that this is the earliest review reprinted in Bound to Please. Several years ago I read Crystal Vision (1999) by Sorrentino, which had the earmarks of an OULIPian construct, and while it was amusing up to a point, it frankly became rather tiresome and I am surprised in retrospect that I even bothered to finish it. Mulligan Stew is an earlier effort by twenty years, which Dirda calls "outrageously dazzling . . . Sorrentino's masterpiece . . . Essentially, the book parodies cheap fiction, bad poetry, academic criticism." I shall reserve judgment.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1981) —
While Dirda doesn't mention James Joyce in this review, his description of Riddley Walker puts me in mind of the writer who likes to play with language to the extent that it becomes more like a foreign language or an earlier version of English. This novel takes place in a post-nuclear age, at least 2,500 years after the "1Big1" which occurred in 1997, in which what is left of the world has been bombed back to the Stone Age. Virtually all knowledge has been lost — all but "shadows and shards of the past survive." Dirda describes it as a powerful and difficult novel, one I think I'll pass. Although I enjoyed The Medusa Frequency, this sounds like something very different.

Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel by Julián Rios, tr. from Spanish by Richard Alan Francis, et al. (1991) —
Fans of the most outré examples of postmodern fiction — Finnigan's Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, Life A User's Manual — will be interested in Larva and its sequels. Translated from Spanish with the help of the author, "it contains five different planes of text: narrative on the right hand page; footnotes on the left; explicatory 'pillow notes' at the back; an index and a set of photographs. The main action of this tower of babble describes a phantasmagoric party held in London on Midsummer's night." Apparently not for the fainthearted.

Landor's Tower, or the Imaginary Conversations by Iain Sinclair (2001) —
The narrator has been commissioned to write a novel about Walter Savage Landor, but that seems to be merely a pretext for everything else served up in this novel. Sinclair apparently became "something of a cult author in Britain" after publication of his first novel, White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (1987) which touches on Jack the Ripper. Apparently Sinclair is not for everyone, but he sounds interesting.

More great books.

I can recommend:
The War against Cliche
Secrets of the Flesh and of course anything by John Updike

I guess I will just have to try and get to all those other books on the list.

>103 Poquette: Riddley Walker is in my TBR list - has been for some months now - but I'm a bit afraid to start it. English is a foreign language for me and this kind of "English" is daunting. I gues I'll have to dive and let me sink in it. In my experience, when the language feels alien for some reason, there is no swimming to the surface, one has to dive and hope the local sea god will help with the breathing! I sank in the16th century old French as in Bourdet's invented language in Le Saperleau and didn't drown. So let's hope...

>97 Poquette:
>98 janeajones:

Second the Nabokov recommendation. It's an education in how to read.

Okay, I just ordered my copy of Bound to Please! Another list to track.

I loved Riddley Walker when I read it shortly after it first came out, but I was absorbed in a lot of Middle English literature at the time. I think probably one really needs to enjoy language and linguistics to get into. I should go back and read it again.

Even more interesting sounding books.

I was familiar with The Wine Dark Sea by Aickman only because of LT touchstones - kept getting that instead of Leonardo Sciascia's short story collection, The Wine Dark Sea. Good to know what it's about. Sounds like a good read.

Agree with you about the Shklovsky - I also have another book by him on the pile, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love.

I have the Colette bio and some Dawn Powell books on the library list. Loved the description of Powell's work.

I like the idea of a fatal type, which we lose our hearts to.

And Dawn Powell is a fantastic writer, although I don't think the comparison to Dorothy Parker diminishes her. They share the same biting wit and ability to get to the heart of outwardly unpleasant or frivolous characters.

Great thread. I have already added a number of books to my ever expanding wish list!

Another book which some on this thread may enjoy is The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike. Some great stories by some wonderful writers, and if you enjoy writing as well as reading this is almost a definitive guide to how a short story should be written.

Greetings everyone! Good to see you here.

>104 baswood: Appreciate your affirmations of the Collette bio (>102 Poquette:) and Martin Amis's essays (>97 Poquette:).

>105 h-mb: I understand your reluctance to approach books that play with language to the extent that Riddley Walker apparently does. English is my first language and I am reluctant, although I did enjoy reading Chaucer in the original Middle English a few months ago. It does take work, and one has to be prepared and in the right mood. Sometimes one simply wants to read a book that communicates directly in plain language.

>106 March-Hare: I am looking forward to the Nabokov, sooner rather than later.

>107 StevenTX: Just what you needed — another list! ;-)   But I am glad I was able to entice you.

>108 janeajones: one really needs to enjoy language and linguistics   Re Riddley Walker, I agree, and as I said above, I also think you need to be in the mood for the challenge.

>109 DieFledermaus: I am not a huge fan of the supernatural, so I probably won't get to Robert Aickman's stories, but I am glad to know about them. Glad to have your thoughts re Viktor Shklovsky and Dawn Powell. She was a revelation to me.

>110 RidgewayGirl: Every reader learns to recognize his 'fatal type,'   I love that notion as well. Comparisons like Dirda's of Dawn Powell to Dorothy Parker are often in the eye of the beholder. It can be so limiting.

>111 AlisonY: Thanks very much! Also I appreciate your suggestion re The Best American Short Stories of the Century. I will look for that.

Dirda says of the books in this category: "Those are the ones I hope people will go out to discover . . . they possess a seriousness about life that is useful for Americans to know about. To be adult is to be, in some sense, European."

Europeans, I bow to your superiority! ;-)

X. The Europeans
The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth, tr. from the German by Michael Hoffman (1999) —
"An elegist of the tattered Austro-Hungarian Empire . . . Roth was said to be a major novelist by Nadine Gordimer and Joseph Brodsky among others . . . The Tale of the 1002nd Night (1939) is sexy, highly ironic, sophisticated and funny . . . it touches on congenial themes: how even the most experienced — a Middle Eastern potentate, a career army officer, a whore — may be fundamentally innocent; how a single impulsive act may echo through the years, how any of us can lose his way when life so often seems like a dream or a badly written play . . . Roth reflects an appealing Central European suavity, a mix of the elegiac, ironic and dryly humorous . . . What a marvelous writer." Other books by Joseph Roth: Hotel Savoy (1923), The Radetzky March (1932) and The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939).

Life of a Poet: Rainer Marie Rilke by Ralph Freedman
Uncollected Poems by Rainer Marie Rilke, tr. by Edward Snow (1996) —
"Any fervent admirer of Rilke — regarded by many as the greatest European poet of the \20th\ century — would do well to avoid Freedman's enormously detailed and scrupulously researched biography; on page after page it portrays one of the most repugnant human beings in literary history . . . Rilke the man is hard to pardon or excuse." Regarding Uncollected Poems, "despite the title, the hundred or so pieces here are hardly dregs . . . much of it is outstanding . . . I still wish he'd been nicer to people so that one could admire the man as one does so many of his poems."

Embers by Sándor Márai, tr. from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (2001) —
"There is a subcategory of mainly European fiction to which one might give the name wisdom literature," like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. "Think of Turgenev's First Love, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Lampedusa's The Leopard, Mann's Death in Venice, Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. Embers takes its own place among this distinguished company . . . Sándor Márai was born in 1900, became one of Hungary's leading writers during the 1930s, fled the communists in 1948, and committed suicide in San Diego in 1989 . . . Embers is as masterly and lovely a novel as one could ask for, evoking the memory of unspoken passion, the loss of illusion, the crumbling of an empire . . . Embers is perfect."

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. by Nathalie Babel, tr. from the Russian by Peter Constantine (2001) —
"Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is generally regarded as the finest Russian short story writer since Chekhov . . . The Complete Works includes the 1920 diary, preliminary sketches for many stories, reportage on life in Petersburg, France and Georgia, two plays and several movie screenplays, a brief introduction by Cynthia Ozick . . . What counts most, of course, are the stories: the brutal vignettes of the Red Cavalry cycle; the exuberant Odessa tales about Benya Krik the gangster; and the astonishing later examples of faux autobiography . . . Babel was both a patriotic Soviet citizen \although he was executed in 1940\ and a Jewish intellectual . . . Much of his work's energy derives just from this sort of polarity."

Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography by Leslie Milne (1991) —
"Of the Russian writers who made their mark after the revolution, one of the most appealing is Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) . . . his last, sunset novel, The Master and Margarita . . . one of the high points of modern literature . . . This new critical biography focuses principally on detailed exegesis of the major works. The result is thorough but academic . . . for confirmed admirers . . . others should first treat themselves to The Master and Margarita."

Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait by Jerzy Ficowski, tr. by Theodosia Robertson (2002) —
"A must buy for Schulz admirers . . . Schulz was a builder of a reality asylum that was a marvelous 'intensification of the taste of the world.'" Dirda saw many of the same positive things I saw in Schulz: "Loose plots may be unearthed in a few of the stories, but narrative precision isn't really what Schulz cares about: he is a poet of metaphorical wildness. Descriptions of nature and the seasons, philosophical arias, crazed situations are yoked together to create dark carnivals, exhibits of bizarrerie . . . Schulz possesses 'the wondrous ability to transmute the commonplace into the bewitching.'"

One of these days I'll give Schulz another try, but in the meantime, this bio is going on my wish list. Schulz's two books: The Street of Crocodiles (1934) and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937).

The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe de Lampedusa by David Gilmour (1991) —
The Leopard (1958 has been compared to Gone with the Wind. "The parallels are obvious . . . The great catastrophe of Lampedusa's life arose from the destruction of his family's palazzo by American bombs during the Second World War. The resulting sense of personal devastation lingered for years, influencing the Proustian wistfulness of The Leopard . . . This is a fine short biography entertaining in itself and likely to send many readers back to The Leopard, that ideal book for the end of any long hot summer.

Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner (1995) —
"In the view of many critics, Paul Celan (1920-1970) is the finest postwar European poet. For most readers he may be the most difficult as well. His verse is compact, elliptical, deeply haunted by the Holocaust. In a Celan poem, the words lie on he page like drops of blood . . . He is the poet of anguished remembrance . . . Felstiner's biography focuses on the life chiefly as a means of elucidating the life work . . . Felstiner fails to satisfy human curiosity about the man, but he excels at illuminating the poetry."

That Mighty Sculptor, Time by Marguerite Yourcenar, tr. from the French by Walter Kaiser (1992) —
"Like all philosophical novelists Yourcenar (1903-1982) is obsessed with mortality: 'We are all alike, and the same fate lies in store for all of us' . . . Her somber sense of life will not appeal to everyone. But for those able to approach her as she deserves, she is likely to become a favorite author. One good introduction might be through her essays, gathered in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and That Mighty Sculptor, Time . . . Together they display a moralist and critic of remarkable range and sympathy."

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard, tr. from the German by David McClintock (1995) —
"The last novel he completed before his death in 1989 . . . proved to be my kind of book . . . essentially a 300-page interior monologue . . . Murau \the narrator\ makes explicit his hatred (and Bernhard's) for Austria's Nazi past, its socialist present, and its catholic culture. The particular fineness of Extinction lies in its depiction of a consciousness in action: Murau, it turns out, can be weak, admirable, reprehensible or mean spirited, but his mind, as depicted on the page, seems absolutely true to life."

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, tr. from the German by Anthea Bell (2001) —
"Few authors have won such widespread admiration and acclaim in so short a time as W.G. Sebald . . . he didn't start publishing until well into middle age . . . his death in 2001 in an auto accident unexpectedly cut short his brilliant late flowering . . . What holds all his work together is his brokenhearted voice and warmhearted personality . . . his four books — besides this one they include The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo — blithely ignore genre boundaries: Are they novels? Memoirs? Essays? It is impossible to say where the factual leaves off and the fiction begins . . . If you're completely new to Sebald, you should probably start with his early masterpiece The Emigrants, four accounts of lives stunted by exile . . . Sebald's are some of the most exhilarating books of our time."

"on page after page it portrays one of the most repugnant human beings in literary history . . . Rilke the man is hard to pardon or excuse."

Had no idea...

>114 dchaikin: That surprised me as well.

