The Big Read: March 2007

March 19th, 2007

4:15 pm. I read Roland Barthes' writings on theatre. I enjoyed it, he talks about symbolism in the theatre regarding the costumes, the visuals, the sound of words. I don't think this would ever had occured to me. However, I continue to be frustrated by the fact that he never wrote a book-length exposition of his thinking. Rats.

March 11th, 2007

12:15 pm. I read Pamela Aidan's These Three Remain, an embroidery on Pride and Prejudice but in the worst Harlequin mode. When Jan Austen invented the Harlequin, she was reacting against the Gothic novels that came before her. I did not expect that the Harlequin would be her tribute. I also read Alors la Chine, from Roland Barthes. I have made no headway on the cloying autobiography by Bill Clinton. I also read Jean Sullivan's novel, which was unremarkable. What I have actually enjooyed the most, apart from re-reading Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede and Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters as stress-relievers, are the articles on theatre by Roland Barthes, since I knew most of the plays mentioned. I was pleased to read a panegyric to Gerard Philippe, whose film performances I have admired. I also read Systeme de la mode, which was a very analytical look at the analysis of signs in fashion. I liked it, in no small measure because Barthes wrote lots of short pieces and few long ones, which frustrates me.

February 28th, 2007

2:00 pm. After a number of days not finishing any books, I have read Barthes' S/Z, and his Bruissements de la langue IV, Jean Sullivan's Traversee des illusions, Bob Woodward's State of Denial, and the entirely forgettable second volume of Goldoni's memoirs in French. Woodward's theme of the stupidity of power continues through his third book on Bush post-9/11. The access he got was impressive, but I don't know that his interviews were that revealing or in-depth. Barthes' short articles in his fourth volume of essays were not particularly interesting either. His S/Z is based on a course he gave, and it is another experiment in structure. He says he can discern five different levels of appreciation in this short story, a thought I find mind-boggling. He does discuss three regimes of expression for novels: where the meant is spelled out, the action named but not given in detail; the meaning is given,adn the action is described; or the action is described but the meaning of it all is not made explicit. That is a thought that never occurred to me. Sullivan's book is spiritual -- he ruminates about various minor occurrences in his everyday life. I am now reading Barthes' Systeme de la mode, an analysis of women's fashions, and if I get to Sullivan's next book, I will have come up to date about my inter-library loan readings. I finished Sur Racine last week, another book by Barthes, but I found that I didn't know enough of his plays to follow easily.

February 25th, 2007

6:00 pm. I read Frederic Morton's The Rothschilds during the week-end. I can't say that it was well written, and it took five chapters for me to get the answer to the question on my mind from early on: what happened to the Frankfurt and Naples branches of the family. There were a lot of cliches included, a la 'they had to be Rothschilds' or 'being Rothschilds' they did this or that. Boring. I also started Milan Kundera's Art du roman. I was disappointed to find it was a collection of essays, but they are interesting nonetheless.

February 22nd, 2007

11:45 am. I finished the Bush biography, and then I did read La chambre claire. It certainly contained ideas about writing as representation that hadn't occurred to me before.

February 21st, 2007

5:00 pm. I finished Colin Powell's biography, and it was just as bland and superficial as the start. I also started a biography of Laura Bush, and it is pious as well as being bland and superficial. So she didn't sell marijuana in college, after all! I then read a clutch of books by Roland Barthes. Being a semiologist discussing I suppose literature as art. So he wrote an essay on Japan, L'empire des signes, and one on love, Fragments d'un discours amoureux. He also published his first lecture as holder of chair of semiotics at the College de France, Lecon, as well as a sort of diary, Incidents. All of these are easy reads. He also wrote the catalogue for a cartoonist, Saul Steinberg, called All About You. Finally, there is a short essay called Sur la litterature. I expect I will read La chambre claire next.

February 20th, 2007

6:15 pm. I finished Goldoni's memoirs, the first volume. I read it because it was supposed to describe Venice in that period. It was more or less a list of Goldoni's many plays, along with plot summaries and a few incidents from his private life. Boring, and I've got another volume to go. I also read Barthes' Sollers ecrivain. I thought it was very good. It was also mercifully short, as are a number of his books. I started the fourth volume of his literary essays. I must say he refers to dimensions 'beyond representation' that I have never thought of. Literature as reading, for example. His essay on literature and science is excellent. I'm also about 200 pages into a biography of Colin Powell, Soldier. It is pretty bland, although that is often the case with biographies whose subjects are still living.As usual, I'm pretty scattered in my reading.

February 17th, 2007

3:15 pm. I read Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus, simply because I like to read about nuns when I get stressed. It's good, but I much prefer her great In this House of Brede...I also finished reading Herzen's Past and Thoughts. The thing about those memoirs is that the reminiscences of Czarist Russia are great, but the rest of the exile years, with the bits and pieces of political writing thrown in for good measure, are dully written and boring. Anyway, I'm half-way through Goldoni's Memoirs (volume 1) and the first Jean Sullivan. With Sullivan, it was striking because I felt like the author just sat down in front of me and started talking to me. Excellent.

February 7th, 2007

6:45 pm. I also read James Rosenau's Scientific Study of Foreign Policy. I heard a speaker at a conference last week refer to him. It is billed as the intellectual autobiography of a scholar in International Relations. His thoughts about the angst of the doctoral candidate were fun to read, but the rest degenerated quickly into the collection of pieces written throughout the author's career. I also read Critique et verite and Le plaisir du texte by Roland Barthes. These are collections of fairly random thoughts on the titled topics, so I can't say I think much of it at the moment. I hope to read a more systematic essay shortly. I have decided to read all of Roland Barthes next.

12:00 pm. I just completed the thirteen-novel cycle by Dorothy Richardson. She is credited for stream-of-consciousness novels, which gives rise to psychological novels that I do like, but also Joyce and Woolf, which I do not. Richardson was recommended by Bryher, who herself was recommended by the New Yorker. It's true that I got to know what it was like to grow up in Edwardian England, but as the cycle progresses, that aspect fades, and I lost interest.However, one is reminded of Proust, and I enjoyed all of that. I also read an excellent, short little novel by Isobel English, Every Eye. A great opening few lines: "Cynthis died, this afternoon, right after tea. This is what it is like when one dies and still dislikes." A real attention grabber, beautifully and simply written. I got the recommendation from New Yorker as well.

February 4th, 2007

12:15 pm. I completed Martin du Gard, and I must say its finish is as strong as any close of a novel ever was. The heroes die during World War I, one from gas, slowly, one is shot when the Germans overrun a camp after being taken prisoner as a traitor following a plan crash in which he was badly burned. I have also read two volumes of Alexander Herzen's memoirs, which are a fine read. I am particularly interested in his descriptions of life as he was in an aristrocratic family in the same circles as one of my favorite authors, the Comtesse de Segur.

January 28th, 2007

4:15 pm. I finished Seton's history of the last century of the Russian Empire, and I agree with his conclusions that the rulers ruined thousands of lives. I also read the first three novels of Dorothy Richardsons' Pilgrimage, which I must say bore me, but it came recommended by Bryher and it does tell me, in boring detail, what it was really like to grow up in Edwardian England if you were a woman of the middle class. I also have finished Flaubert's Salammbo, which as a Antiquity novel did not particularly interest me. I have three more volumes of Richardson on my nightable, as well as Roger Martin du Gard to complete.

January 27th, 2007

5:00 pm. Today I read The Lady of the Holy Alliance, about the Baltic baroness who inspired Tsar Alexander I to institute the Holy Alliance. Quick read about a Lutheran mystic in action. I also read Chateaubriant's Monsieur de Lourdines, about a man's ruin comign about because of his son's debts. I'm now about 200 pages into a history of the last century of the Russian Empire.

I have decided to read off my lists for a while, just for variety. That is how I read the complete works of Gide and Genet, and I am now working towards Martin du Gard and Flaubert. In each case, I have less than 1000 pages to go.

January 20th, 2007

5:00 pm. I was off sick for this, the fourth day in a row. I delected myself with archived articles from the New Yorker for two days, but then I returned to read Devenir and the first two instalments of Les Thibaut, by Roger Martin du Gard. I don't think much of Gard yet, but it's early still. Today I read Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. It is slightly badly written, and it fails to explain some of the occurrences, but it is impeccably sourced and I certainly know much more about the Cultural Revolution than before. It read like a locomotive roaring down a mountain, the events set in motion have so much of their own momentum. I also read Tintin and the Secrets of Literature by Tom McCarthy, of which I didn't think much. It was a quick read, a literary essay on a comic strip from my youth. I had more fun looking up the titles and covers on the Internet. Then I read Heart to Artemis, by Bryher. It's right up there with Consuelo Vanderbilt's memoirs for skipping over all the interesting parts: illegitimate birth, father becomes richest man in Britain, discovery and pursuit of lesbian identity. Nothing about any of that, but the memories of her childhood travels in Egypt and Europe (I guess they weren't received in polite society), especially the notation that her self-awareness came after her travels and changed how easily she entered the culture she visited, was quite worth it. I also read Julien Gracq's En lisant, en ecrivant, but I didn't find him perceptive.

