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When I started writing here it was to hear my own voice, but of course it is easy over time to slide into trying to write what I think others will want to read -- and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is not what I wanted to use this space for, and I must keep coming back to centre and reminding myself of that or I will end up silent in all the fractal possibilities of what Others (any imagined other, not any specific you who is reading this) will think or say or want or do. This does not mean commentary or discussion are unwelcome, they are always very, very welcome, just that writing with an eye to pleasing others ends up without the writing at all. So --
Behind a cut tag because it is very long, my current reading and what I am thinking about it; it wrote itself in my head as I was driving hither and yon and back again running errands today.
Divorce is the earliest poetry by Charles Williams and even though I have only read one of his novels, there is a definitely recognisable core shared between them. I am halfway through and there are two Trojan War sonnets I am in love with. A slow read because poetry is always slow if it is at all working for me; if I can race through it then there is nothing to catch upon.
The Perfect Summer is popular history about 1911, mentioned before, I am bogging down very occasionally in paragraphs of comma separated lists, but overall it is going well and I am glad to be rereading it.
Class: A View From Middle England is another reread, Jilly Cooper on class, interesting in that social document of the moment way (1979). I do not share her preoccupations but that is the point, to see someone else's point of view. It would be nearly perfect for what it is if she did not succumb to sudden arounds of some sort of humour I cannot stand, I think it might be punning but I am unclear on the terminology. I would be done with this if I did not have to carry around the physical copy in order to read it.
Violets and Vinegar: Beyond Bartlett is more Jilly Cooper, with Tom Hartman, and it is a collection of quotes from women's writing, from 1980. Neither Cooper nor Hartman have, in my mind, a good eye for quotation -- the things they choose seem more like random selections than actual pieces of writing which stand alone and say something
Oedipus at Thebes is the earliest Bernard Knox I could find; Knox was my first meeting with a certain sort of writing where a lot of works on a single topic are considered together and allowed to play off of each other with a strand of the personal running through -- I am not certain what it is called, an essay I suppose, but not much like the essays I find now. I came across a collection of his in the mid-90s and fell in love with it and have always meant to go back and read his other things. He was a classicist and died in 2010 and oh how I wish I had written him a fan letter, not really for his sake (because why would he have cared?), but for my own because his writing opened up very new worlds to me. Anyway, this is his from 1957 and I am only ten pages in because I was expecting it to be dense but it is not so far, it is very quick, and I do not know if I agree with the first ten pages but then, I am not a classicist, so really I am just enjoying the newness of it all.
Sleeping Giant by Tamara Draut is from 2016, one of those books I am reading to become more woke, as the phrase now goes, and it is hard going because it is so upsetting to see all the awful things the classes with power have done and are still doing to maintain their power, but it is not right for me to look away from it when I, being upper middle class, am benefitting so much from it. So I am reading it very, very slowly and trying to look and see what I can do other than give money to people who are better informed.
The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zoroudi is the first in a series of mysteries by a British author who married a Greek man and lived in Greece and wrote a series of mysteries set in Greece. This first one is full of rural island misery and filth and boredom and isolation and occasionally very good food, and if they are all like this I do not think I will make it through the series, but I am a little reluctantly drawn in enough I keep reading it, but not quickly. I had not known before she is British; her portraits of misery were difficult enough to take when I thought she might be writing them from the inside, now I am not at all sure what I think, except that Flora Poste really ought to take a Greek holiday and sort these people out. (Or a Greek Flora Poste is needed, really, the original might sort them out to be 1930s English stereotypes of remote Greek fishers...)
The other 11 will have to wait until I have made my children dinner and had some sort of snack; I had matzah brei for brunch and it was a little too dry as well as some hours ago -- but I will have dinner with our spouse tonight, after several days not, so just a snack.
Behind a cut tag because it is very long, my current reading and what I am thinking about it; it wrote itself in my head as I was driving hither and yon and back again running errands today.
Divorce is the earliest poetry by Charles Williams and even though I have only read one of his novels, there is a definitely recognisable core shared between them. I am halfway through and there are two Trojan War sonnets I am in love with. A slow read because poetry is always slow if it is at all working for me; if I can race through it then there is nothing to catch upon.
The Perfect Summer is popular history about 1911, mentioned before, I am bogging down very occasionally in paragraphs of comma separated lists, but overall it is going well and I am glad to be rereading it.
Class: A View From Middle England is another reread, Jilly Cooper on class, interesting in that social document of the moment way (1979). I do not share her preoccupations but that is the point, to see someone else's point of view. It would be nearly perfect for what it is if she did not succumb to sudden arounds of some sort of humour I cannot stand, I think it might be punning but I am unclear on the terminology. I would be done with this if I did not have to carry around the physical copy in order to read it.
Violets and Vinegar: Beyond Bartlett is more Jilly Cooper, with Tom Hartman, and it is a collection of quotes from women's writing, from 1980. Neither Cooper nor Hartman have, in my mind, a good eye for quotation -- the things they choose seem more like random selections than actual pieces of writing which stand alone and say something
Oedipus at Thebes is the earliest Bernard Knox I could find; Knox was my first meeting with a certain sort of writing where a lot of works on a single topic are considered together and allowed to play off of each other with a strand of the personal running through -- I am not certain what it is called, an essay I suppose, but not much like the essays I find now. I came across a collection of his in the mid-90s and fell in love with it and have always meant to go back and read his other things. He was a classicist and died in 2010 and oh how I wish I had written him a fan letter, not really for his sake (because why would he have cared?), but for my own because his writing opened up very new worlds to me. Anyway, this is his from 1957 and I am only ten pages in because I was expecting it to be dense but it is not so far, it is very quick, and I do not know if I agree with the first ten pages but then, I am not a classicist, so really I am just enjoying the newness of it all.
Sleeping Giant by Tamara Draut is from 2016, one of those books I am reading to become more woke, as the phrase now goes, and it is hard going because it is so upsetting to see all the awful things the classes with power have done and are still doing to maintain their power, but it is not right for me to look away from it when I, being upper middle class, am benefitting so much from it. So I am reading it very, very slowly and trying to look and see what I can do other than give money to people who are better informed.
The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zoroudi is the first in a series of mysteries by a British author who married a Greek man and lived in Greece and wrote a series of mysteries set in Greece. This first one is full of rural island misery and filth and boredom and isolation and occasionally very good food, and if they are all like this I do not think I will make it through the series, but I am a little reluctantly drawn in enough I keep reading it, but not quickly. I had not known before she is British; her portraits of misery were difficult enough to take when I thought she might be writing them from the inside, now I am not at all sure what I think, except that Flora Poste really ought to take a Greek holiday and sort these people out. (Or a Greek Flora Poste is needed, really, the original might sort them out to be 1930s English stereotypes of remote Greek fishers...)
The other 11 will have to wait until I have made my children dinner and had some sort of snack; I had matzah brei for brunch and it was a little too dry as well as some hours ago -- but I will have dinner with our spouse tonight, after several days not, so just a snack.