Michael Dirda tells us in the headnote to this penultimate section of Bound to Please that "most of these books are highly polished literary fantasies, glimpses of dark worlds or magical realms, sometimes antiquarian romances or great fairy tales . . . all the books and writers here fulfill Willa Cather's injunction that 'Every great story . . . must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.'

I read Philip Pullman's trilogy a few years ago and for whatever reason I did not like it, could not understand what all the hype was about with The Golden Compass. Robertson Davies has been on my watch list for several years but he hasn't yet bubbled to the top — maybe next year. And two writers whose names are new to me — Steven Millhauser and David Markson — are going right on my wish list.

XI. Writers of Our Time
What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies (1985) —
"Robertson Davies is the sort of novelist readers can hardly wait to tell their friends about . . . If Garcia Marquez practices 'magic realism,' then Davies specializes in what might be called 'melodramatic realism' . . . In What's Bred in the Bone he includes an idiot child, a bartered bride, a father-and-son spy team, several faked paintings, Nazis, Oxford communists, the Holy Grail, astrology, King Arthur's Tintagel, a dead dwarf, a millionaire art connoisseur, Bronzino's Allegory of Time and a pair of angels . . . he weaves them all together so beautifully that a reader just sighs with pleasure as he turns the pages . . . Davies, author of the Deptford trilogy, went on to write other good novels, but this remains, in my view, his masterpiece."

Little Kingdoms: Three Novellas by Steven Millhauser (1993) —
"No one alive, except perhaps James Salter or John Crowley, can write more beautiful prose. And no one since Borges or Calvino has composed such spellbinding literary fantasies . . . each is a little world made as cunningly and as exquisitely as a Fabergé egg . . . Millhauser likes to recreate an artifact, often transmuting the throwaway — a guidebook, a catalog, a classic comic, even a game of Clue — into something rich and strange. Similarly, he may fragment a narrative into glittering shards, then scatter these shiny bits and pieces upon the page with seeming artlessness . . . the life of the world and the life of the imagination has long been Millhauser's recurrent theme . . . he won the Pulitzer Prize for his short novel Martin Dressler, but he remains at his finest in the long short story or novella. See such collections as The Knife Thrower or The King in the Tree.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1992) —
"In Ben Okri's 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel, the ghostly world of preexistence is all too close and frighteningly real . . . \The protagonist\ Azaro's adventures in anima-land, described in a dithyrambic prose that blends Revelation, almost Blakian symbolism and African folklore . . . seem to be suggesting an analogy between the Other World and ours . . . a novel of vast ambition and equal achievement, alive with magic, allegory, lyrical prose, sly humor . . . The Famished Road suggests a fusion of the two most famous Nigerian novels, Amos Tutuola's fantastic, word-mad The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Chinua Achebe's soberly tragic Things Fall Apart.

Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx (1996) —
"A group of eight linked stories . . . a panoramic tour of America's ethnic past . . . Proulx creates a green button accordion which comes to be owned by a score or so working-class people during the hundred years of its knockabout existence . . . mini-sagas set in Louisiana, Maine, Chicago, the West . . . If one may criticize Accordion Crimes ever so mildly, it is only for its relentless existential bleakness. No one here gets out alive . . . And yet Accordion Crimes is not a depressing book."

Cities of the Plain, Volume 3 of the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy (1998) —
"Cities of the Plain makes clear that the gods have so arranged our lives as to guarantee that nobody is happy very often or for very long . . . In several ways \it\ feels quite different from the first two books of the series \All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994)\ — more contemporary and urban, narrower in focus, at times overemphatic . . . largely about our human propensity for hopefulness and self-delusion . . . Though the plot may be slightly disappointing, its language still soars."

Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin (1995) —
"One of the best American writers of our time. Any doubters need only try Mrs. Ted Bliss, his latest and last novel, to see how language, keen observation and a pervasive sense of the still sad music of humanity may combine in a work of art that is also a tour de force . . . Democritus was sometimes called the laughing philosopher. Just so Stanley Elkin might be considered our laughing philosophical novelist. His amazing books can crack you up and make you cry and leave you marveling."

The Tunnel by William H. Gass (1995) —
Dirda praises Gass to the skies as a writer and a stylist but then tells us the hero of The Tunnel does not invite admiration: "A bigot and a Nazi sympathizer, this fat professor sexually exploits his students, mocks his colleagues, scorns his wife and ignores his children." This probably will not go on my wish list.

Reader's Block by David Markson (1996) —
"In Reader's Block Markson has actually come close to creating that ultimate novel dreamed of by the critic Walter Benjamin: one consisting entirely of quotations . . . Markson imagines that a character called Reader is trying to draft a narrative about a Protagonist who is living either in a cemetery or on a beach. This tiny novelistic plot is then bejeweled with a series of literary anecdotes and lugubrious factoids, random lists and sorrowful observations that build up through verbal pointillism, a picture of the artist's vocation as one of madness, deprivation and early death . . . each page of this novel offers a chance to test the breadth and depth of one's own reading. For many, the result will be quite unputdownable . . . Markson's 'seminonfictional semifiction' is exhilarating, sorrowful and amazing. Indeed, a minor masterpiece." Also by David Markson: Ballad of Dingus Magee (1965), Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), This Is Not a Novel (2001) and Vanishing Point (2004).

A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (1994) —
"The novel's plot incorporates three main lawsuits . . . nearly any page will elicit a laugh, or more often a rueful smile . . . a dramatic quality is reinforced by Gaddis's heavy reliance on dialogue . . . the characters create ht situation . . . for the readers to read and be swept along, to participate and enjoy it and occasionally chuckle along the way . . . on the whole this remains a superb comic novel."

The Amber Spyglass, Book 3 of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (2000) —
"Many grown-up readers are likely to bristle at its theological and ontological daring: this so-called young adult novel takes on the central religious tradition of the West and finds it wanting — not only wanting but downright evil. Think of this trilogy \The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass\ as a counterblast to C.S. Lewis's Christian science fiction and his celebrated chronicles of Narnia. Pullman is of the devil's party, William Blake's party, and he knows it. He has written the best, deepest and most disturbing children's fantasy of our time. By comparison, the agreeable and entertaining Harry Potter books look utterly innocuous . . . This is heady stuff for a children's book . . . in the end, the Dark Materials trilogy is an ode to the joy of living in a physical world, a hymn to flesh, to exuberance, to the here and now, to free thought, imagination and feeling, to nobility of spirit."

Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997) —
"Think of Underworld as a great Victorian-style panoramic novel — The Way We Live Now, say — or even as a twelve-part miniseries titled perhaps "Cold War and Remembrance." DeLillo's masterpiece provides both a cultural history of America during the Bomb era and a suspenseful journey into the past . . . One eventually discovers that Underworld operates as a kind of hypertext, a never-ending series of narrative links . . . Imaginative fiction still flourishes. Let us read and rejoice."

I didn't find The Golden Compass to be anything particularly special. It was certainly over-hyped, and pales hugely in comparison to Sabriel by Garth Nix.

Interesting comments. But, Dirda, where are the woman?

>117 mabith: i felt the same way (although i haven't read or heard of Nix)

>117 mabith: >119 dchaikin: Garth Nix is new to me as well. That makes three of us who were underwhelmed by The Golden Compass.

>118 dchaikin: Dirda, where are the woman?

From previous posts:
Claire Tomalin
Jenny Uglow (The Lunar Men)
Madame Blavatsky
Valerie Eliot (ed., T.S. Eliot's letters)
Djuna Barnes
Vernon Lee (aka Violet Paget)
Frances Donaldson (ed., Wodehouse's letters)
Elizabeth Bishop
Judith Thurman
Dawn Powell
A.S. Byatt
Nathalie Babel (ed., Complete Works of Isaac Babel)
Marguerite Yourcenar

Still to come:
Penelope Fitzgerald
Nancy Mitford (letters)

Not a great percentage by some standards. But 15 out of 120 is higher than my own average in any given year. (Last year: 5 women out of 63 books read.)

I'm not sure why Garth Nix isn't more widely known (at least among the people I talk books with). He builds really original worlds. The Sabriel trilogy is YA but could fit well in the adult section too. He also wrote a fantasy series for younger children (The Keys to the Kingdom) which is immensely good. I feel like it's harder to write great fantasy/sci-fi for the younger set. The fantasy world in it is really interesting. I'm re-reading the first in that series, Mister Monday, now and I remain so impressed by it.

I read all of Philip Pullman's trilogy and that made me very angry at him. First, he committed the literary crime (for me) of overtelling and not leaving any room for my imagination. Second, and much worse, he wrote a work of religious propaganda aimed at children. I get angry just thinking about it, especially since his religion consists mostly of hatred for one specific church, and a bunch of mumbo jumbo about souls and the afterlife. It's bad enough when you're talking to adults, but children are already subject to enough religious crap as it is, in my humble opinion.

I never got past page 50 of The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights as my copy is called) and it's quite rare for me to give up on a book. I keep thinking I should give it another go, but maybe not considering other people's opinions here.

>121 mabith: I looked up Garth Nix and the reason he hadn't stuck in my memory is that I am not really into fantasy. That's a whole area I have completely missed.

>122 FlorenceArt: and >123 valkyrdeath: His Dark Materials and especially The Amber Spyglass were very controversial at the time of publication. It was some article I read at the time that piqued my interest and caused me to read the entire trilogy in record time. The world Pullman created did not appeal to me at all, and the third installment was quite offensive to many people. I am not religious but even I did not care for his broadsided attack.

All the writers in this final section are British, and the other thing they have in common, according to Dirda, is that they are "masters of the barbed sentence, the casual put-down, the faux-naif and the snootily sophisticated."

XII. Performing Selves
Ackerley: The Life of J.R. Ackerley by Peter Parker (1990) —
He has been called "the greatest literary editor of our time and one of the best writers of prose in this \the 20th\ century." Wow! Strong praise for someone whose name is not a household word. Evelyn Waugh loved his "hilarious travel journal Hindoo Holiday. His most famous book, published posthumously, is My Father and My Self. Late in life he "fell deeply in love with a German shepherd," his life with which he wrote about in We Think the World of You and My Dog Tulip. He became a lifelong friend of E.M. Forster and apparently "helped the famous novelist complete A Passage to India . . . In his letters and books Ackerley appears slightly bemused, absolutely frank, quietly funny. Peter Parker's bio perfectly captures that man, but also gives pleasure with its own low-key wit and stylishness."

The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Means of Escape: Stories by Penelope Fitzgerald (2000) —
Fitzgerald is best known, in America at least, for her short novels such as The Bookshop, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring and Innocence, which Dirda characterizes as "exquisite haiku fiction in a world of noisy epics." She never published anything until she was past sixty. The Knox Brothers — first published in 1977 but reissued in 2000 as a "corrected" edition — is a biography of her father and three uncles. Her father Edmund became editor of Punch; Dillwyn was a cryptographer who was involved with cracking the Enigma code; Wilfred was an Anglican priest; and Ronald wrote a spoof "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes." The Means of Escape is a collection of stories, apparently published posthumously.

Collected Tales and Fantasies by Lord Berners (1999) —
Lord Berners was a composer and a writer of autobiography and short fiction. This is an "omnibus collection" of six short novels. "Berners' novels are subdued works of humor, soothing rather than hysterically funny . . . All seem to build to some moment of bloody excess — murder, accidental death or suicide . . . they are resolutely and perfectly minor, inconsequential, canonically unimportant — and extremely enjoyable."

Cyril Connolly: A Life by Jeremy Lewis (1998) —
Dirda says Connolly was "the leading English man of letters of his time." (How many people has he said that about? Remind me to go back and count.) Rose Macaulay: "Lobsters he loved, and next to lobsters sex." This book seems to be a catalog of his sexual exploits, which may account for why Dirda says, "if ever a biography was a page-turner, this is it." Okay.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, ed. by Charlotte Mosley (1997) —
Once again Dirda falls all over himself with enthusiasm: The Letters . . . quite simply the most amusing correspondence of our time . . . Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) arguably the century's wittiest writer." Nancy Mitford (1904-1973), no slouch herself: "her own talent was for a particular breeziness . . . feline humor and lightness of touch . . . The Pursuit of Love remains an almost perfect light novel." The Letters goes on "for page after glorious page . . . Mosley's explanatory footnotes, invaluable for identifying members of the Brideshead generation and their numerous offspring . . . Mosley could teach a graduate course on the art of the footnote. This is going on my wish list!