January 14th, 2007

4:00 pm. I have read Isabelle, l'immoraliste and finished Les faux-monnayeurs, and so have completed the canon of Andre Gide's works. I thought Isabelle was very atmospheric, but I still think Caves du Vatican is his best novel. L'immoraliste reminded me very strong of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, so much that I wondered which writer had read whose novel first. The obsession with the beautiful boy, the everpresent female mother figure, the pervasive fear, the near-death illness, the visit to the barber or coiffeur. I have now borrowed the complete works of Roger Martin du Gard, of whom I've only read Les Thibault.

January 13th, 2007

5:30 pm. I read Andre Gide today, including L'Odyssee d'Andre Gide, by Rene Maril, about Gide himself. I read Thesee, Nourritures terrestres, and Caves du Vatican. Gide deserves his Novel Prize just for Caves du Vatican. It has characterizations which are priceless, and the characters are unforgettable. The plot twists are believable but completely unexpected. It is a great novel. I found Thesee uninteresting, but Nourritures terrestres is real poetry, whether it is in verse or in prose. If I read Isabelle, L'immoraliste and Les faux-monnayeurs tomorrow, I'll have read all his novels, although not his journals.

6:00 am. Since I ran out of books to read after Saint-Simon, I got out the complete works of Jean Genet, whose name I had read but about whom I knew nothing. I said to myself: "This will be the Genet week-end." Well, it turned out to be a Genet twenty-four hours, he is an easy read and a talented write. But after Saint-Simon, what a contrast. Genet wrote four novels which I would summarize as: sodomy in juvenile hall, sodomy in federal prison, sodomy in the maquis, and sodomy in Brest. It reminded me of Yukio Mishima's obsessions with masochism, the endless violence endlessly sexualized. That is the fact that repels me, not the fact that they were both gay. I find repugnant the explicit details of the underworld, and I find it tragic that Genet, who was the French intelligentsia's pet, was never allowed to become more than a trained or move beyond his exoticism: he was gay and had been a 'loubard', a criminal living on the streets since he was ten years old.

Swinging back to the high ether of spirit, I also read Andre Gide's Symphonie pastorale, about a minister finding his Galatea not in his wife, and in a blind waif he adopts out of pity. When her sight is restored, she commits suicide over the sin she sees for the first time. Nicely written, short, but very predictable. More Gide to come.

January 9th, 2006

7:00 pm. I have just finished the last volume of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon at the court of Louis XIV and Louix XV, and it is indeed the incredible monument of literature that everyone says it is. I can't say I didn't skip the political essays and the descriptions of various wars, but the portraits Saint Simon draws of the nobles at court are priceless. I feel edified to have ploughed through the whole thing...The writing was extraordinary, and anecdotes, such as his leave-taking of a three-year-old Spanish infanta going to marry the French King (at teh time only 11 himself), where all she does is burp. Three times. Loudly. The courtiers were understandably convulsed and everyone being constrained by etiquette, had to run like hell before they burst out laughing. When Saint-Simon, France's ambassador, took leave of the Spanish King and Queen, the royal couple also couldn't stop laughing about it.

I also read three books I got as gifts: Diana's Boys: William and Harry and the Mother They Loved by Christopher Andersen; Diana in Pursuit of Love by Andrew Morton; and Empress of Pleasure, about a perpetually broke impresaria in 18th century London, by Judith Summers. The first two books are shameless rehashs of already known stories, ruthlessly exploiting a dead woman; the third is the self-absorbed work of a woman who adores the Soho district and goes on and on about it. Of little interest to anyone who realizes that there is a world beyond a particular neighborhood in a city half a world away.
December 22nd, 2006

I read Peuple de la mer by Marc Elder, and I found it a sea novel in the tradition of sea novels in English, as was Julien Gracq's Rivage des Syrtes. Gaspard is a comic novel, by Rene Benjamin, set during World War I, so it's a nice change from all the blood and gore of Henri Barbusse's Le Feu, all gritty realism. I can't imagine who would have read this during the slaughter of WWI. I also started reading my non-interlibrary loan books, as I have already run out of my borrowed books. I read quite a good novel by Bernard Clavel, about World War II, called Les fruits de l'hiver. Paul Colin's Les jeux sauvages didn't make much of an impression on me, I found the plot culminating with a rape obscene and sexist, but Henri Troyat's L'araigne did: for once the spider spinning an evil web and killing itself was a male, not a female, character. After Arland's L'ordre, which is lengthy, I'll fall back on the 9000 pages of Saint-Simon's memoirs.

December 12th, 2006

I just read Rene Maran's Batouala -- I was shocked to find it billed as an 'authentic nigger novel'. It is a standard novel about indigenous Africans, but clearly written by a white man. I also read Henri Beraud's Vitriol de lune, as wells as Le Chevrefeuille by Thierry Sandre. The latter is a novel of a World War I casualty who comes back to see his wife eight years later. Raboliot by Maurice Genevoix is a story of hunters in France in the thirties, and the passions that lead to murder in that bucolic setting. Le supplice de Phedre by Henri Deberly is another mother-obsessed novel about the widow of a sea wolf who lusts for her stepson. Great. Boring and cliched. The title is the best thing about it. Maurice Constantin-Weyer wrote a novel about French Canada, complete with characters speaking with the accents of my unlettered grand-parents, Un homme se penche sur son passe. I liked it,as I did Passage de l'Homme by Marius Grout. I then hit a streak of melodramas: Les Loups by Guy Mazeline, Mal d'amour by Jean Fayard, Les enfants gates by Philippe Heriat, Histoire d'un fait divers by Jean-Jacques Gautier, Les forets de la nuit by Jean Louis Curtis. Another war novel capped that streak, Capitaine Conan by Roger Vercel. Vent de mars, another war novel by Henri Pourrat, was written and published in WWII era France, and it is a metaphysical reflexion on events there, which I thought was intriguing. I was also interested to read what could actually be published on that topic during the Occupation. Under the heading of wartime melodrama: Mon village a l'heure allemande by Jean Bory.

December 6th, 2006

I have read an interesting novel about matadors, called Sang et lumieres (blood and light), by Joseph Peyre, and another melodramatic novel about a businessman, complete with temperamental mistress, called Rabenel, by Lucien Fabre. I am also reading the novel Les Loups, by Guy Mazeline, which is also melodramatic in plot. The melodrama from the the twenties and thirties is a little tedious, I have to say. I also read Bard O'Neill's book on Insurgency and Terrorism, which I didn't find intellectually challenging.

December 3rd, 2006

So I have read an extraordinary war novel, L'appel du sol by Adrien Bertrand. It put me in mind of Grossman's War and Fate in its chilling simplicity. I also read the depressing Nene, a novel where the main character commits suicide, by Ernest Penochon, Leon Morin, Pretre by Beatrice Beck, about a proverbial good priest; Les Faux Passeports by Charles Plisnier, a Belgian former communitst, about a communist's disillusionment in the thirties; Le Vitriol de lune by Henri Beraud, which I've already forgotten about despite having read it this afternoon; and a WWII novel, Week-end a Zuidcoote by Robert Merle.

November 27th, 2006

I have read Les racines du ciel, by Romain Gary, about which I recollect nothing, La pitie de Dieu by Jean Cau, a prison novel and a single long four-way conversation among cell-mates; l'adoration by Jacques Borel, another mother-obsessed novel; and the forgettable Bush at War, by Bob Woodward, a light piece of fluff.

November 16th, 2006

I read l'Etat sauvage, a novel of interracial relations with heartstopping violence. I am now reading les fils d'avrom by Roger Ikor. I also read Laski's Ecstasy, an anthropological investigation of the peak experience, in which I was disappointed -- not enough distinction with inspiration, insight, and just pleasure. I also read Anna Langfus's Bagages de sable, about a love affair between a young woman and and much older man, and Felicien Marceau's Creezy, about an ill-fated love affair.

November 14th, 2006

I read Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman, which was repetitious of the author's other book, Sex with Kings, and also takes as fact accusations from political enemies. I read Lufte's Visual Represetation of Quantitative Data, which was short and excellent. I am now acquainted with the principles governing the production or otherwise of the spacejunk. I also read Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark, a history of the university which was very detailed and whose writing could have done with less jargon. I also read Robert Hughes' Things I didn't Know -- a memoir of little interest, frankly, since I barely know who he is. Andre Schwart-Bart worte Le dernier des justes, about the millenary persecution of the Jews. The last scene is the death of the protagonist in a gas chamber, comforting, then experiencing the death throes of little children. Difficult at best.

November 6th, 2006

I read Saint-Germain by Fernand Walder, and Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation. Saint Germain was certainly very ordinary as a historical novel, and despite my knowledge of the Edict of Nantes and that period of French history, I think I missed some points. It was an easy read. Koestler is a monument to the theory of creativity, and what is most useful to my research is the idea that there are varying degrees of flexibility in habitual ways of thinking; and that there are two ways of getting out of a rigid way of thinking: a dream state and a flash of insight. If I had to choose a single world to describe John L'Enfer, by Didier Decoin, it would be contrived. I mean a Cheyenne window washer, a blind sociologist and a Polish naval officer in a love triangle? But it has a sensational opening scene. I also started Living History, the self-serving and sanitized autobiography by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

November 5th, 2006

I read Oublier Palerme, by Edmonde Charles-Roux, about a young Sicilian woman who grows up and works in France. I also read La Marge by Pieyre de Mandiargues, which I thought was melancholy about the death of a man's wife or girlfriend while he was carousing, but has been done as a soft core film. I read Les betises by Cecil Saint Laurent, an experimental novel about interwar France. I also read the poignant La dentelliere, a very sad novel not to be read by menopausal women! By Pascal Raine, it was made into a movie years ago, I remember reading the film review in Time when I was a teenager. I liked the nickname of the main character, Pomme. A universal story about the overly vulnerable in this world. I also read Quand la mer se retire, a novel about the trauma of postwar France, featuring French Canadian characters, and dedicated to the Canadian dead in Caen.

October 31st, 2006

Well, I read Roger Vaillant's La Loi, a novel about southern Italy which is full of stereotypes about Italians, the young woman without a dowry who can only hope to be a mistress, the rivalry among men, the sensuously presented scene of violence between father and daughter. Bad. I also ready Romain Gary's La vie devant soi, about a Muslim boy in the slums of Paris being raised by a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Moving and suitably unsentimental in presentation. Antonine Maillet's Pelagie la charette commemorates the Acadian deportation in a flavorful language but otherwise doesn't particularly work. Oh God, speaking of really failed metaphorical novels, I read Les flamboyants, a novel of African tribal warfare, by Patrick Grainville. It really didn't work at all.

October 25th, 2006

8:15 am. I finished Les egares by Frederick Tristan. The most strikign thing about this book is how much knowledge the author assumes about the reader's knowledge of literature in another language, something an English author rarely does. One of the characters is GK Chesterfield, instead of Chesterton. Ha ha. I also read Les Noces barbares by Yann Queffelec. A sad story of a boy conceived in a gang rape who ends up murdering his traumatized mother and sinking into the ocean with her body in his arms. It was a quick read, at least. And I have also read the very stylish Rue des boutiques obscures, by Patrick Modiano: it was reminiscent of the detective story classics of the forties, but in French, and about a man looking for his own lost memories. A great scene talking with a woman he once knew slightly, about people he doesn't remember.
October 23rd, 2006

I have completed reading Peter Abrahams: Mine Boy, Path of Thunder, View from Coyaba, Wild Conquest, Wreath for Udomo, Song of the City. Song and Mine Boy are early and perhaps primitive novels, and Wreath and Path are pretty ordinary novels of anti-racism activists in South Africa, close to the author's life. Coyaba is a historical novel, but without the same characters throughout. The best is Wild Conquest, because it also works at the more symbolic level, and it shows the even-handed sympathy of blacks and whites which is Abrahams' peculiar heritage.

Other than that, I plowed through a fairly boring novel in French, Jardin d'Acclimatation. Fortunately, I also read an incest-flavored boy-mother novel, Anne Marie by Lucien Bodard, a book about a young boy returning from China to the France his diplomat-parents are from; and Dans les mains de l'ange by Dominique Fernandez, another novel in French about Italy. Both of these were also easy reads. Jardin was not, a real chore.

October 13th, 2006

6 p.m. Well, it was a banner day for reading. I finished Tell Freedom, and it was not particularly remarkable, the memoirs of a writer of color in South Africa forty years ago. Not a pick-nick, but nothing that stood out for me. Unrequited love, the stirrings of creativity, the longing to escape the slums. I also read everything I could fin on counterinsurgency and three-block warfare: David Galula's classic Counterinsurgency Warfare, who wrote in a time where innsurgency had a predictable pattern; john Nagl's Eating Soup with a Knife, an indictement of the non-learning organization that is the US Army; Leroy Thompson's Counterinsurgency Manual, and US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency, urban warfare, irregular threat, small wars manuals. Ihave become convinced I can make a contribution.

October 12th, 2006

2 p.m. Well, I read quite a lot, I just haven't reported it here. I read The Bathroom by Alexander Kira, the great classic of design. It was interesting in many unexpected ways, and it presented the dynamics of cleansing and evacuation in ways I never thought of. Graphic representations of backsplash during urination, pictures of models who got in and out of showers and baths, and even people urinating and squatting on toilets. I also read Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini, which was a rehash that wasn't as incisive as I'd hoped. I also started reading Peter Abraham, and I have read Mine Boy so far, and I'm in the middle of Tell Freedom. In between, there are the memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon.

September 30th, 2006

7:00 am. I finished Rocher de Tanios, about a murder of a sheik written by the great-grandson, Amin Maalouf. I also read Valet de nuit, by Michel Host. I have now begun Texaco, a novel about the island of Martinique, by Patrick Chamoiseau.

I have said that I thought the calibre of the French novels was higher, and it is. It's just that nothing has really held my attention easily so far...Pity.

September 24th, 2006

Wel, I finished Exposition coloniale by Erik Orsenna, which was perhaps the first time that I found that an experimentation with structure didn't make for a hard read. I also read Un grand pas vers le bon Dieu by Jean Vautrin, which is a 19th century Cajun novel. I found the language luscious, but that was also it's principal virtue, the plot was weak. Now I'm reading Les filles du Calvaire by Pierre Combescot -- a novel about Jewish people in the seedy Parisian entertainment district. Having read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth,I am familiar with what I call Jewish novels, but they are rare among French literature. This novel has what must be an insider's view of Judaism.

Taken globally, so far, I would also say that the caliber of the literature is much higher than the English.

September 15th, 2006

9:00 pm. I have been reading Saint Simon's colossal (10 000 pages or more) in the original French of the XVIIth century. Wow! But I have also begun to read my way through the French list. So it's been Jacques Rouaud's Champs d'honneur, and now Tahar Ben Jelloun's La uit sacree. I have now concluded that the metropolitan French are obsessed with colonialism. Rouaud is about pieds noirs in Morocco and the episodic novel talks about the death of an aunt. Nuit sacree raise my eyebrow, because it is about the adult life of a child character from a previous, very successful novel. Recycling is fine for the environment, but for literature? In any event, either is short, less than 200 pages, and quick reads to boot. I expect to finish Jelloun's shortly.

September 5th, 2006

8:00 am. I finished Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette, and I found it interesting, albeit speculative at times about her sex life. So she didn't say "Let them eat cake" after all, that was a journalistic cliche of the period about royalty. She certainly died bravely, even if she had lived frivolously.

August 31st, 2006

I have finished reading the biography of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, by Jacques Roujon, in preparation for reading the volumes of memoirs. It was unusually lively for a biography,I thought. Not at all insightful was a biography of John Gielgud, a list of roles and clangers dropped in rehearsals, by Sheridan Morley. I also read two other gifts from my partner: TAras Grescoe's Devil's Due, about the author's pursuit of forbidden fruit like absinthe and coca leaves -- a good excuse to have someone else fund his travels -- and the idiotic book by John Stossel, Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity, where he seeks to debunk myths but actually only succeeds in making the same mistakes as his targets in replacing one myth with a more right-wing one.

August 24th, 2006

8:30 am. I finished reading Rouge Bresil last night -- it was for the most part quite predictable, but then the story got a bit less predictable, the two siblings sailing to Brazil became more interesting, the boy disappointed in love, the girl living with the aboriginal populations, and at the end I realized this was a story built on a myth of Adam and Eve, with the siblings as parents of future generations. With each other.

August 3rd, 2006

3 pm. I read Bruce Feiler's Where God Was Born, about the biblical and contemporary Middle East, and Peter, Paul and Mary, another book about the major apostles. Too cute for my taste. I read Consuelo Vanderbilt's Glitter and the Gold -- she divorced in scandalous circumstances the 9th duke of Marlborough after being forcibly married to him, but this is no tell-all...no reason is given for their divorce, except 'not getting any closer' -- and this with two children, too. I also read a rash of books in French, in addition to the ongoing memoirs of Saint Simon and the accompanying biography: Aller simple by Didier van Cauvalaert, about an algerian youth returned to the land of his forbears; Ombres errantes by Pascal Quignard, which was really poetry, and which I read without really understanding; Chasseur zero by Pascale Roze, a novel by an actress; Je m'en vais by Jean Echenoz, the story of a man who goes to observe war; Ingrid Caven by Jean-Jacques Schul, about a German singer during and after World War II; and Laurent Gaude's Soleil des SScorta, an affectionate satire of Italy by the son of Italian immigrants living in France...excellent, that one.