Bruce Chatwin: A Biography by Nicholas Shakespeare (2000) —
"With the publication of In Patagonia, Chatwin awoke, like Byron, to find himself famous . . . At times he may strike some readers of this biography as a flake and poseur . . . yet the testimony of his numerous friends is affectionate and sincere . . . Nicholas Shakespeare's prose isn't particularly elegant . . . \In this\ fine, if overlong biography . . . anyone not positively obsessed with "Bruce" will prefer Susannah Clapp's superb memoir With Chatwin. Based on this review I really must read In Patagonia.

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, ed. by John Lahr (2001) —
"These diaries reveal a man of deep frustration, unhappiness and anxiety. For the most part the entries cover the 1970s the years in which Tynan (1927-1980) floundered after his early successes and they memorialize the follies and dreams of a desperate man . . . In the early and mid 1950s this Oxford dandy made himself into the most formidable and witty drama reviewer in England. Later he helped found England's National Theatre, devised the notorious erotic review Oh! Calcutta! and then gradually smoked and drank his way to an early death at fifty-three of emphysema." Tynan's books are out of print but "in the meanwhile treat yourself to the diaries of this dashing, perverse and stoical hedonist."

The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. by Zachary Leader (2002) —
This book "offers wicked, wicked reading pleasure." This review — the last in the book — does not provide a good reason to read this 1200-page collection of "naughty laddishness."

Coda
This is an appendix which includes — among other things — three annotated reading lists — books about the Renaissance, classics of religious thought, and "high spots" of modern science fiction. Dirda also takes a stab at creating a list of the dozen most creative literary voices, which is as subjective as one might expect — "already I can hear the baying of enraged readers." So he knew it was quirky in the extreme. But it is important to remember he was talking about the most creative — not the best, most enjoyable, most influential, etc. His criterion sends one off on a completely different track, and it is almost certain every reader would come up with a different list.

* * * * * * *

So . . . this is it, the end.

Dan (dchaikin) jumped my gun a bit with his rhetorical question, where are the women? Although I am not terribly concerned with quotas in that regard, the thought did cross my mind early on that the representative female writers were scarce in this collection. This thought was accompanied by my growing sense of literary inadequacy:

Exactly how many of these books have I read? A pathetic few: 8

How many of the authors reviewed or written about have I read? This number is better: 22

How many of the literary figures had I never even heard of? This is embarrassing: 20

Clearly, any illusion that I am a fairly well-read person has been severely tarnished. Many books and authors Dirda reviewed are now well established on my "To read" list, but there are a surprising number that left me cold. So I will not be setting this book up as a list of books to read before I die. But the bottom line is that this collection of reviews has made for some very enjoyable and enlightening reading. As a tour through the highlights of literary output during the 1990s and give or take half a dozen years on either side, Bound to Please has a great deal to offer the literary minded reader. I highly recommend it.

Well, I have finally caught up. I admire the way you tackle some of these projects to help you remember what you've read, and we get to come along for the ride. I have several of the books on my shelf already, and you've helped me push them up the TBR. You've also added a few to my wishlist. Well done!

>125 Poquette: Thanks for the Dirda journey, Poquette! I've enjoyed this very much. I think I have only read a few of these as well, although every now and then I could pounce on one and say, "Well, good, at least I've read that!"

Well done, Suzanne! I’ve been enjoying your summaries and excerpts, even thinking they’re “enough” that I might remove this book from my wishlist ... until:

>103 Poquette: Every reader learns to recognize his 'fatal type,' the writers to whom he automatically loses his heart. Mine goes out to those who play with language and attempt something new with form. The resulting books may be difficult to read, or seemingly unserious or gamelike, or even requiring decipherment. But these original artists are often the ones who matter most. {...} they aren't all for everybody. Even those of us who are attracted are often disappointed.

Yes! (“fatal type”) and Yes! (originality in language and form), my favorite too, and sometimes disappointing. At a minimum I must read that section of the book. Thanks for all of it.

>124 Poquette: I'm not much for fantasy either, but got into Nix when I was working in a bookstore. I ran the children's and young adult sections so I tried to read as much from there as I could.

>126 NanaCC: and >127 ipsoivan: Thanks so much! The trouble with and the advantage of my "projects" is that they slow way down the progress of reading. So it is a double-edged sword. But what's the point of reading a book like this if you don't have a way of capturing some of its essence? This became really apparent to me when I saw how little of it stayed with me when I sampled a few of the reviews a decade ago. Therefore it is nice for me to have this reading diary and I am glad to share it.

>128 detailmuse: These notes are not enough. Trust me. They capture the essence of what I wanted to remember. You and others will not necessarily be attracted to the same elements. With most of the reviews I had great difficulty eliminating things I wanted to include. With the books that put me off in one way or another I had trouble finding something nice to say! This began as a reading diary but inevitably my awareness of having an audience caused me to want to relay more and more information, and thus it became an editing problem.

Re the "fatal type" passage, I absolutely loved that as well and really wanted to include the whole page.

Your comment reminds me that in my summary above I neglected to mention the sections that appealed to me most. What appealed to you and others is of course something I am interested to know.

Section I, Old Masters (>69 Poquette:), surprisingly, contained the highest number of books I had read and that I want to read; But I was also most attracted to the books and authors in Sections III, Romantic Dreamers (>80 Poquette:); IV, Visionaries and Moralists (>85 Poquette:); VII, Critical Observers (>97 Poquette:); IX, Magicians of the Word (>103 Poquette:); and X, The Europeans (>113 Poquette:).

* * * * *

Thanks to everyone for your comments along the way, which egged me on. There were times when I thought of stopping and just getting on with it. This book caused me to get off to a very slow start on my year of planned reading! Now it is catch-up time!

>129 mabith: We seem to have cross-posted. It is interesting how one's milieu influences one's reading. I know that being in Club Read has influenced mine in some ways, although I do manage to continue on my own trip, whatever that might be at any given time. I have read some fantasy — His Dark Materials being a notable example — but as creative and imaginative as it is, I seem to be more attracted to other ways that creativity and imagination manifest themselves in literature. It is hard to say why this is so, but there it is.

It's great to have the book list and your comments on the net so that we can all refer to it

Thank you for writing these notes! I am reluctant to read books about books, but I have no such prejudice against reading about books online, go figure. Anyway I'm grateful that you read and summarized this book, so that I don't have to!

Your notes on Dirda were a joy to read. Thanks for taking the time to post them were we could all read them.

Fabulous, Suzanne! I greatly enjoyed your notes and now have Bound to Please in my possession. This will do my TBR pile no good at all, as evidenced by having already bought three of Nabokov's lecture series: Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, and Lectures on Don Quixote. The first contained a lecture on Bleak House, which I am currently reading, and from there it just seemed right to complete the collection.

"Susannah Clapp's superb memoir With Chatwin" - that's now on my wishlist.

Thanks Barry, and Florence and Kay. Glad you enjoyed my notes.

>135 Linda92007: Wow! You have been busy! I hope you enjoy Bound to Please as much as I did. And I look forward to hearing what you have to say about the Nabokov books. I probably won't get to Nabokov this year but he is definitely on my radar screen.

>136 dchaikin: Now that I know a snippet or two about Chatwin, I need to read one of his books. In Patagonia is on my wish list. Clapp's bio intrigued me as well.

The wish list I have accumulated in January from Club Read threads is huge! There is half a year's reading right here! Yikes! I was going to add the wish-listed books from Bound to Please as well, but that would more than double the size, so I'll refrain. But here is what caught my eye from you all since the beginning of the New Year. (I have been putting three *** in front of your screen names so they will stand out.)

January Wish List

Memoirs of Hadrian by Margaret Yourcenar (***ursula)

Dvorak in Love: A Light-Hearted Dream by Joseph Skvorecky (***torontoc)

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (***Cait86)

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood (***Cait86 — short stories; Cait also recommends novels Alias Grace and Cat's Eye to start with Atwood)

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff (already on my list I think)

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (***detailmuse)

Black Ships by Jo Graham (***Majkia — a takeoff on the Aeneid)

Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas (***Arubabookwoman — same author as Bartleby & Co.)

My Sister Chaos by Laura Fergus (***stretch — quirky-sounding Australian novel — see Stretch's review)

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund (***Valkyrdeath)

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe (***Bragan)

William Shakespeare's Star Wars Trilogy by Ian Doescher (***kaylaraeintheway — this is a series of mock Shakespearean Star Wars, sounds like fun)

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (***RidgewayGirl)

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth (***Valkyrdeath)

The Borgias: The Hidden History by G.J. Meyer (***mabith)

Realm of Lesser Evil by Jean-Claude Michea (***FlorenceArt — English translation of L'empire du moindre mal, mentioned by Florence in connection with Gorgias)

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt (***japaul22 — "dreamy fairytale quality")

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash (***DieFledermaus — stories of everyday life among the poor in Delhi)

Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith (***AnnieMod — sounds like a good overview)

Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel (***baswood)

Suzanne, in case you want to know more about Michea's book, I talked about it in my 2014 thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/163767#4545605
http://www.librarything.com/topic/163767#4591882

>20 Poquette: I'm late to your thread, but thank for the great Thucydides review. I'm reading the same this month, but accompanying it with Simon Hornblower's commentary - I'm glad to know I'm not alone, because it seems like a daunting project. I agree that reading Herodotus first certainly helps, but I haven't tried the Landmark editions, and will check those out now.

>139 FlorenceArt: Thanks for those links, Florence. I'll take a look.

>140 reva8: Welcome to my thread! And it is good to hear from another Thucydides reader! Hope you enjoy it.

I appreciate your Dirda reviews. I do think you should still consider yourself a well-read person. Dirda's lists are very Brit-oriented, and as noted, really neglect the women.

Thanks Jane! It would be interesting to figure out what women during the period 1980-2000 were left out in favor of some of the men's books that seemed marginal. There were some collections of letters and bios that were by or about people who perhaps could have been omitted if quality female writers had produced literary quality works. I wasn't paying attention during those years and so I don't know offhand. Would have to do some research. Anybody have any names to suggest?

>143 Poquette: I'm sure there are dozens of excellent women writers that were publishing in 1980-2000.

For a start these Nobel Laureates:
Alice Munroe - (five story collections, none of which I've read)
Herta Müller - (I am not familiar with her works)
Doris Lessing - The Fifth Child (1988)
Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher (1983)
Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)
Nadine Gordimer - July's People (1981)

And what about:
Alice Walker?
Anne Tyler?
Carol Shields?
Grace Paley?
Isabel Allende?
Jeanette Winterson?
Joyce Carol Oates?
Lorrie Moore?
Margaret Atwood?
Marguerite Duras?
Marilynne Robinson?
Pat Barker?

>143 Poquette: Three that weren't on the list whom I will always read whenever I find a new to me title:

Joan Didion
Janette Turner Hospital
Christa Wolf (recent discovery for me)

>144 ELiz_M: and >145 SassyLassy: Wow!!!

Last night as I was going to sleep I thought of Joyce Carol Oates (who wrote one of my all-time favorite books) and Joan Didion, but that's about as far as I got. Those two and Doris Lessing are the only writers any of whose work I have read.

About half of them I haven't even heard of! This certainly indicates that I may be just as bad or even worse than Michael Dirda when it comes to women writers. And I have only read two of the ones he reviewed. Not a good record.

Thanks to both of you for these names. You have demonstrated what Dan pointed out.

>144 ELiz_M: I recently read Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeanette Winterson which was great. I liked the way she wove her family story with her readings.

>146 Poquette: Admittedly I could only name a handful off the top of my head, for the rest I checked a few prize lists and my read collection.

>147 h-mb: I think i first put that book on my tbr list because I love the title so much. One of these days I will get around to reading it....

>143 Poquette:, >144 ELiz_M: I went through my own very Brit-centric bookshelves and came up with Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner, Penelope Fitzgerald, Pat Barker, Rumer Godden, A.S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Jane Gardam. I didn't come up with much else that hasn't been listed except Anita Desai--wait, has she been mentioned??