July 23, 2006

9 pm. I read Alfred Einstein's book on Mozart, long considered the definitive biography, but I didn't find it was a biography but a structured collection of essays on aspects of his life and work. It was very good. I'm reading about Mozart (I just started a proper biography) because I've bought a 170 CD set of the complete works and I want to be ready to give myself the course on it.

July 22, 2006

6:30 pm. By gosh, has it been six days since I last wrote? I do read less during the kayaking season! So I just read volume I of the complete works of Saint Simon, and i am flabbergasted -- the UN, the European Parliament, the problems of the welfare state with free-riders. I have also read La Bataille by Patrick Rambaud, a novel about the battle of Essling under Napoleon (who speaks Italian in the novel) and with all sorts of characters like Henri Beyle, known to the world as Stendhal...I also read Confidence pour confidence, by Paule Constant. Interesting to read about a Frenchwoman in the US instead of the endless procession of Americans I've rad about in novels....

July 16, 2006

3:30 pm. I read Hortense Mancini's memoirs, as well as her sister's Marie's. Two rich noble women at the very apex of Louis XIVth's court, because of the patronage of their uncle Cardinal Mazarin, and they proved to be of promiscuous nature and dissipated life. Only you'd never know it from the memoirs! However, they were bestsellers in their day. I also read Ohmann's radical view of English in universities, and I found his argument insipid compared to what I would say about academic disciplines!

July 15, 2006

1:30 pm. I finished reading Mimesis by Eric Auerbach, a book about the representation of reality through stylistic choices. I found the argument too general to be convincing. I went to the library and I have on my table two novels in French, the memoirs of the Mancini girls (XVIIth century France), the memoirs of Saint Simon and the complete works of Saint Simon: the latter is descended from the former and was the founder of French socialism...

July 13, 2006

11:15 am. I read a number of books: Jewish liturgy : a comprehensive history by Ismar Elbogen ; translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin, which failed to hold my interest; La trahison des clercs, by Julien Benda, a famous essay on the dishonesty of artists and intellectuals promting their own political beliefs; A Brief History of the Dead, a novel my partner gave me, which was inventive but with a plot of too many loose ends and not enough interesting characters. I am now reading the autobiography of Gay Talese, which really ought to be considered a pack of reminiscences… meandering and poorly structure, although his prose is very lucid. After that, I am left with Auerbach, and nothing else in the house to read! OH MY GOD!
July 9, 2006

7:30 pm. I finished the last three volumes of Churchill, and it was moving indeed, although I was mostly interested in the War years. So Churchill was indeed offered a dukedom, which he declined! I wondered about that story, whether it was true! I also attempted Language and Responsibility by Noam Chomsky, and found it unreadable -- it's the translated transcript of conversations in French with a researcher. Very bad. I now am reading a history of Jewish liturgy, because it caught my eye on the shelf at the library, but I find it very technical and full of Hebrew, which I can't read. But as with the Churchill volumes, I found it paid off to let the mind go and just flow without asking myself too many questions, so that I formed an overall impression.

Also on my night table are two gifts, the memoirs of Gay Talese, a short novel called A Brief History of the Dead. Apparently my partner thought it was literally a history of funeral practices. Also I have Auerbach's Mimesis in French. But none of htis should take me particularly long, and I'm considering taking a break from reading after that.

July 6, 2006

6:30 pm. I read vol. 5 of Churchill, and I moved on to vol. 6 and the terrifying few months of World War II when all the news was bad...it makes riveting reading.

July 5, 2006

Yesterday I read and wrote a first draft of a review for Andrew Michta's Limits of Alliance, a book about NATO. I also read Golden Compass -- not a great hit, I like juvenile literature often but this is fantasy and I didn't enjoy it. And I finished Edward Said's essay. I now plan to plow through Churchill vol. 5, another 1000 pages!

July 3rd, 2006

1:45 pm. Now that I have completed my list of 550 books, at long last, I can reflect a bit on what the impact has been. I am reading Edward Said's World, the Text and the Critic, and I now know more of the books and authors that he refers to. I am more broad-minded and my taste has been educated. I can situate my own writing far more effectively. I am a better teacher for having been exposed to a much greater variety of ideas, styles, content than before. I am more confident as a result of being able to situate myself better. I find I have used a good deal of discipline in reading material to the end that did not interest or appeal to me, so in a sense the pleasure of reading for pleasure is a little decreased. I am much, much harder to please than before. I am more convinced of the fact that one can judge the quality of the intellect by the difficulty of the reading that intellectual undertakes when s/he doesn't have to. I am looking forward to following my fancies in reading for a while -- I may not undertake my list of French winners for a bit, with a few more books on literature to read, and that biography of Churchill to plow through.

8:45 am. So I'm finally done, I read Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. I was disturbed by the violence and sexuality in Silko -- there doesn't seem to be a single example of a sexual act that is not mired in power and violence. Housekeeping is lauded as precise, and it is economical, but it is also predictable.

July 1st, 2006

6:15 am. I read Elizabeth Hamilton's Life of Saint Theresa of Avila, and the author's intrusion on the story irked me. I also read Travels of Jamie McPheeters, an astutely structured story of two pionneers, a father and son, who lose each other on the trail and then reunite. I also read Robert Tressell's Baggy Trousered Philanthropists, a striking autobiographical story of the Victorian poor, written by a tubercular Irish house painter. When he writes that the main character, Owen, has his mouth fill with blood at the first hemorrhage, it is very believable indeed. Two more books and I'm done the big 550 book long list.

June 29, 2006

4:15 am. I read White's novel about a Catholic school, and I reminisced a bit over my own upbringing. Then I read Sacred Hunger, a novel about slavery, by Barry Unsworth. It was an easy but a painful read, lots of detailed violence.

June 26, 2006

1:00 pm. I've been lucky enough to read some very good novels. Fay Weldon's Life and Loves of a She-Devil was deliciously satirical, even though I don't enjoy the comedic novels usually. I also read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, which is a famous novel that I thought was fairly insipid, although I did smile when he referred to the Beast as his newspaper, and the fact that they had sixteen peers working for the Beast. I also read Anita Shreve's Weight of Water, which was also excellent, the story of murders on the Smuttynose Islands in the American Atlantic. I finished this morning Theroux's masterful Picture Palace. I was interested in his reflexions on art, and the fact that the successful artist was a woman, and that her work became the object of political infighting and empire-building, on which she comments from beyond the grave. What a talent, what skill.

Now I'm really in the final few of my massive reading program -- about five novels left, and I'm read Antonia White's Frost in May, a school girl novel according to the dustjacket.

June 25, 2006

8:15 am. I finished Confederacy of Dunces, but my interest in comic novels about anything, even about New Orleans which I've been to, is very low. I also read Donna Tartt's Secret History, a modern retelling of a Greek myth with the principals actually taking ancient Greek together. I have an instinctive reticence about any murder mystery which thanks Easton Ellis in the acknowledgements, after my disgust over American Psycho. The book itself starts off quite well, but I lost interest once the blood started flowing. I'm into part II of Picture Palace by Paul Theroux.

June 24, 2006

6:15 am. I read Augustus by John Williams, a novel about what follows Julius Caesar's death, which was written from a variety of points of view and textual styles. I found the original idea interesting but the style confusing for the reader. I also read Music and Silence -- what can you expect from a novel written by someone called Rose Tremain? It was about King Frederick of Denmark's court, and I should have been enthralled by it but it barely held my attention. I am at present reading Confederacy of Dunces, a novel set in New Orleans, and whose author tragically committed suicide before it was ever even considered for publication. Another comedy, I am having trouble concentrating on it.

June 21, 2006

2:45 pm. I have read Joyce Carol Oates' You must remember this, and Anywhere but here by Mona Simpson, a coming of age story. Anne Tyler's If morning ever comes was insipid, the tale of a returning visit by a graduate student from Columbia, back to Kansas. Must have been her first novel. I also read Philip Roth's novel of bewilderment, American Pastoral, about an all-American character fathering a radical daughter. Roth certain lacks insight into his characters, and judging from Claire Bloom's catty remarks in response to his own tell-all, lacks insight into himself.

June 19, 2006

5:45 am. I read Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, another idyllic children's novel about sailing and pirates and a desert island. I complained about this, I must say, although it is very engaging, and recommend for those of us without idyllic childhoods to read the series by Comtesse de Segur: there is always at least one unhappy child in each novel, such as the author herself was. I also read Dog Soldiers, by Thomas Stone. It seemd to me to be primarily an excuse for the author to relived his Haight-Ashbury druggie days, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.

June 18, 2006

10:15 am. I've been reading lots, even if I have not been writing about it. I read Empire Falls by Richard Russo, which I found pointless. I read Susan Sontag for the first time, Volcano Lover and In America. I found them both well-researched, a strange comment for two novels, and i found her decision to explore the status of the artist in the past an interesting way of reflecting on the issue. I read two Sebald's, which I found indistinguishable in style, plotlessness, and theme from the previous Sebald I had read: they were The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. I read Sabbath's Theatre by the sex-obsessed Philip Roth. Enough! Enough! I enjoyed Richter's trilogy of The Awakening Land, although I knew the plot from a faithful adaptation on television I saw years ago, starring Elizabeth Montgomery.

June 14, 2006

6:00 am. Yesterday, I read Margaret Wilson's Able McLaughlins, which was ordinary and forgettable, however much I enjoy pastorals, and Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, whose title was more intriguing that her novel.

June 12, 2006

10:30 pm. I read Felicia's Journey by William Trevor and Young Shoulders by John Wain. The Trevor is a sad story about a lonely man who means well in trying to help a young woman, but winds up being the instrument of her becoming permanently homeless, and then commits suicide. Excellent choice of revealing details, but so very sad. Wain has a poignant starting point, the death of schoolchildren on a trip, but it becomes quickly predictable as a coming of age story. Both are quick easy reads, but oh! I almost long for a comic novel!

June 11, 2006

10:45 pm. I read Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb and I found it a very strong opening and a delightful description of Gubbio, Italy, where I just spent three weeks. I also read Mating by Norman Rush, which was...goodish. What can I say, I'm not usually disappointed by a National Book Award winner. Now I'm reading Philip Roth's Sabbath Theatre, and it is certainly not as self-indulgent as Portnoy's Complaint!

7:15 am. I read Elizabeth Taylor's Angel yesterday, a bildungsroman in which I lost interest when the eccentric writer was past her youth. I also read Ben Okri's Famished Road, which was well received critically, but which I found inferior to some other African novels I had read, in particular The World Is Falling Down, which is also Nigerian-themed. And I read a novel about the Vietnam war for US soldiers, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. It is told in flashback, and there are the requisite gruesome deaths and madness discussed. I started Mating last night.

June 9, 2006

4:30 pm. I read Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, Rosamund Pilcher's The Shell Seekers, and Jose Saramago's Stone Raft. Saramago is the only magical realist I actually like -- in this novel the Pyrenees crack and the Iberian peninsula starts to drift away. He uses it well to highlight human nature. Shell Seekers is another really good read, about a woman's life and loves during World War II, told in flashback, much the structure of Bridges of Madison County. Perfume is antoher easy read, about a murderer in 17th century France, by the German author Patrick Suskind. Excellent research into parfumerie of the period.

9:00 am. I finished Confessions by Mary Lee Settle yesterday, and I was thinking more about writing that about what I was reading as I was doing so. I thought about how intuitively I write, rather than writing technically, and I also write for the ear. I have read Mervyn Peale's Gormenghast this morning: it is truly an education to read an excellent book even when the style or type, in this case, a fantasy novel, does not appeal to me. I like only very limited types of fantasy novel, but this one is Dickensian -- I almost felt the dust in my hands. And I read Bernice Rubens' Elected Member, about a rabbi and his mentally ill son. It was short, it failed to get my attention.

June 8, 2006

9:30 am. I finished Confessions last night, and now that I've written for the day, I'm hard at work on Blood Ties.

June 7, 2006

8:15 pm. The Edge of Sadness is a novel about disappointment in life, not a very optimistic topic. Then I read Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (another one of his melodramas), and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. I'm half way through Blood Ties by Settle, and Elizabeth Taylor's Angel, and Confessions of Zeno by Svevo. Yes, I've started but not finished any of these!

10:30 am. I finished yesterday Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, supposedly his best novel. Well, it's the last of his books I hadn't yet read, and I enjoyed myself, although it shows that he wrote his books without knowing how the plot would turn out, so that there are some illogical developments. I enjoyed Trollope much more than many other authors. Doesn't know how to pick a title.

Also, I read yesterday a novel by Anya Seton, Katherine, about Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt. Bloodless. In contrast, I read Mario Puzo's Godfather, and it was a thumping good read. At the moment, I am reading The Edge of Sadness, a melodrama about a priest, by Edwin O'Connor.

I've figured out if I read two books a day, I won't have any books returned late to the library. This may be a challenge since I have a lot of writing to do.

June 5, 2006

6:15 pm. I read two novels by Trevor Williams, The Children of Dynmouth and Fools of Fortune, then The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, about the Civil War.

6:00 am. Last night I read The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams. Here is a writer of great talent and power, naturally gifted for writing, but all to no point. I remember my French teacher in high school saying that what made a writer was the soul, not the talent, and I still think she was right. This book, about the reminiscing of coming of age by a professor is a profoundly misogynist book. And when the women who are clearly being raped by stepfather/loutish acquaintance/boyfriend, it is clear that they come to enjoy it, however nuanced their feelings. I was offended (this book was written about the heyday of the sexual revolution and drugs, an earlier, not so innocent time) and I feel justified in echoing Pauline Kael about Straw Dogs: this is a fascist book. In total contrast, I also read Anne Sewell's Black Beauty last night.

June 4, 2006

7:30 pm. I finished Jalousie, a hot sweaty novel set in a banana plantation, where nothing much happens. I also finished Golden Spur, which was a picaresque novel about the search by a young man for his father. A claustrophobic New York - centered novel, where the new yorkers' provincialism is achingly obvious. Then I read Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons, which is supposed to be about LIFE, but I thought was quite ordinary. Then I decided to read Perec's novel Life: An Instruction Manual in the original French, so I put it off for several days until I can find it. Finally, three novels of Discworld by the fantasist Terry Pratchett: Night Watch, Colour of Magic, and Guards! Guards! I realize this is supposed to be devastatingly witty, but I'm a bad audience for comedy. I really only like satire.

June 3, 2006

9:30 pm. L'aveuglement was everything I hoped, except it was quite predictable. A disturbing parable. I also read Last Orders, which was touted as an almost existential novel, but I found it vapid. I am now reading The Golden Spur , on the one hand, and La jalousie, by Alain Robe-Grillet,on the other.

June 2, 2006

4:15 pm. I have read a number of pointless books: Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price, Saville by David Storey, Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter, Morte d'Urban by J. F. Powers, His Family by Ernest Poole, and House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien. Kate Vaiden is the first person story of a single mother whose first lover dies. I mean, it's so pointless it's hard to summarize, and I wonder it got published at all. Saville is another plotless novel, the artist as a oung man in postwar Britain. Morte d'Urban is a comic novel that isn't funny, about a priest in an order of Saint Clement, known, you guessed it, as Clementines. His Family is one of the early, dubious choices of the Pulitzer committee, about a widower and his three daughers -- pure melodrama. House is the novel of most interest -- the writing is a little experimental, but it is still possible to read quickly, about a woman who is brutalized her whole life and eventually harbors a subversive (or a patriot) in Ireland and is shot dead by the British in a read.

But I found treasure within the dross: Aveuglement by Jose Saramago, about an epidemic of blindness and the social consequences -- a magnificent exploration of totalitarianism in society. Splendid, and I'mm only on page 50 or so. The man is immensely talented.

June 1, 2006

1:45 pm. I have read W.S. Sebald's Austerlitz, Nevil Shute's A Town like Alice, the Mathnawi in three volumes, and Paul Scott's Staying On. Staying on was the book that comes after the Raj Quartet, whose best known tome is The Jewel in the Crown, about Britishers in India. This last book is utterly forgettable. I was struck by the Mathnawi, an Iranian Muslim sacred commentary, by the discussions of Christ, Mary and Moses. Lots of parables, and when there is the necessity for the Oxford don to translate sexually explicit material from Farsi (this translation is from 1930 even if the edition is later), he reverts to latin. Funny. Shute is a quick easy read and a ripping good story for three quarters of it. A young woman in post-war Britain is allowed by an inheritance to pay a debt of gratitude to Malays who helped her survive the war, and look for the man she loves abroad. Her return to the Malay village where she lived as a native woman is beautifully described; melos meets opsis. But the end of the story is almost too much -- she becomes a mogul in a frontier Australian town. Beautiful verses from Yeats on the frontispiece:" One loved the pilgrim in you, and the sorrows ever changing on your face." Austerlitz is yet another German novel about the Holocaust, experimental in form. I agree it's luminous, but it's hard to read with the shifting point of view and the lack of paragraphs.