Some of these may already be listed by Dirda or others in this group. I'll bet some of the rest of you can add more!

>148 ELiz_M: and >149 ipsoivan: Well, he did review Fitzgerald and Byatt.

It is possible that the female writers were assigned to other reviewers. And it may be a matter of reading taste. Since I have read so few of these women myself I am hardly in a position to know anything, but for whatever reason I have made different reading choices myself. Oh well.

How about Carson McCullers? I haven't read her yet, but my mother is a fan.

Oh well! as usual I see we are getting hung up on why there were not more women authors on the recommended list.

Congrats on finishing the Dirda reviews!

I really love Sebald - I think Austerlitz is his most popular work, but I'm glad they listed The Emigrants because that was my favorite.

I would like to read bios of Bulgakov and Schulz, so will have to check those out. Of course the Mitfords are interesting to read about, but have to finish some of the stuff they wrote first, and I imagine there are many books about the Mitfords out there.

Will check my books for women writers, but here are some that I read in the last year or so that published between 1980-2000

Elsa Morante
Mavis Gallant
Banana Yoshimoto
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
Yoko Ogawa
Hilary Mantel
Slavenka Drakulic
Cynthia Ozick

>151 FlorenceArt: - I didn't like The Member of the Wedding when I had to read it for school, but I'm reconsidering after reading a lot of the reviews posted around here. Have The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on the list now.

>152 baswood: - Heh, I do that a lot. That, and "the list has too many Americans/Brits!" I like quotas in my reading, I think I've been happier with my reading since, but am definitely not as organized as some members of CR who are truly impressive in their list-making, award-reading etc.

I've enjoyed catching up with your Dirda summaries. Quite a work (both to write and for you to read and share with us).

Some of the women writers I like a lot are (just from my favorite authors list on LT are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Beryl Bainbridge, Amy Bloom, Barbara Comyns, Jennifer Egan, Anne Fadiman, Paula Fox, Mavis Gallant, Jaimy Gordon, Shirley Hazzard, Shirley Jackson, Jill Lepore, Janet Malcolm, Hilary Mantel, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Edith Pearlman, Jane Smiley, Rebecca Solnit, Honor Tracy, Barbara Tuchman, Magdalena Tulli, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Of course, I don't like everything each of these authors has written, but I like enough of them that I added them as favorite authors.

>151 FlorenceArt:, >152 baswood:, >153 DieFledermaus:, >154 rebeccanyc: Clearly there are many more reading choices than those represented in Bound to Please. I am feeling doubly sheepish here because I have read only a few of the writers chosen by Michael Dirda, and I have read even fewer of the women writers you all are talking about. I feel bad in both cases. But there it is. Believe me, this has been a consciousness-raising experience!

Thanks for adding to the list of women writers. It is good to have these names for future reference.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, I am about halfway through Boccaccio's Decameron, which is a whole other kind of reading experience. Here we have a hundred stories, all of which thus far concern romantic love and how it manifests itself in different situations with different kinds of players, whether aristocracy, bourgeoisie, the poor or the clergy! I am reading the same edition that Barry (Baswood) did, namely, the Penguin Classics, which contains the longest introduction I have ever run across in a book at 140 pages, and the notes are especially interesting and useful as they point out cultural or literary issues that are characteristic of attitudes and writings of the period. Most of the stories are interesting for one reason or another, but only a few are real standouts. I'll have more to say about this later.

>155 Poquette: That sounds like something I might like to take a look at. I look forward to your further comments, and I'll add it to my TBR.

>155 Poquette: I'm certainly looking forward to your thoughts on Boccaccio.

Will be interested to see what you say about the Decameron. I read it several years back and enjoyed it, although many of the stories did reflect the morals of the day. I agree that most were interesting, with a few standouts. I was hoping for something similar so started to read The Heptameron last year, but got distracted and it had to go back to the library. I'll probably try to finish it this year.

I've seen a new edition of the Decameron in the bookstore but you make the Penguin edition sound the best. Another book I'd love to read someday . . .

>156 ipsoivan:, >157 dchaikin:, >158 DieFledermaus:, >159 rebeccanyc: I was hoping to finish the Decameron today but I had lap top problems and had to schlep it over to the repair shop. Decided to run other errands while I was out and today has been a lost cause in the reading department. But the good news is that the lap top is fixed with a spanking new solid state drive and more ram. This is almost like having a brand new computer! Tomorrow is a new day . . .

So, about those women and Dirda, I'm looking over my copy of Lila by Marilynne Robinson, thinking about starting it, and there on the back cover is a blurb by Michael Dirda about Gilead.

ETA sorry about your laptop.

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353), translation, Introduction and Notes by G.H. McWilliam, 2nd edition (1975), 1072 pages, Kindle Edition

Giovanni Boccaccio stated in his prologue to The Decameron that these hundred stories were meant for the entertainment of ladies due to the fact that they had nothing better to do than assuage their boredom by indulging in the sometimes lascivious narratives. After all, a woman's role in the Renaissance was exclusively domestic, unless she had either chosen or been relegated to a nunnery. Not only as an entertainment, it was offered as a solace to those who were pining away as a consequence of Love:

I intend to provide succour and diversion for the ladies,
but only for those who are in love, since the others can
make do with their needles, their reels and their spindles.

If Boccaccio is to be believed, romantic love was like an epidemic, a scourge upon the earth, not unlike the plague that The Decameron's storytellers were in the act of avoiding.

These storytellers — ten in number, of which seven were young ladies and three young men — had fled the city of Florence in 1348 due to the plague that eventually reduced the population by half, to a locus amoenus — literally "delightful locale" — where the young people were transformed into nymph-like maidens and sylvan swains who entertained themselves by telling stories, ten a day for ten days over a two-week period. But the young women also represent the seven virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, Faith, Hope and Charity) and the men, according to the introduction, reflect the "tripartite division of the soul" into Reason, Anger and Lust.

One could go on and on about the frame alone. But as to the stories themselves, they reflect many things that are common in medieval literature. Boccaccio's sources for the stories were fables, old French fabliaux and histories. All but a handful were mere sketches with stock figures and farcical situations. He embellished them and converted various elements to suit his own purposes. The major themes that appeared in the stories concerned Love, Intelligence and Fortune.

Most of the stories are eminently forgettable, not much more than inflated jokes. A Renaissance reader would have seen them in an entirely different way than we inevitably do. For instance, the names of Boccaccio's characters in many cases were those of real people or at least referenced well known families. Many of the episodes would have read like a gossip column to a contemporary reader. Adversaries often reflected the contemporary conflicts between Church and State, Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, or their various representatives. A 14th century reader would have read much into each story based on familiarity with distinguished family names and colorful local characters, and locales from Florence to Naples, Palermo to Athens. The notes are very helpful in identifying much of the lore underlying each story, but the facts still seem remote and the individual episodes seem improbable.

Readers who are caught up in medieval and Renaissance literature will find much to enjoy in The Decameron. Others may find it a bit bewildering and may not want to invest the time to read the 140-page introduction and the copious notes. Doors are open to a lifetime of study in this comprehensive Penguin Classics edition, if one so desires. A thoroughly enjoyable and absorbing read for those who are intrigued by this sort of historical literary artifact.

I'm certainly intrigued. I really enjoyed your review. Was the intro just long or too long?

Hi Dan! The intro was actually too long! And that's saying something coming from me! It could have been shortened a bit if the writer hadn't spent so much verbiage on reciting the stories to make a point rather than merely referring to them, or including his comments in the story's footnotes, which he did anyway. They say it takes longer to write a pithy piece than an extended treatise, and this may be the case here. This is not to say the intro was not interesting, because it was — very! I have never seen such a long introduction. It could very well have sold as a separate book!

What I said in >159 rebeccanyc:!

ETA I do have an old edition of The Decameron that I've apparently had since college, although I'm sure I never read it there.

>165 rebeccanyc: The Decameron is fascinating for so many reasons. For years a book called Stories from the Decameron has been on my shelf. Taken out of context and without footnotes said stories are rather bewildering. I have picked it up before and put it back down. Thus, I cannot recommend the Penguin Classics edition enough, with its very useful notes and informative introduction — length notwithstanding.

I have been reading Ecclesiastes with Dan and Florence and others in another thread. Very interesting to swoop down in the middle of things — they are making their way through the whole Bible. At this point I am mostly interested in the Wisdom Literature.

Ecclesiastes was quite different from what I remembered from a class I took in my college days called "The Bible as Literature." I think my take may be quite different from that of others. Since it is not a stand-alone book, I am not going to do a review, and besides, it is only 14 pages! If anyone is curious, check out the BR — Philosophy thread.

One of the key tropes running throughout is the famous "Vanity of vanities. All is vanity," and every time I run across that it reminds me of Brideshead Revisited, a book I thoroughly enjoyed way back when, and which features that quote in the closing paragraphs. I have always been baffled by the ending. My impression, as I was reading it, was that it carried a mildly anti-Christian subtext, and the final big paragraph was — and remains — very enigmatic to me in that context. It seemed to signal a complete reversal by Charles Ryder. I have reread that paragraph a number of times over the years hoping that all would become clear, but it almost seems as though Evelyn Waugh was engaging in a literary sleight-of-hand maneuver, a trick, if you will, on the reader. I may be the only reader in history who was tricked, but I would be curious to know what other readers might have to say.

Anyone reading this who has read Brideshead Revisited, please put me out of my thirty-year misery!

>167 Poquette: Thanks for the link to BR.

A very good review of The Decameron and congrats on finishing! That one could certainly do double duty as a doorstop. I read the Penguin version also and I did find the notes very helpful - it added some background and interest especially, as you say, since some of the stories are forgettable. You probably had a better background for reading it, what with all the medieval/renaissance books you've read, but I still found it enjoyable. I took it on vacation with me and it made good reading.

Well, now i really want to read Brideshead Revisited.

Ditto on Brideshead Revisited.

>168 h-mb: You are welcome!

>169 DieFledermaus: Thanks! I don't get the doorstop benefit because The Decameron is on my Kindle!

>170 dchaikin:, >171 FlorenceArt: Brideshead Revisited is a fascinating period piece.

* * * * *

BTW, I have been put out of my thirty-year misery! I got the answer from AlisonY on Helenliz's thread. Woohoo! Read at your own risk if you have an aversion to spoilers. It's not much as spoilers go, and in this case it won't ruin the book for you. It's not like The Red and the Black where the ending is a total shocker!

Did you ever watch the BBC adaptation of Brideshead Revisited? I decided not to read the novel based on the adaptation because it just depressed me so much. I think I was 20 then, though, so it's probably worth revisiting (ha) the question ten years later...

The Book of Ecclesiastes

I said I wasn't going to do a review of Ecclesiastes, but I can't seem to stop thinking about it. Also, Dan (dchaikin) has written a review that is so different from my take that I decided to read it again and see where I went wrong! It is almost as though we had read two different books.

My text is based on the New Revised Standard Version as found in the The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd edition, which has very helpful extensive notes that clarify ambiguities in translation and expression. (I should point out that reading the King James version is also like reading a completely different book.)

Ecclesiastes is unique among the books of the Bible. It is the only one that considers human pleasure and enjoyment of life. In fact, the words "pleasure," "enjoy" and "enjoyment" appear almost thirty times in this 4,500-word text. Despite this, some commentators view it as the most pessimistic book in the Bible. To reach that conclusion, I think they are missing the forest for the trees.

Tradition holds that Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon or at least by someone who adopted his persona when, as an old man, he had time to reflect on his life and what he saw and experienced as a powerful king, and to share the wisdom he had accumulated over a lifetime wherein he could say:

"I made great works; I built houses and planted vineyards for myself; I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and of the provinces; I got singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh and many concubines.

So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil." (2:5-11)

The book begins by announcing "The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." This is followed by a poem proclaiming, "Vanity of vanities, All is vanity," in which the ephemeral nature of life is contrasted with the unchanging nature of the earth. The generations come and go, but the earth remains the same.