May 31, 2006

5:45 am. I had a good day of reading yesterday. First I read the US Marine Corps draft text on counterinsurgency, which had a lot to be praised in it. I also saw in it an opportunity to fit my own work into such a framework. It is also the day I found out about the Haditha massacre, so it was mixed. Then I read Tell me a riddle by Tillie Olsen, which failed to impress me. I like straightforward prose, not poetry of this time, experimenting with the writing form. I also read Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Sing, by May Sarton. That held my interest slightly more, because it is an experiment in novel structure, but also a long disquisition on inspiration. I also liked that the main character falls in love with another woman when she is in the fifties, and that the love affair doesn't have remotely a stereotypical ending: she is separated from her lover when her lover's health declines, and her lover's children take over her care. Then I read the excellent The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, an unusual coming of age story, first sexual and then moral, with unpredictable plot twists, and an extraordinary metaphor for the German nation. It has the rare distinction of moving me by making me identify with a adolescent boy of awakening sexuality. Chapeau. This is a really cinematic book, too. Really, it was one of the treasures I hoped for when I collected the thirty books that came in for me from Interlibrary Loan. Now I'm ready Agneta Pleijel's Dog Star. So far, it's goign to be a quick easy read, but I already expect that the main pleasure will be from the unusual reversals of images in the writing: the cold coming up from the floor energizes and wakes up a character, for example, because he starts to walk around and flap his arms to warm up.

May 29, 2006

8:30 pm. I read Scarlet Sister Mary by Juliet Peterkin. It was racist, in the sense that the black characters didn't feel any pain and were happy being field hands. I was interested in gullah culture, but it turned out to be a throwaway use of the word by the author. Finally, the attempt at dialect was hard to follow, instead of being suggestive. A quick read.

5:00 pm. I just finished reading Oe's Somersault. What can I say about a book where I find there is too much anal sex for my taste, practiced by a man who incorrectly thinks he's dying of intestinal cancer. He's faith-healed, but dies of something else. I suppose it's daring, but I was bored for 570 pages.

There are over thirty books waiting for me at the library, so I shall try to read Scarlet Sister Mary this evening.

8:00 am. I read Maias by Eco de Queiroz. I was shocked, not as shocked as by Swift's modest proposal, but shocked anyway -- in order to satirize the Portuguese nobility, the author has a brother and sister fall in love and marry, not knowing their relationship. Brother finds out first, and sleeps with sis anyway. Otherwise, and I didn't find out until the 550th page, I was not particularly engaged by this, except that I found the constant French references funny.

May 28, 2006

7:45 am. I finished reading Writer at War, the war notebooks of Vasily Grossman, translated and edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. It is a suitable companion to Life and Fate, can praise go higher? It is the best-edited work I have ever read, and it reveals how closely Grossman followed his war experiences when he wrote Life and Fate. There are many sections I couldn't bear to read, because of the atrocities described, committed by all sides. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it.

May 27, 2006

2:15 pm. I read Crossing Borders by Akaha and Vassilieva, a book I read because I agree to review it for a learned journal, Etudes internationales. Whenever I read such a collection, I am always frustrated by the fact that the editors put together a book based on what people submit, rather than going after a topic thoroughly, and this book is no exception. I have started Oe's Somersault, another cold novel, and am reading Vasilyi Grossman's notebooks from World War II.

10:15 am. I read Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. It is a novel that must have some sort of relevance to the Nazi opposition of the forties, but if so I have missed it. This novel about three generations of a family in Austro-Hungary has a coldness at its center.

8:45 am. I read Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock, a satire of the gothic genre, only it's not funny enough. Only flashes of wit (a clergyman named Larynx) over its 92 pages. Hohum. Read Cold Comfort Farm instead, it's much better.

I also just finished Affluent Society: I think Galbraith revised it in his own favor in the second edition, which I read. The book proposes changes to traditional economics given the incredible affluence of post-war North America. It is well written but badly structured, and the argument is by now completely out of date. An influential book in its time, it has a couple of notable quotes, such as the discussion of education as undermining the values of an affluent (read consumeristic) society. Very true, Mr. Galbraith. Shame about the rest of your career.

May 25, 2006

7:15 pm. I finally finished the fourth volume (second by a decent historian) of the Churchill biography, over 900 pages, and it was excellent again. I must say that Churchill had no luck: Home Secretary during the Troubles in Ireland, Admiralty for the Dardanelles, Foreign Secretary during the Iraq crisis of the twenties, and Exchequer for the Great Depression...Easy read, but oh! Too many details!

I have now begun the Affluent Society, by Galbraith. I already know why the Economist said in Galbraith's obituary recently that he was charming, successful, and wrong. It is an easy read.

May 20, 2006

18:45 pm. I just finished the first volume of Churchill's biography and I have not been disappointed. The discussion of the sources alone is very impressive indeed. The detail of the consideration of the Gallipolli disaster, and Churchill's various political mistakes is also excellent. This is a masterpiece of biography, no doubt about it. But over 800 pages for less than two years? We're in for a lot of information.

Because the biography is so heavy, I mean physically heavy, I am reading The Maias as an alternative.

9:00 am. I only had a hundred pages of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies left, so I finished it. It is a thumping good read, like the reviews said. It is also self-serving, and a vicious indictment of the misdirection of the Bush White House after 9/11. I was also interested to read this expert's opinion on who to go after: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, in that order. Not with war, but with anti-terrorism activities, including diplomacy.

On now to the next volumes of the Churchill biography, which is now written by an actual historian, Martin Gilbert, instead of Churchill's son.

8:15 am. I read Hapsburgh Monarchy, by A. J. P. Taylor, and I found it a hard read and not on the topic I expected. I thought it would be the history of the dynasty, but it was the last 100 years of the political entity. I don't quite understand why it created him such a reputation. Oh well.

May 19, 2006

3:30 pm. I'm back from my trip, during which I only had time to read international newspapers and a biography of Somerset Maugham. But I've just got back from the library, and I've a stack of books to read: the next two volumes of Churchill's biography, A.J.P. Taylor's Hapsburg Monarchy, at last, a book on Jewish liturgy, just because it caught my eye, and Galbraith's Affluent Society, because I read about it in his recent obituary in The Economist.

April 24, 2006

7:30 pm. I finished reading Frum's Right Man, whose argument that Bush turned out to be the right person to lead the US after 9/11 is utterly unconvincing. It is slightly more insightful than Karen Hughes, but not about Bush, only about the other staffers. Bush is the great man, as always. But not in my next read, Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. This is an attack on Bush and Iraq.

5:15 pm. I read the second volume of the son's biography of the father, so when I return from Italy in three weeks, I can start on the volumes written by Martin Gilbert. I am of course particularly interested in the war years of Churchill's life.

I am reading now David Frum's Right Man, his memoir of his brief time in the White House as an economic speechwriter. It is slightly more candid, but not by much. The Bush White House is averse to ideas, but very, very clean living.

April 23, 2006

4:30 pm. I read Karen Hughes' Ten Minutes from Normal, her autobiography. Karen Hughes was senior advisor to Bush, and her book is larded with references to Christianity, viz. favorite Old Testament book, reading story of Esther on 9/11, her minister writing to her, etc. President again comes off looking very good, albeit a little more human. Also, the horrible, horrible power of leaks to the press -- no greater threat than uncontrolled information. Now on to second volume of Churchill on Churchill.

2:30 pm. After Churchill on Churchill, I read Ari Fleischer's Taking Heat, which was a gift. Fleischer was George W. Bush's first press secretary. I got immediately irritated by the obvious partisanship of the book: the media is biased, President Bush is a great man...I've got Karen Hughes and Richard Clarke to get through next, and I may have time to read the second volume of Churchill on Churchill.

April 22, 2006

8:00 pm. I am on the first of about ten volumes of Winston Churchill's official biography. This is what I decided I would read if I ran out of Trollope's, which I did today, before my trip to Italy (25 April-18 May). I can't order anything from interlibrary loan until my return, so I have to make do with our collection. i also received as a gift five or six political books, which I'll read when I finish this volume of the biography -- I'm already past p. 300 or so. The first two volumes of the biography are written by his son, the rest by the historian Martin Gilbert. My reservations about the son writing the father's bio are verified: there is no mention of the paternity of Winston's brother, or Winston's father's syphilis, which killed him. The volume is a string of extracts of letters exchanged, which isn't at all enough to explain Churchill's youth. Although much more gossipy and racy, I found more information in William Manchester's efforts on Churchill, although he did not have access to the papers because the official biography was not completed. Interesting facts: (1) Churchill's great, great, great grandmother was an Iroquois; (2) the origin of Czar is a contraction of Ceasar...

4:15 pm. I read Trollope's Ayala's Angel and Kept in the Dark today. Kept in the Dark is a novella, about 100 pages. Trollope certainly picks bad titles, and there is certainly plenty of conventional love stories to appeal to his original readership, young ladies of birth and no employment apparently.

April 21, 2006

3:OO pm. I read Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope, primarily because he said in his autobiography that he considered it his best book. It is another easy, good read, and the plot is pretty good. I was tickled to realize I was holding a first edition with original Millais drawings.

April 20, 2006

12:30 pm. I read the autobiography and Is He Popenjoy? this morning. Popenjoy had an enjoyably convoluted plot -- marquis quarrels with family, family investigates doubtful marriage and legitimacy of heir, family is proven wrong but death of heir and marquess leads them to their end anyway. The autobiography was interesting given what it says about Trollope's method: he kept a book with the number of pages and words he wrote a day, a week, a month, for years, which kept him honest. Didn't do much for his reputation as an ah-tist, I have to say. When readers found out he wrote by, well, rote, his sales plummeted. He also published exactly how much he made from all his books, book by book. Very forthright.

6:15 am. At the end of yesterday, I could honestly say I was onto my fourth Trollope. I have read Miss McKenzie, Framley Parsonage, and Cousin Henry. I find Trollope so restful, easy and quick to read, happy endings, plenty of human foibles to laugh at...I began his autobiography last night, which is supposed to be one of the best ever written. It certainly is clear and succint.

April 19, 2006

9:30 am. The Warden was an easy read -- it's supposed to be a satire but I read straight, as a study of human nature. A minister of the nineteenth century is warden of a hospital and supports twelve indigent pensioners with the income of a trust. There is a dispute over the trust's income, which also pays the warden's salary. He voluntarily increases the pensions out of his own pocket, but the whole thing boomerangs, and so he resigns. The pensionsers, for their trouble, lose the additional income and the former warden is impoverished. Happens in real life all the time: stupidity reigns.

6:15 am. I started Anthony Trollope's The Warden, but I'm still thinking over Life and Fate. I think this may be the greatest novel of the 20th century. All the characters are so real, every last one, and we share their fates, unexpected as they may be, their rises and their falls, right along with them. In broader terms, we are swept along with the great historical movements that conflicted at the battle of Stalingrad, during World War II. Characters sell their souls, live their loves, fight or fail inexplicably to fight, and at the end, it is the 'peace of wild things' that starts again to heal them all.

April 18, 2006

1:30 pm. I just finished Life and Fate. I didn't want to put it down last night, and it was the first thing I thought of this morning. It is absolutely sublime, it is a great masterpiece, the symbolism is beautiful, and light peeps through a very tiny hole. The plot held up beautifully, the characterization is extraordinary, the writing is wonderful even in translation. I can't say enough about it, it's the best book I've read in years. Now that I spent pretty much 24 hours reading it, I'm almost bereft.

8:00 am. I was wrong -- Life and Fate isn't 700 pages, it's about 900 pages. Death and destruction, death and destruction, and then for a little variety, death, despair and destruction. That being said, it is absolutely the best thing I've read in a long time, it's riveting. The comparison to War and Peace does naturally spring to mind, although I'll reserve judgment until the end, to see if the plot holds true. At the moment, around p. 275, there are more and more political discussions occurring among the many characters.

April 17, 2006

1:15 pm. I read the great Icelandic epic, Independent People by Halldor Luxness. It is a pastoral about the north country at the turn of the century -- I enjoyed it thoroughly and devoured it in a few hours. An engrossing read about a settler who buys a farm on his marriage, and the vicissitudes of his family throughout. Socialism and World War I sprint past, as well, for a hint of politics. I can't say it's a happy ending, but it is absolutely riveting. I've been lucky in my engrossing reads recently. I often have to plod through much literature for its own sake, without enjoyment. I am about to return to Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Another 700-pager...

April 16, 2006.

6:30 pm. I finished the last Wilt, and I also read the Sakuntala, the great pastoral of Sanscrit. I would call it Shakespearean in scope -- it's a tale of magic, with the gods revenging themselves on the royal couple for its happiness, but with a happy ending. I liked more than I liked Shakespeare at the first read. It's a mix of prose and poetry, and the translation I read dated from 1900! But it was excellent, even if the notes explaining the details were patronizing, owing to colonialism.

4:15 pm. I have read the third of the Wilt series. If I can complete the fourth today, that will be it for the interlibrary loan order of forty odd books I made three weeks ago. I'll read books in our own university library until my trip to Italy.

2:30 pm. Having read all of Alain Badiou's books, novels and plays included, I can say with certainty that I am not often impressed with contemporary writers. I supposed I had better stick to reading more of the great classics rather than reading whoever is in vogue at the moment.

I have also read two of four Wilt books by Tom Sharpe. It seems I'm in a picaresque streak, and I only wish there were more scenes from academic life in them. They were recommended to me by a consulting economist from Toronto -- I thought they'd be good background for my own writing of a satire of the university.

11:30 am. I finished reading a picaresque novel set in Cairo during the Suez crisis, Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby. I then devoured History, by Elsa Morante, an Italian novelist. It's been a long time since I've been this engrossed by a novel -- 550 pages this morning alone, sitting in the sunshine of my own front window, drinking tea. "At such moments is life best lived." (Pearl Buck) The novel is a terrifically sad story about wartime Italy, and the various miseries endured by a lonely widow and her children. Egads! It's a metaphor for the state of Europe's wretchedness itself in those years. But I can recommend it, it's absolutely riveting and wonderful, although it is not uplifting.

April 15, 2006

6:30 am. I finished the letters of Madame last night, gossip and dirt right to the last page!

6:30 pm. I read Patrick Neate's Twelve Bar Blues today, a novel about two characters who are connected but do not know about the connection. It is partly historical, and just about every black stereotype is in here (contrary to my suspicion, the author is not a black Brit -- must be a black wannabe like Clinton). The novel would be nothing without its structure, and there is plenty of colorful detail, as well.

April 13, 2006

8:15 am. I am still reading the letters of Madame, nee Princess Palatine. This is actually really good. I've read a number of collected letters (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mme de Sevigne, Clementine and Winston Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil), but they are usually boring. This is great stuff: there's an introduction that gives you an overview of Madame's life, which is enough to follow everything. The Sun King's sister-in-law wrote in German, so it's a translation, but she is very blunt and very clear, and spent a lot of time writing her relations after her dynastic marriage. Her husband is gay, fathers three children on her for the succession and then never touches her again, which she appreciates. Right now, about 1682, she is arguing with him about appointing his lover as their only son's tutor -- she isn't sure her son isn't going to be corrupted, according to the prevailing prejudice of the time (although the lover was, quite apart from being gay, hugely debauched and unscrupulous). She picks fights with the King's mistress, Mme de Maintenon, a bad idea since they eventually secretly marry. The money problems, the intrigue, the sexual indiscretions, the wars and conquests of her native country, her troubles over her inheritance, it's all here in gory indiscreet detail. It's gossip, I suppose, but I confess I enjoy gossip.

April 12, 2006

7:00 pm. I just read Badiou's L'etre et l'evenement. It has a spelling mistake in the title! Enfin. Four hundred and seventy-five pages of the philosophy of mathematics, and all I really think about is a quotation from Leibniz, to the effect that beingness is concomitant with singularity and/or uniqueness. The French is ambiguous on that point. Either way, I disagree with the ontology, but it may be true for mathematics. The book also states that an intellectual must act, speak, and write to the effect that everything is decidable. Again, it may be true in mathematics, but I disagree in general. I managed to read all but about three 'meditations' out of the 37 -- meditations being the unit instead of chapter or trope. (No pretensions in that family.) The math otherwise was understandable for someone with second year calculus and algebra. Well, glad that's over.

April 11, 2006

8:00 pm. I read Murakami's autobiographical Norvegian Wood, about his sexual adventures as a university student. Eros and thanatos again, as a friend, then a lover commit suicide. Boy meets girl and her boyfriend. Said boyfriend commits suicide. Boy depucelates girl. Girl ends up in mental hospital, boy hooks up with another girl. That girl's father dies. The first girlfriend commits suicide. Boy mourns briefly, second girlfriend refuses to resume the relationship, boy hooks up with dead girlfriend's best friend, to whom she had read all his letters. That's the story. Is this a love story?

4:30 pm. I read Badiou's D'un desastre obscur, a rumination on the right way and the wrong way of Marxism. I also read Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, a novel about a single mother. I did not find it impressive.

1:15 pm. I am reading the letters of the Duchesse d'Orleans, nee Princess Palatin, sister-in-law to the Sun King. She is famous for having written: "Il est rare qu'un savant soit propre, qu'il ne sente pas mauvais, et qu'il entende raillerie." My translation is: "It is rare to find an intellectual who is clean, who does not smell, and who gets a joke."

Now you know why I'm reading this. I found this reference in the Leibniz/Spinoza book I read earlier.

9:30 am. I wish my latest read, A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, had somehow engaged me. Once the title character had grown up, however, I lost interest. It is the life story of an Indian in Trinidad whose desire for some sort of power in his life becomes crystallized in his purchase of a ramshackle house. He dies without having paid off the mortgage, which guarantees it will be repossessed from his family. I started this book with such expectations, as I had read Naipaul at his peak, but like so many of my favorite writers who are capable of achieving the balance between melos and opsis, he only occasionally reaches that peak.