Then the Teacher begins to speak: "I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven . . . I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind." (1:12-14).

This introduces several tropes that appear again and again throughout the book: wisdom on the one hand and vanity, a chasing after wind on the other. It should be pointed out that "vanity" as it is used throughout is not about looking in mirrors or Narcissus-like behavior; rather, it concerns actions or efforts or thoughts that are in vain, fruitless, without substance. "Chasing after wind" equals "pursuit of futility." A third poetic expression that appears repeatedly is "under the sun," which according to the notes, means the realm of the living. He who can see the sun's rays is alive, in contrast with the dead who see nothing.

The Teacher/King contemplates the great wisdom he has accumulated over his long life, yet considers that this, too, in its way, is a chasing after wind, because it doesn't yield any answers to the vexing question: Is this life all there is?

For in much wisdom is much
      vexation,
and those who increase knowledge
      increase sorrow. (1:18)

According to The Literary Guide to the Bible (Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds.) Ecclesiastes is a subversive text in that it "both presupposes and attacks the conventional wisdom represented by Proverbs. Ecclesiastes' style, outlook and conclusions on the meaning of life radically question received wisdom. He sees polarities in creation but subordinates them to a skeptical questioning of what the ancient sages taught."

As an aside, Proverbs is mentioned here because, first, it is the book immediately preceding Ecclesiastes, and second, in attempting to impart his accumulated wisdom, the Teacher not only couches that wisdom in the form of proverbs, but he also shows life's contradictions by pitting proverb against proverb.

"Then I saw that wisdom excels folly,
as far as light excels darkness.
The wise have eyes in their head;
but fools walk in darkness.
Yet I perceive that the same fate
befalls all of them." (i.e., death) (2:13-14)

So here we have an avuncular old Teacher, who was once king of the world, a towering, almost Shakespearean figure, and he is clearly thinking about what will come after him, both in terms of his successor as king and in terms of when his life is over. He is full of wisdom, and part of that wisdom lies in his recognition that the possible answers to life's dilemmas are contradictory at best.

On the one hand, he believes in God, that wisdom is better than folly, knowledge is better than ignorance, good is better than evil, that work is better than idleness, but in the end, it all appears to be in vain, for the same fate befalls everyone. He does not know God's plan. He knows — or at least thinks he knows — about God's judgment, but no one knows when or where that will materialize.

The beginning of chapter 2 announces a new theme that will be contrasted with the notion of the futility of life throughout the rest of the book: "I said to myself, 'Come now, I will make a test of pleasure; enjoy yourself.'" But immediately he reflexively remembers the uselessness of it all. He has done all his great works, and yet they amount to nothing in the end. All is in vain.

But there is another possibility: "There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?" (2:24-25)

The two ideas — life's futility versus taking pleasure in one's life because it is God's gift — cycle around again and again through the rest of the book. After making his many lamentations, the Teacher comes back to a realization that life is its own reward. Everything is futile only if you are of a frame of mind that demands something beyond this world.

Each time he contemplates taking pleasure in one's life, the idea seems to escalate.

". . . it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil." (3:13)

"This is what I have seen to be good: it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us: for this is our lot . . . this is the gift of God. (5:18-19)

So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that god gives them under the sun. (8:15)

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. (9:7) \Wow! God has already approved! This is a new and subversive idea.\

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you all the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. (11:9) \In other words, God judges people for failure to accept the gift of enjoyment.\

The concept of God's judgment is perplexing if one is not anticipating an afterlife. There is no statement of such anticipation in Ecclesiastes. However, there are vague references that imply such a belief:

For who can tell them what will be after them under the sun? (6:12)

. . . mortals cannot find out anything that will come after them. (7:14)

When I applied my mind to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth . . . then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun . . . even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out. (8:16-17)

Between his all too brief moments of praising enjoyment, the Teacher/King recites many evils, imparts much wisdom, sees much futility, every now and then bursting into song — even in the plain text of the NRSV — delivering lines of sheer poetry. In the end "The Teacher sought to find pleasing words, and he wrote words of truth plainly." (12:11)

The crowning revelation (for me at least) of 11:9 says that you will be judged if you don't enjoy God's gifts. If one prefers, one can take God out of it and substitute one's own highest value. We can question ourselves on this standard: that if this life is all there is, are we stopping to smell the roses along the way? Are we enjoying the fruits of our labors, our loved ones, our pursuits of whatever kind?

The pessimist may see only the Sturm und Drang of futility, while the optimist will see that the ultimate wisdom of Ecclesiastes is that life under the sun is its own reward.

>173 mabith: Yes, I did see the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. It was in the midst of it that I decided to read the book. I was totally gripped by that series, and although I did enjoy the book, I see what you mean about the depressing story. The BBC characterization was fabulous!

I think my problem is I'm just hopelessly pessimistic and incapable of taking the optimists point of view. Well, that and i just am stuck on the vanity of it all.

I like your summary.

I know, your mind is made up, don't confuse you with facts!

My problem is that I'm a cockeyed optimist and want to rescue everyone from their misery! ;-)

Thanks!

Ha! Yeah, those facts always cause me problems. :)

Your comments on Ecclesiastes were well worth reading, especially in counterpoint to Dan's comments.

>179 RidgewayGirl: What she said! (I fall in the pessimist camp myself.)

Suzanne, I enjoyed your review of The Decameron and am feeling off the hook, it'll probably forever be in my wishlist because "I'm interested" vs. "so many books/so little time."

I haven't read Ecclesiastes but was so aligned with Dan's comments that I'm fascinated to hear of an opposite interpretation. Figured I'd better read it first and then come back to your comments and the link to the thread.

>179 RidgewayGirl: Thanks so much!

>180 rebeccanyc: Can I help? ;-)

>181 detailmuse: Boccaccio is really in the same category as Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante and even Milton. You almost have to go into training to read them! It is easy to see how scholars have made a life's work out of the study of any one of them.

Ecclesiastes is very interesting because of the contrasts it represents — and all within 4500 words! I thought it was one of the shortest books in the Bible, but it turns out there are quite a few that are even shorter.

I finished Plato's Gorgias today. A review will follow in the next day or so. I am still thinking about it. Now I feel better equipped to talk about it with Florence.

I am just starting The Charterhouse of Parma and am about halfway through Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi.

I think I said elsewhere that March is going to be devoted to reading nothing but novels. All this heavy reading — from Thucydides to Boccaccio to Plato — makes me think I have earned a spate of lighter reading.

>182 Poquette: Probably not! I've been this way for decades!

>183 Poquette: Oh, you are in for a treat with The Charterhouse of Parma!

>174 Poquette: I have been very out of touch, and am so far behind with people's posts that I am working from the bottom up, but I enjoyed your review. As the day is passing it is a good message for me to log off and go and enjoy the flowers. (My only slight concern about the recommendation that we all just get on with enjoying what God has given us is the extension of that which is heard in some quarters as giving mankind the right to consume/exploit to the full all of nature as it has been given us for our use. Strong adherents to that philosophy tend to dismiss any argument that we have a custodial obligation towards what God has given us. That, of course, is not the fault of the author(s?) of Ecclesiastes.)

>184 rebeccanyc: I finished The Charterhouse of Parma yesterday, and it was quite good. I am behind on reviews but will have more to say.

>185 Oandthegang: I read the New Revised Standard Version of Ecclesiastes, which is quite different from the King James and which, with its rather libertine "Eat, drink and be merry," may leave the impression you indicate. The NRSV leaves an overall suggestion of moderation. From my irreligious standpoint, just the way the message is expressed, it doesn't say to me, "Eat, drink and go out and destroy the earth." That seems a bit of a stretch. But do read it and see what you think.

I forgot all about my February wish list. It's not so long this month but there are some goodies here:

February Wish List

Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed by Gerald A. Press (***FlorenceArt)

Passion by Jude Morgan (***NanaCC — historical novel re the Romantic poets Shelley Keats and Byron)

Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd (***ursula)

Uppity Women of the Renaissance by Vicki Leon (***Cariola)

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (***DieFledermaus — bio-fic of Bolivar)

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (***bragan — a dystopian novel that left her with a "book hangover"!)

The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai (***edwinbcn)

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thoughts by Douglas Hofstadter (***bragan)

> Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was intending only to refer to the people who put that spin on what is written because it suits their purposes, rather suggesting that was what was actually said. I was very surprised when I discovered there were people who believe that God has given us everything to use as we like. I'm not sure whether they believe that He will simply provide new stuff when we've used everything up or whether that will bring on Armageddon.

(I like the idea of the King James version of Ecclesiastes being 'Eat Drink And Be Merry'. Must dust down my copy!)

>187 Poquette: Heh, I really didn't think my review of Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies would make anyone want to go out and read it! I am, however, more than happy to be an evangelist for Station Eleven.

>188 Oandthegang: I'll be interested in what you think after you read it.

>189 bragan: It was the idea of an "attempt to model certain aspects of human thought, notably pattern-matching, analogy-making, and, in a limited sense, creativity" that got my attention. Since Hofstadter is the author, my curiosity was further piqued. Having read Gödel, Escher, Bach way back when, I thought I might take a look anyway.

I am sitting here more or less paralyzed because I cannot seem to get motivated to review the last three books I have read, and I need to just get on with it. So here are some brief comments and I'll move on.

Gorgias by Plato, translated with introduction and notes by Robin Waterfield, 206 pages

I especially appreciated Robin Waterfield's excellent introduction and very helpful notes. He explains Plato's approach to dialectic, which is known as the elenchus, and this is important to know about to read and understand Plato's other dialogues. It would have been good to have read Gorgias before I read the Republic, because in some ways it is a precursor as both have as a premise that virtue is the highest good. Each dialogue approaches the discussion from an entirely different point of view, but that is the underlying assumption.



Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi (2004)

I don't know what I was expecting when I purchased this book, but it delivers something quite other than the vague thoughts I might have had. Essentially, this is a book for writers. There are many good ideas regarding approaches to writing, style and generally thinking outside the box. It is heavily illustrated with many kinds of "maps," from a simple chess board to a highly schematic way finder for an urban metro system, from a highly imaginative Renaissance mappa mundi to a modern highway map. Turchi tries to relate ways of delivering a story to the functions of the many types of map. He has lectured to writers' workshops about imaginative approaches to writing, and in fact this book arose out of just such a lecture. The book is very interesting for readers interested in getting inside the fictional writing process.



The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (1839)

Having recently read and thoroughly enjoyed The Red and the Black, I couldn't help that it was at the back of my mind while reading The Charterhouse of Parma. These are completely different stories, so they really have nothing to do with each other aside from their common authorship and the post-Napoleonic period in which they were written. Charterhouse got off to a slow start — for me anyway — which was disappointing because Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature had made such a point of how thrilling the beginning was. But by the middle I was thinking that it ranked right up there with Ivanhoe and The Count of Monte Cristo in my own personal pantheon of great nineteenth century novels. But it ended with rather a thud for me. Not the shock that The Red and the Black delivered, thankfully, but kind of a disappointing ending all the same. The characterizations were interesting, better developed and seemed more human in some ways than in The Red and the Black, and insights into the milieu of the Catholic clergy and court society in northern Italy as it functioned under a mildly despotic prince were all fascinating and at times truly delightful. On balance, it was a very good read.

>190 Poquette: Well, if and when you do get to it, I'll be interested to hear what you think. And whether you manage to make it to the end.

I think you liked The Red and the Black more than I did, and The Charterhouse of Parma less, but I'm glad you found it "a very good read," which it definitely was.

I re-read your review of Ecclesiastes after reading Dan's.

I have to say I am much more in sympathy with your version of the message in the book.

Reading the two reviews does demonstrate how a "book with a message" can deliver different messages to different people. Great stuff, but I won't be reading Ecclesiastes.

>192 bragan: I won't be getting to Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies this year, so it may be a while. ;-)

>193 rebeccanyc: Surprisingly, the jury in my head is still out on the two Stendhal novels. I can see that in many ways The Charterhouse of Parma is a much better book, but I felt a greater impact from reading The Red and the Black. So the conflict for me seems to be between the emotional impact and a reasoned appreciation. This has brought me face to face with a contradiction: I fancy myself as more rational than emotional, but this is an instance where the emotional may be winning. Go figure!

>194 baswood: After giving a great deal of thought to all the conversation here and elsewhere about Ecclesiastes, it occurs to me that my more moderate than libertine and more optimistic than pessimistic interpretation — that if this life is all there is, we should enjoy it for its own sake — is colored by a saying of Jesus from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which stuck with me when I first encountered it in Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, wherein he says, "the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."

Never mind the contradictions raised by an unbeliever quoting one scripture to support interpretation of another!

* * * * *

I seem to be full of contradictions today! Also I am still feeling inadequate for copping out on reviewing three books! The mistake was in plowing ahead and not taking time to review as I finished each one. Maybe I'll do it later . . .

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968), 256 pages, Kindle

One day in the life of an android bounty hunter — that is the frame of this witty, philosophical science fiction novel, which was written in 1968 but is set in the year 2021. By 2021 colonization of Mars has been underway for several years — even before World War Terminus, which has turned planet Earth into an irradiated dust bowl where massive extinctions have transformed animal ownership into the equivalent of what luxury car ownership was to the American of 1968. People who qualifiy as to age and intelligence are lured into migrating to Mars by the promise of being provided with a fully functioning almost human android upon arrival at the red planet. People whose numerical age is too high or whose numerical IQ is too low are left to live out their days on Earth where civilization has been all but destroyed and the population decimated. It is illegal for an android to be running around free on Earth. They are made strictly for use on Mars. Androids have reached such a high level of development that the only way to distinguish them from humans is by administering a highly sophisticated empathy test or a postmortem bone marrow examination.

Inevitably, androids on Mars who are the functional equivalent of slaves, will occasionally go rogue, kill their "masters" and anyone else who gets in their way and commandeer a ship back to Earth. Thus the need for bounty hunters.

A group of six of these fugitive androids have made their way back to Earth and are on the loose in the San Francisco area, and it is the duty of our hero bounty hunter to find, test and destroy these creatures. Many ethical questions are raised in the course of this intriguing novel, and it is not surprising that the bounty hunter would be transformed in the course of carrying out his mission.

In addition to the interesting premise of the novel, the problem of reading a book written in 1968 and set in 2021 reveals many incongruities related to how the author thought the world would be in 2021 and the way it actually is in 2015. In Philip K. Dick's imagination, the world has not only very humanlike android helpers and space migration, but it also has videophones, hover cars, laser guns and — in the absence of real animals — electric sheep, goats, rabbits, etc., to substitute for pets. However, it does not foresee personal computers, laptops and notebooks, the Internet or cell phones, much less smart phones.

Despite these anomalies, or perhaps because of them, we have here an engrossing exploration of the many questions raised in a post-nuclear holocaust environment where an artificial being whose intelligence makes it competitive with human beings must be dealt with. It is left to the reader to come up with answers.

I keep meaning to read this, and, despite some of the technology and political disasters not being around (yet) the questions about artificial intelligence empathy and ethics are very much live, and scary.

>196 Poquette: I keep meaning to read this too. I recently read his Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said which was the first Philip K Dick I've read. Perhaps this next. I liked your review, thank you.

I suppose it's too obvious to say but one of the best ever science fiction film Blade Runner http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/?ref_=nv_sr_1 was based on Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep Glad the book is also good

>197 Oandthegang: Indeed!

>198 reva8: Thank you! If you read it, I look forward to hearing what you think of it.

>199 baswood: Not too obvious at all. Alas, I have never seen Blade Runner, but it shows up in the listings on cable TV fairly frequently, and now that I have a frame of reference, I will make a point of watching.

I'm forced to think only of Blade Runner while reading your review. Ths is one scifi book i would really like to read, just to fill in my gap in cultural literacy. Enjoyed your review. Loved the movie, but then i wasn't comparing it to a book.

>196 Poquette: Great review.. Now that I know more of what the actual story is about, I am more keen to read it. I keep trying to get it from the library, but it's always checked out!

I love both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner, though they're somewhat different. My husband really likes Philip K. Dick but I'm not any sort of completist, so the only other one I've read is VALIS, and that was ... very strange.

I saw Blade Runner when it first came out and will forever associate it with the city where I lived at the time. We emerged from the theatre on a hot steamy night into the same strangely lit world filled with questionable beings that the film portrays so well. I had no idea about its relationship (the film not the city) to a book. I'm not sure if the film recommends the book or not.

>200 Poquette: I suspect the film is one of those best seen on the biggest screen possible, not on a TV. Maybe it plays somewhere in a repertory cinema.

I finally read a book that people are interested in! Glad to see you all here and thanks for your kind words.

>201 dchaikin: Glad the review resonates well with the movie.

>202 avidmom: If you have a Kindle, it is available at Amazon for less than six dollars.

>203 ursula: This was my first Philip K. Dick, but I am definitely going to read more. I love the way he injects humor.

>204 SassyLassy: I take your point about the big screen, but my TV is pretty big, and it has been almost ten years since I was in a movie theater, so seeing Blade Runner in a theater will be unlikely. But I do appreciate the difference.

Now I am really going to have to see this movie!

I also preferred The Red and the Black to The Charterhouse of Parma - I think it was because Julian, who I loved as a character (wouldn't want to be friends with him or anything, but enjoyed reading about him), was the focus of the book, while I found Fabrizio and Clelia to be a bit dull (Gina and Mosca were wonderful though).

It was good to read about the futuristic setting in your review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - it's on the pile. I did hear that the book is pretty different, so I won't be reading it expecting it to be like the movie (which is one of my favorites). The director's cut is the best one to see (no Harrison Ford monotone voiceover). Was the "Are you human" test in the book called the Voight-Kampff test? Sometimes I like to make jokes about that. Also, I read an article about how someone interviewed the candidates running for a political office (mayor or governor of something California related?) using the Voight-Kampff questions from Blade Runner - it was pretty funny.

Suzanne, I had to double check whose thread I was on when I read your review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Fun but unexpected!

>206 DieFledermaus: You have hit the nail on the head, something I was unable to quite get my own arms around — namely, that Fabrizio was dull compared to Julian Sorel. I never quite warmed up to him. And I agree, Gina and Mosca were more my cup of tea as well.

I am going to try to see Blade Runner in the next few days. I just found out it was available at HBO "on demand." I may subscribe just so I can watch it. Scrolling through the HBO movies currently available on demand, I found enough there that I would like to see to pay for the subscription for whatever minimum time I would have to take it.

And yes, the empathy test in the book was called Voigt-Kampff. That's very funny about using it on some California candidates! It is more like a lie detector in that it uses electrodes to test physiological reactions to different situations, such as the following: "You are watching an old movie showing a banquet in progress. The entrée consists of boiled dog stuffed with rice." The verbal response can be learned, but the physiological response — or lack thereof — tells the tale. Looking forward to seeing the movie.

>207 Linda92007: Science fiction has always been of interest to me, Linda, but that interest seems to get pushed into the background in recent years. Even so, there are some big holes in my reading. During the nineties I went through a period where I hardly read anything else. Once in a while it is good to dip a toe back into the science fiction waters.

I have been reading A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. How I get myself into these giant tomes I'll never figure out. This one is almost 900 pages. One reason it is going so slowly is that every five minutes I have to look something up on Wikipedia. I have had "Timeline of the French Revolution" up on my laptop screen for the past week but even that isn't enough. You'd think that in 868 pages there wouldn't be any questions left to answer, but alas, that is not the case.

In some ways the book is "unputdownable," but I find I can only read so much before I need to take a break. And with all the "research" interruptions, progress has been slow. But I am on the home stretch, only 150 pages to go. I'll be glad when I am done with this.

Is it just me and my penchant for ferreting out every last detail, or what? I don't remember having to keep notes on a historical novel before. Well, that's not entirely true. I usually do keep a list of characters, especially in long novels, just so I can keep track of who everyone is. Something I started doing somewhere in the last ten years. Does anyone else do that?

>209 Poquette:

Wolf Hall is pretty much the same - I did not need to keep notes because the Tudors is my period but she tends to get into minutiae and if you need to get to the bottom of everything, that will drive you to encyclopedias and wikipedia...

Keeping a list of characters for long novels sounds like a brilliant idea (especially for me since I'm mostly listening to audiobooks). I love the internet SO much for allowing me to look things up while I read. I think for me it makes a nice little break so I can read in longer stretches.

>206 DieFledermaus: >208 Poquette: Well, I guess my problem was I just couldn't warm up to Julian Sorel, and he was such a focus of the book that I didn't warm up to the book.

>209 Poquette: A Place of Greater Safety is my favorite Mantel, but I did feel I missed a lot by not being up on the French Revolution. After I read it, I read Citizens by Simon Schama, which filled in a lot of gaps, and since then I've read other books that deal with the French Revolution at least in part.

And I've definitely read books where I wished I had kept a list of characters!

>210 AnnieMod: Good to know. Mantel certainly has a different approach to writing fiction. I'll have more to say about this when I write my review!

>211 mabith: Glad you like the idea of keeping a list of characters. Believe it or not, I now have a file of such lists! And yes, what would we do without the Internet? I used to look up things in my own reference books, but they seem to be less and less important as the Internet becomes more and more effective.

>212 rebeccanyc: It is difficult to weigh the merits of one book against another when they are both really good reads. There were many things I liked better about The Charterhouse of Parma. The fact is, I enjoyed both books.

The best thing about A Place of Greater Safety is the characterizations, IMO. Mantel really makes the Revolution come alive, that's for sure.

>206 DieFledermaus: So true about Gina and Mosca, although I never thought about it that way.

>209 Poquette: I've been reluctant to read Hilary Mantel because I don't like the idea of a fictionalized retelling of historical events, but I can see I'm missing some great stuff.

Yes I keep a list of characters, but only for the first few chapters. This seems to be my most vulnerable time not to be concentrating. I find that once I am in to a book my memory can cope.

>214 FlorenceArt: I usually resist historical fiction for just that reason, but I'm a big Mantel fan, and not just of her historical novels.

>214 FlorenceArt: You may not like Hilary Mantel, Florence, possibly for the same reasons I don't. But I'll reserve more comment for my review.

>215 baswood: Your point about "my most vulnerable time not to be concentrating" is spot on. That's exactly why I started keeping a list of characters, but then after I started reading on my Kindle, which by its nature makes it harder to flip back and forth, it became a habit.

>216 rebeccanyc: While I am wedded to finishing A Place of Greater Safety, I am coming out of it with a sense that I won't be reading any more Hilary Mantel. But more later . . .

 
Georges-Jacques Danton      Camille Desmoulins

 
Maximilian Robespierre

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel (1992), 868 pages, Kindle Edition

In an author's note following the main text, Hilary Mantel says that her intent was to create "a book one can think and live inside." By this measure, she was wildly successful. Unlike most historical novels that place imaginary characters in a historical setting, A Place of Greater Safety is more like a novelization featuring real people and events at the heart of the French Revolution. Again, by rigorous adherence to the chronology of events, and by imaginatively fleshing out the dozens of historic participants based on their own writings and other documentary evidence, Mantel has successfully recreated the atmosphere, drama, heartbreak and viciousness of the people and events culminating in the Reign of Terror.

Superb characterizations and historical veracity aside, why is this not a slam-dunk five-star read? For one thing, it reads like a collection of notes, snatches of conversation, speeches, newspaper clippings, diary entries and bits of connective narrative that have been carefully put in order for the purpose of sitting down to write a book. First person, third person, present tense, past tense, scripted dialogue, conversational dialogue without clear attribution, difficult to follow plus occasional dropped quotation marks leading to further confusion — in other words, it reads like an early draft, not a finished work. The final chapter, which is also the longest at 50 pages, is possibly the most polished section of the book. The rest is an editorial mess — choppy and too long.

Despite these flaws, Mantel has managed to meet her own objectives and to convey the right tone and has delivered a compelling inside story of the Revolution.

At the core of Mantel's production are three characters who drove the events between the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the guillotining of two of them by the third on April 5, 1794. George-Jacques Danton, a lawyer and highly skilled administrator, Camille Desmoulins, the brilliant and reckless polemicist who was credited by some with inspiring the attack on the Bastille, and Maximilian Robespierre, the respected but enigmatic and cagey politician who rose to the top in time to sign the death warrants of Danton and Desmoulins, who had been in at the beginning of the Revolution, and were his friends!

How could such a thing have happened? As Pierre Vergniaud, a famous politician and orator said, "The Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children." What began as massive civil disobedience in 1789 — resulting from two years of crop failure due to bad weather that was on the verge of causing widespread famine in France, on top of centuries of economic mismanagement of farmlands by the aristocratic owners, not to mention a clueless monarchy — devolved into an unstable Republic fraught with petty jealousies, suspicions regarding loyalty, and a level of paranoia that resulted in shocking internal purges.

The book ends with the beheading of Danton and Desmoulins, and even though it happened beyond the scope of this book, less than four months later Robespierre received a dose of his own medicine: He was guillotined without a trial.

Mantel's editors obviously did not see the deficiencies that I saw. If it seems petty to dislike a book for being too much like a rough draft, so be it. I think it could have been a much better book with a bit more effort.

A Place of Greater Safety is my favorite Mantel, but it isn't an easy book. I think I was entranced because I had been reading a lot about the French Revolution and so I was able to enjoy what she did with the characters (it's not perfectly historically accurate) and how her characters deviated from the historic views of them, without having to look things up. Also, Danton is my favorite of the revolutionaries so it was fun to disagree with Mantel's view of him - I like to argue with my books.

One fairly short book about the French Revolution called Danton: Giant of the Revolution by David Lawday is my favorite for clearly explaining the different groups, how they changed and why they hated each other.

That's an interesting review of A Place of Greater Safety. I read it several years ago and loved it. What's funny is that I loved it most for the writing style! I've read quite a bit of historical fiction of "real people" - mainly royalty and political figures - and I loved that Mantel's work wasn't simply the typical historical fiction with characterization of people and events that are normally in stiff history books, but additionally had a literary feel to the writing. I liked how her style shifted with events and characters, sometimes having a clipped feel when events are propelling forward, and sometimes being more dense and descriptive to reflect the wild emotions of the time. I liked the snippets of real words and writing interspersed with her take on things because it helped ground the book for me and helped me decipher what were her ideas and what was "real".

Anyway, it seems what we differed on in the book was Mantel's writing style and that is something that is hard for two people to agree on and part of the reason why there are so many books out there - to find a perfect one for everyone!

I've said many times that A Place of Greater Safety is my favorite Mantel and that it started me reading more about the French Revolution, so I guess I'm just repeating that here. I read it several years ago, so I don't recall the writing style as well as I should, but obviously it didn't bother me. One of the things I admire about Mantel is that she's not afraid to try different styles, plots, time periods, and characters -- not always successfully, I might add.

Fascinating review and discussion of A Place of Greater Safety, Suzanne. I look forward to reading it, but have been waiting for when I have more time to concentrate on it. I own more Mantel than I have read, but so far have admired her work.

Thank you for the great review Suzanne. You're making me curious about the writing style, I might like it, or not I guess.

>218 Poquette: Your review makes me think of some other readers issues when reading Wolf Hall
Some people find her style of writing confusing.

Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments. I will respond to you each individually, but I want to say right up front that it should be obvious from my review that I was very conflicted about A Place of Greater Safety. The book made for compelling reading. I was fascinated. I don't object to any of the content. It all contributed meaningfully. My point is that I thought the writing as a whole lacked polish, especially considering all the hype around Hilary Mantel.

>219 RidgewayGirl: I agree, it is not an easy book, but one of the things that made it so compelling was the skillful way Mantel brought the characters to life. By the end of the book, I felt as though I really knew them, which added to the shock of their fate, even though I knew what was coming. Also, I felt I understood the development of the various factions much better than I had before reading this book.

Interesting that you thought Mantel did not look favorably upon Danton. I thought she did a good job of keeping her own attitudes out of the book. My impression was that she let the characters reflect their own attitudes. I too liked Danton, but I also liked Camille. It was interesting to watch Robespierre develop into a real villain. You could almost see it coming.

Thanks for recommending Danton: Giant of the Revolution. I'll keep it in mind.

>220 japaul22: You have expressed the problem of style and taste in a nutshell. On the one hand, Mantel's use of "snippets of real words and writing" actually helped to round out one's impression of the characters. My complaint is not that she used all those materials — merely that it was ungracefully presented. I didn't care for her style at all until the final chapter, which is, in my view, very well written. You can feel the climax building. If the whole book had been like that, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. It's also possible that by the end I was more accustomed and was finally getting into the groove!

>221 rebeccanyc: The paradoxical thing about all this is that Mantel did accomplish her own objectives as expressed in her Author's Note, and the overall effect was that this reader, just like you, came away with a sense having been inside the Revolution. The overall effect was masterful. I am perhaps nitpicking about aspects of the presentation.

>222 Linda92007: The book does require some concentration. I found it helpful to have a time line of events handy. So much happens that keeping it all straight really requires one or two crutches. I'll be interested to have your thoughts if and when you do read it.

>223 FlorenceArt: Thanks, Florence! Whether you end up liking the style or not is hard to predict. Most people like it. I seem to be an outlyer in this case.

>224 baswood: Some people find her style of writing confusing.   In this case the subject matter is so huge it can't help being confusing, which is why I really benefited by use of a time line to help keep it all straight.

Well you all have me wanting to learn about the French Revolution. Seems to happen every time this book comes up here.

>190 Poquette: Suzanne, I went looking for The Charterhouse of Parma and ended up unable to decide which translation to choose. Whose did you read? Anyone have any advice?

>227 Linda92007: Linda, I read the Modern Library edition translated by Richard Howard, and loved the book. It included excellent notes and a commentary by Balzac on the novel. It looks like this:

>227 Linda92007: My Kindle version of The Charterhouse of Parma uses the 1925 C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, which is excellent and doesn't seem dated at all. There are newer translations, but I understand it was Moncrieff's translation of Proust that was revered for so long until it was recently superseded.

ETA — cross-posted with Rebecca.

>229 Poquette: For what it's worth, I never could get through the Moncrief translation of even the first volume of Proust, and only was able to read him when the new multi-translator editions came out, but that may have more to do with my age and commitment than the translation.

>230 rebeccanyc: That's good to know, Rebecca. I haven't even tried Proust yet, but when I do, I'll go for the new translation.

I have just come face to face with the arbitrariness of judging a work of literature. I made a big deal about what I perceived as the unfinished quality of A Place of Greater Safety. I made that judgment under the assumption that Hilary Mantel had written a conventional historical novel — a cut above the run-of-the-mill to be sure, and not to be confused with genre historical fiction. Perhaps it was an unfair assessment, perhaps the form of the novel was Mantel's effort to set it apart from the ordinary. After all, she did win the Booker Prize twice with subsequent efforts.

What raises this issue of arbitrariness is that if, in her author's note, she had said something about it being in the postmodern tradition, perhaps it would have relieved me of the misapprehension that it should meet some set of time-honored expectations.

This issue of arbitrariness has raised its ugly head as I get into The Flanders Road by Claude Simon, which is a well-known example of the postmodern nouveau roman, a book that was consciously conceived and written to defy such novelistic conventions as plot, action and character development, etc., which The Flanders Road avoids. It is an example of stream-of-consciousness writing calculated to convey the odd disorientation caused by the dislocations of cavalrymen in the Second World War.

At this point I am not sure how I will come down on this book, but it demands a different set of expectations and different criteria for making an assessment.

Simon's experiment didn't exactly change the trajectory of fictional output. Most readers still want novels that tell stories, that create people who develop — or not —and events that reflect a beginning, middle and end. It would be completely unfair to compare The Flanders Road with, for example, All Quiet on the Western Front, although they are both concerned with battlefield horrors. But it would be interesting to compare it with, say, To the Lighthouse — a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness writing.

I have the creeping sensation that if I had read The Flanders Road before tackling A Place of Greater Safety I might have had something different to say about its perceived unfinished quality. I really don't know. But I am left with this question: Do we sometimes judge books in contexts that may be separate and apart from their own merits or even our personal taste?

>232 Poquette: Very, very good questions. As I was reading your post I felt an urge to say "Hah! That would never happen to me!", but of course that's completely untrue. Our expectations and the frame of reference we apply to any work shape our perception of it.

As a spectator of art, I have to struggle constantly not to be blinded by my own personal definition of art and at least keep an open mind to other interpretations. But it never occurred to me that I could have a similar blindness to certain forms of literature. Food for thought.

>232 Poquette: Interesting question. I try to go into reading something with as little knowledge about the book as is humanly possible. I usually will know when it was written, and if it's a somewhat popular book I probably can't avoid knowing a little bit about its reputation, which will sometimes involve knowing something about the style. But I want to try to judge each book on its own merits as I perceive them.

Reading like this has led to some interesting discoveries, since I suppose I go in "expecting" the default of plot, character development, relatively linear writing, etc. But while I may think that I'm getting some sort of "fresher" perspective on a book, more like someone might have when it was written, that's not necessarily true. After all, books aren't written in a vacuum and often their style or other aspects are influenced by whatever movements are happening at the time. So not knowing that Book X was influenced by Book R may make me less likely to appreciate what it's trying to achieve rather than more.

But I'm still going to continue reading in my own way because I like the feeling of discovery and I like experiencing books for myself, whether or not my ideas about them "match up" to prevailing ones.

>233 FlorenceArt: This was a rude awakening for me, Florence, especially after it occurred to me that there might be a bit of postmodern influence underlying Hilary Mantel's work.

You are so right that a little understanding goes a long way when considering any creative piece, whether literature or the visual arts.

>234 ursula: I try to go into reading something with as little knowledge about the book as is humanly possible.

Interestingly — and thanks for your comments, by the way, Ursula, which have led me to think even more deeply about all this — my approach is exactly the opposite with almost everything but genre fiction, which is so predictable that it almost never leads one into pitfalls. I like to know everything I can about a book, the author and his/her intent before I begin to read because there is too much danger of misunderstanding if one approaches a book in complete ignorance. IMHO.

The case of postmodern fiction comes to mind. If you don't know in advance that The Flanders Road, for example, is in effect an anti-novel, you are bound to not want to bother finishing it because it is not living up to conventional novelistic expectations. Italo Calvino is incomprehensible outside the postmodern context, and a little foreknowledge can transform one of his books from perplexing to immensely enjoyable. There is a lot of literary gamesmanship going on among the postmodernists that goes right over one's head if you don't know the context — and detracts from one's ability to fully appreciate a work.

Novels from earlier eras frequently are written in historic and literary contexts that may be unfamiliar, and so I tend to go for editions with good introductions and copious notes so there is little room for misunderstanding. Case in point, I read The Red and the Black last year — without introduction and notes — and it mentions "The Emigration" quite frequently. I wondered what this was and assumed it was something quite different than the reality — namely, the mass exodus of the aristocracy from France during the Revolution. Someone here in Club Read thankfully straightened me out before I wrote my review! If only I had read A Place of Greater Safety first!

Reading in context also leads to interesting discoveries, but for different reasons of course. I am particularly aware of the traps awaiting the reader of literary fiction written since the mid twentieth century, simply because of the widespread influence of the postmodernists. Even a writer like Julian Barnes can be misunderstood because some of his books are more postmodern than others. If you don't know the context, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters may just seem like a collection of short stories, or Flaubert's Parrot may not seem like fiction at all if you are not paying attention.

In retrospect, I am still fretting over whether I am being unfairly critical of A Place of Greater Safety because it doesn't fit into my preconceived expectations, which may be quite different from the author's intent. Now that my review has hit the top of the Hot Reviews, I cannot help wondering if people who know more than I are sniggering at my ignorance. Even though Mantel's novel is not advertised as postmodern per se, it certainly lives in a literary world that has absorbed many of the breakout features that were introduced by the postmodernists. Even in the postmodern context, my original assessment of her book doesn't changed much. But I might have couched my criticism differently if I had thought of this context beforehand.

Since I write reviews I am probably more concerned than most that I don't criticize a book for things that were not part of the author's program. Again, trying to fit a postmodern novel into the standards of genre fiction is completely unfair — not to say ignorant. Heaven forbid that I should ever appear ignorant! ;-)

Interesting discussion of A Place of Greater Safety. I read it from the library in the early 1990s when it first came out. I have no idea why I picked it up. I had never heard of Hilary Mantel, but she is now one of the few current authors I read. I have read most of her work since.

I liked most of the stylistic things you did not, they didn't occur to me at the time. Reading what people have said above made me think about it, and I suspect I like the style as to me it fitted the actions and thought processes of a group of revolutionaries, people who would not have had time to sit down and discourse at length and even act at length on any topic, so a somewhat disjointed flavour worked.

The Charterhouse of Parma is on my list to read, so it was good to see the comments above about the translations.

>234 ursula: I have the same approach of not wanting to know anything about a plot be it book or film, before I read or see it. Do you reread books, and if so, how does this affect you rereading?

>232 Poquette: Do we sometimes judge books in contexts that may be separate and apart from their own merits or even our personal taste?
This has happened to me when I have read particular books under extraordinary circumstances in my real world, positive or otherwise. My notion of those books is forevermore tinged/ tainted by the external circumstances under which they were read, despite how I think I would feel about them if I were to reread them now.

So back to my original question: Do we sometimes judge books in contexts that may be separate and apart from their own merits or even our personal taste?

I am now realizing that we have to judge books in separate contexts! We are not in Kansas anymore. Too many schools of literary fish have poured over the dam to allow us to blithely read without some foreknowledge. Outside the realms of genre fiction, we must have some understanding of literary context or we risk missing the forest for the trees.

>236 SassyLassy: We seem to have cross-posted, and I appreciate your comments.

There is obviously room for differences of taste, and now that I have thought of this problem of context, I am thinking I should have had it in mind while I was reading! Let's hope I remember this in future!

>237 Poquette:: I think it's a big question. On joyful occasions we read a book where we feel the same about both pure reading pleasure and literary merit, but certainly it's a challenge when you read a book that scores highly on pushing the boundaries of traditional novel writing but rather lower on pure reading enjoyment.

If we read a book where the author has succeeded in redefining form, but has failed to engage us as a reader, should that merit the same or better appreciation (and I guess rating) than a book that just quietly engages us in a page-turning read?

I think your review of A Place of Greater Safety has equal merit to anyone else's, if not more. You have reviewed it with honesty in terms of pure reader enjoyment, which for the majority of us takes precedent over something that's supposedly boundary pushing but not emotionally connecting. I felt like that about The Stone Diaries - lots of flipping between first and third person narratives that was apparently very progressive from a literary perspective, but from a reader's perspective seemed like a lazy and convenient way to get around plot and narrative stumbling blocks.

I suspect that there are a good number of reviews written by people who are scared to stand out from the crowd and say it like it is about a novel for fear of being considered 'non-literary'.

>235 Poquette: I don't really have a preferred approach, since sometimes I know virtually nothing about a book beforehand and sometimes I'm reading it specifically because of what I've heard about it. I've always thought that a book should be able to stand on its own though without needing any prior conception of it before starting. I feel communicating with the reader is precisely the author's job and if it requires outside information to understand then they haven't done it. I do tend to approach everything as being in a general "books" category though, and it either works for me or it doesn't. It's interesting what you said about Italo Calvino though. I don't know anything at all about postmodernism but I read If on a winter's night a traveler a couple of years ago and I didn't have any problems with it, though I've yet to check out any of his other works so I don't know how they compare. I went into A History of the World in 10½ Chapters with no knowledge of it too and really enjoyed it. We all have different ways of reading though, and that's what makes things so interesting and keeps books so varied!

>235 Poquette: Context is everything when you read more than say a book a month. I like going into books blind - tell me the genre and the style but allow me to decide if I like it on my own (I don't get postmodernism but some of the books that get bundled there seem to work for me for example). But it is inevitable that what you read before will influence your enjoyment of what you read now - and expectations can come into the way of enjoying a book - if you expect say fantasy and end up with one of those supernatural romances, things won't go overly well; expect the correct genre and style and it works a lot better...

Part of what makes some novels stand out is that everyone can find something different in them - and you are restricted in what you can find if you go with preconceptions. This is why I like how they teach literature back home a lot more than what they do in the States (no more than a week or two on a book and it is concentrated to specific scenes and elements so literary techniques can be discussed as opposed to spending a semester on the same text and dissecting it until you forget that you had an opinion that is not the same as the one you are getting taught.). And that is not the same as not knowing the historical era - reading someone from the 19th century without realizing the restrictions imposed on women will leave you believing that you read a misogynistic atrocity and will stop you from finding why the novel is actually good (same with portrayals of Jews, People of color and so on).

Saying that Mantel is postmodern gives me a pause. I like her style and I cannot read most of the post-modernists. But then it comes back to expectations - her style is her own and trying to fit it under a category does not work very well...

I don't know that I agree that some things are incomprehensible without other information or context. Can one understand a piece of abstract art without knowing the history of the art movements that led to it? Hopefully on some level - as >240 valkyrdeath: says, it's the author's/artist's job to communicate with the audience. Now - I'm not going to argue that every viewer without additional knowledge gets the same thing out of a piece of art or literature as one who has studied context, but I think that it's 1. dismissive to say the unstudied won't get anything/as much/the right things out of it and 2. not a terribly successful piece of art if one has to have done research to have a reaction to it that's not simply "huh?"

I've read a number of books that were not a traditional novel, and while they might have started out as perplexing because I wasn't expecting that, it also led to me considering more deeply what I thought the author was trying to achieve, why he/she used the chosen techniques, etc. After I finish I can read other people's opinions, but at least I've had a chance to form one of my own first.

>236 SassyLassy: I generally do not re-read books. However, I have gathered a few somewhere in the back of my mind that I would consider/would like to re-read at some point in the future now that I know more about them and would like to read with a concentration on different aspects.

Well - I do no understand abstract art even if I have all the context and information anyway :) But I was talking more about understanding the history and not getting tripped by something that sounds bad in our times but was acceptable when the novel was written... or getting oversensitive at such things so that you do not see the actual story in the book. May be wrong of course - and I suspect it is different for anyone :)

>243 AnnieMod:, My message wasn't in response to you or in any way about what you were saying about historical context and racism/misogyny. Sorry I didn't tag an original message I was responding to, since it was more intended as a part of the general conversation.

>244 ursula: :) Old habits on my side from forums where there is no tagging :)

This conversation reminds me of a thought process i once put myself through. If an artists creates a wondefully creative and complex work of art and yet no one gets, or can understand it, is it still a great work of art? I think the answer is yes.

Surely a writer wants to get general reader appeal. But not doing so doesn't, by itself, make the book bad or a failure.

As a reader, sometimes we just find oursleves enjoying a book and don't really understand why. Sometime we see the other aspects of the work and that creates an enjoyment. And sometimes we just don't get it. We may hate it because we didn't get it, because not seeing that we are left with a boring experience. But that doesn't make the book itself bad. (Also sometimes the book is just bad. And sometimes we get it but we just don't care. And a lot of other things can happen too.)

>245 AnnieMod: No worries, I totally understand. :)

>246 dchaikin: I agree completely with your last paragraph. Lots of possible scenarios!

>242 ursula: Agree with everything you say!

Personally I don't put a lot of value on understanding. That's how I improved my English, because I didn't mind reading a book where I didn't understand every single word. Some of my best experiences with movies or books were from works I did not understand at all.

A work of literature or art is also created by the viewer or reader, and it's different to everyone. Great works are those that do offer something, maybe not for everyone, but on enough levels that it can enrich many viewers/readers, even after the context in which they were created has been long lost. Knowing something about the symbolism of Romanesque sculpture can give you a richer perspective and an additional level on which to enjoy it, but you can also just admire its beauty. After all, this is what we did with African sculpture, we took it away from its context and put it in museums to be admired for reasons that are completely foreign to its creators.

I think I have only two separate (but largely overlapping) frames of reference as regards books: recreational reading, and serious literature. I would probably not even have noticed Mantel's style if I had read it without Suzanne's comments (and now I really feel I have to read Mantel and see what it's all about).

It always annoys me slightly when people seem to give so much importance to genre, but reading the comments here, I begin to see how it can be important to some people, so that they know what to expect and get into the right spirit, or something :-)

Wow! When I posed my original question, I had no idea it would generate such a wealth of responses!

>239 AlisonY: I suspect that there are a good number of reviews written by people who are scared to stand out from the crowd and say it like it is about a novel for fear of being considered 'non-literary'.

This touches upon what I am trying to get at. I stand behind my opinion about the book, but my misgivings have to do with making sure that opinion is based on an understanding of what the author was trying to do. Since WWII, the influence of the modern and postmodern has permeated literature in both subtle and outlandish ways. And in a sense, writers of fiction have been freed up to write whatever and however they want. If we aren't sophisticated enough to get it, well, it's our loss. I just want to be sure I got it!

>240 valkyrdeath: We all have different ways of reading

Isn't that the truth! And often the individual is required to adopt more than one way of reading!

>241 AnnieMod: Saying that Mantel is postmodern gives me a pause.

I am not actually saying Mantel is postmodernist. But I believe all fiction — genre excluded — since WWII has been influenced to some extent by the experimentation, playfulness or even iconoclasm of the modern and postmodern writers who were trying to break out of the bonds of what had become for some of them, at least, a literary dead end. I didn't think of this as I was writing my review of Mantel's book, and all this talk about context is involved with "Maybe I didn't cut her enough slack."

I wrote this note to myself somewhere along the line: A writer may have written a different book than the one you think you are reading. In this case, my review spells out what I thought I was reading, and despite its flaws, the book does put the reader squarely inside the French Revolution. I came away with an understanding of what went on there that I doubt I could have gotten any better through reading an actual history of those events. The flaws that I saw are subjective. Other readers didn't mind, which says I had some different expectations. The question is: Was I being fair?

>242 ursula: Perhaps "incomprehensible" was too strong. In my own experience, however, it has helped to learn a bit about the various schools of literature and to know how a writer fits into the scheme of things. I am not at all interested in forming opinions before reading, but knowing some background usually enlarges the enjoyment I get out of a book.

>246 dchaikin: As a reader, sometimes we just find oursleves enjoying a book and don't really understand why.

This is true, but it is part of my personality to want to understand why, and that question will frequently send me in search of some background to try to get at authorial intent.

>248 FlorenceArt: Personally I don't put a lot of value on understanding. That's how I improved my English

Now, this is very interesting, and it may illustrate why you are an artist, Florence, and I am not! When reading English, understanding is of great importance to me. It is how I grew my vocabulary as a young person. But you have said something very helpful here, which I may try to apply to my ongoing study of French. Thanks for that!

A work of literature or art is also created by the viewer or reader, and it's different to everyone.

This is so true, and maybe that's the bottom line here. My context and yours may be different, but we overlap enough with each other and with the authors we read and artists we observe that there is common ground.

As for genre or literary school or period, or whatever, it seems to me to be essential to know the context in order to fully appreciate what the author is doing. We don't have to think about this at all with regard to what I call escape reading, but serious fiction deserves a bit of foreknowledge. At least it works out that way for me.

Couldn't it be that certain books, for whatever reason, appeal to you and other books appeal less? I understand wanting to understand why, but sometimes it's so nebulous that it's difficult to figure out why one book appeals and another doesn't. I'm often surprised at how a book I disliked was loved by another reader who usually has very similar tastes to my own. And there are books that I read and dislike despite understanding the book, the author, the author's intent and the literary and historical background of the book.

I suspect those stars attached to your review were from people who agreed with you or people who simply thought you wrote a thought-provoking review that gave them insight on the book.

I am a reader that likes to know as much as possible about the book and author before I read. I think that the more you know then the more you will know.

However >248 FlorenceArt: "Some of my best experiences with movies or books were from works I did not understand at all." I can also relate to this: as my understanding of French is not great and yet I still enjoy French films (perhaps the best cinema in the world) and I enjoy French novels

This thread is getting unwieldy, so on to part two . . .