April 7, 2006

9:00 pm. I finished reading Badiou, and then I read Katherine Ludwig Jansen's Making of the Magdalen, about Mary Magdalen. It seems that this figure from the New Testament was only associated with sin (i.e. prostitution) in the third century of the Common Era. Which means that she was a woman of independent means who was an apostle of Jesus who preached in her own right. The Fathers of the Church didn't like it, then or now. The book is an amazingly good read.

I also began the Wilt quartet, by Tom Sharpe. It skewers academic life, but I haven't laughed so far -- only three chapters of the eponymous first book, though. This was recommended to me by an economist I met in Toronto last month.

1:30 pm. Just when I thought I would never react philosophically to Badiou's work, and that his only contribution was to introduce me to the philosophy of mathematics (which I didn't even know existed), I was proven wrong. His Peut-on penser la politique? is an extremely misleading title. It is a long critique of Marxism from his own, i.e. Maoist, point of view. Ho-hum. However his Court traite d'ontologie transitoire really got me thinking. I'm only on p. 100 and the concept of the undecidable, and therefore the unknowable, in mathematics makes me think that there are such things in philosophie, and therefore also in my general theory of strategy. Oh. And he defines intuition, an idea which is of great interest to me as the supra-rational form of thought, as 'decision de pensee inventive au regard de l'intelligibilite des axiomes' (p. 100). In English, I'd translate that as the decision of inventive thought with respect to the intelligibiilty of axioms. I don't know that the translation adds much to the intelligility of the definition, but I had not considered before the role of axiomatic truths or propositions in relation to intuition before.

I have also created a new category of literature, that of the obscure philosophical novel of no particular moment, into which I put Natachee Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (he captures the lilt of the aboriginally accented English without falling into singson, as an self-respecting Kiowa should) and Wright Morris' Field of Vision, who is poorly served by the overly complimentary endorsement of one John Aldridge. How to raise and then fail to meet expectations.

7:45 am. I don't as a rule read collections of short stories, but V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State was so good, I just read right through, even afte I realized that it was a collection, not a novel. It's not the novella of the title that I liked best, however, it is the story called One Out of Many, the story of an Indian cook that follows his employer to Washington and makes a new life for himself. It is the best book I've read in a long time, and I liked that the stories were inter-related. Naipaul, the poet of post-colonialism. Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it?

April 6, 2006

6:45 pm. Robert Musil "Les desarrois de l'eleve Torless" is a novel about homosexuality and cruelty in the Austrian boarding school for boys, and it has scenes of shocking violence. There is a lot of discussion that this novel is a prophecy of Nazism. I can't say I agree with that -- I think it's an illustration of human nature when it is misunderstood, not nurtured, or abused. We all can become cruel.

4:15 pm. I completed Calme-bloc ici bas, by Alain Badiou. It was better than either of his previous novels, although I can't help feeling that his habit of telegraphing large portions of the text -- I mean that literally, he puts bullet-like points in a paragraph, separated by periods - is really laziness. The second half of the novel is a bunch of episodes involving the main characters, each three or four paragraphs long. It was still pointless, but it was easier to follow. I also finished the last 200 pages of Hopeless Monsters, and sure enough we got dragged through the Spanish Civil War, but we allowed the main characters to leave us on September 30th, 1939. Whaddaya know. This novel also shifts points of view and narrators between sections, several times. The problem with this, as with so many novels written in the first person, is that the tone either doesn't shift between sections, or it is not distinct from the author's style in other books.

11:30 am. I finished reading Portulans by Alain Badiou, and really, no novel should be such a chore to read. I've also never seen before a first edition with an explanation of the novel by the author. I feel strongly that a novel should speak for itself. However, it was an experimental novel and it really needed the explanation. I cannot judge, however, if the author's explanation of the symbolism is correct -- it completely escaped me. Five characters talk, go for walks or trips, complete their military service (mandatory for men in France), all without it going anywhere. I also feel strongly that you cannot write like abstract artists paint or sculpt. It is not a medium which lends itself to the absence or presence of sole form or structure. If you want to rise above the use of words, then it becomes like Peter Beard's diaries, which are visual art and not literature.

April 5, 2006

2:30 pm. I read Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian. I liked it quite a lot, the story of an abused little boy who is rescued when he is evacuated from London during WWII. Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww! The story is predictable, and it's an easy read, but it's not syrupy, at least, and I took with a grain of salt the mention that it reduced Penguin's hardboiled printers to tears when they were producing the book.

11:00 am. I just finished Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I realized on p. 450 or so that it was a non-realistic psychological thriller. The plot got too tangled for me to follow easily about that point, and there are many loose ends the author doesn't tie up. But I liked it, if less than in the first hundred pages. There were a few too many descriptions of wartime atrocities, by Russians on Japanese, by Japanese on Chinese, by Mongols on Japanese, for me not to think there was something political here. But I failed to get the point loud and clear. Plus at length (it's over 600 pages), I got tired of the sexism: a single Japanese man surrounded by sexually voracious and assertive women? Puh-leeze.

April 4, 2006

3:00 pm. I finished Wright Morris's Plains Song, the pointless story of three generations of plainswomen. I don't understand what the author was trying to do. I don't understand why the author spent, in all likelyhood, several years of his or her life to write this. There had to be a point, the author isn't without talent, but I don't get it.

In my previous diary, I forgot to mention that I laboriously read another fifty pages of Badiou's Portulans, to my great boredom. However, great news, I started Harumi Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird, and it's excellent -- a good read, an interesting main character (that rarity the unemployed Japanese male), it's a page-turner, and I'm reliving my days in Tokyo. Excellent, a lengthy pleasure at 600 pages.

1:30 pm. Yesterday and this morning I read over Pearl Buck's Pavilion of Women, one of my big favorites, and a great novel in its own right, about the awakening of a Chinese woman beyond her traditional role. I then read Bharati Mukherjee's Wife, a short novel about an immigrant Indian woman who is driven to violence by her experience. It ends in a striking image of violence, very surprising and completely unexpected. It made me go over in my mind the previous pages to see what the signs were, and indeed it is a well-constructed novel with all the signs obvious in retrospect. It is also an easy read. Another woman driven mad by her traditional role.

April 3, 2006

10:30 am. I just finished Badiou's experimental novel, Almagestes. It is more like a poem or an abstract work of art than a novel, and I like my novels naturalistic. It is not as hard a read as James joyce, but Joyce's plots are actually more obvious. Badiou's style changes from chapter to chapter, there are lines of music, a play within the novel, sections without punction of any kind except paragraph returns. It's confusing, and I didn't like it. There is a second novel in this two-book series called Trajectoire inverse which I am reading at present. Yay!

9:30 am. Yesterday, I gave myself the pleasure of re-reading an old favorite, Pearl Buck's Good Earth. It's another pastoral, which I like, and it's about turn-of-the-century China, which I also enjoy. This morning, I finished reading Badiou's Nombre et les nombres, a philosophical essay on mathematics. I confess I read about 180 pages before skipping the rest and going to the conclusion, since I couldn't follow the mathematics. The conclusion was easy to understand and should really have been at the start of the book: it gives the goal of the book as being a screed against the enslavement of numericity. Well, old news, the social sciences were talking about that in the 1950s.

April 1, 2006

5 pm. Having discovered that I can rest and read heavy stuff at the same time, I read Deleuze by Alain Badiou. It's an essay summarizing teh philosophy of a French existentialist that I've never heard of, and I know a little philosophy. I had three reactions. First, when Badiou compares Deleuze to Heidegger, he talks about the conscience-being subversion. I'd have said: 'inversion.' Second, Deleuze seems to me have a very mathematical conception of the universe. Third, when Badiou discusses the theoretical consequences of the fold in being proposed by Deleuze (huh?), all I could think of were the folds of the universe provided by the spice melange in the sci-fi novel Dune.

2 pm. I've been a little tired from year end so I haven't read anything heavy. (People magazine, eclectic reading researched and printed by the boyfriend). I did have Vasiliy Grossman's Life and Fate open to the first page, but I haven't actually embarked on the War and Peace of the Soviet era. No, I just finished Life's Little Annoyances by Ian Urbina. It's a collection of anecdotes on the revenge people wrought on others because they were mildly annoyed. So long as I didn't think of what the world would be like if we all behaved that way, I found it mildly enjoyable. And where did I find this gem? On my boyfriend's bedroom floor, where he keeps most of his reading.

March 30, 2006

I just finished reading Badiou's short book on Beckett. I didn't find his observations probing, although I share his admiration for him. What I remember most clearly is Badiou's discussion of Beckett's essay on Proust, whom I also read recently. Badiou says it is excessive to speak of identity with respect to their use of childhood events, and I agree. But, I thought, there is a link between the two, there is what in French we would call parente, kinship.

Badiou's works are dropping like flies. I'm almost done Concept de modele, which must have come early in his career: it was published in 1969. It purports to show that the idea of model has been appropriated by Marxists to affect state economic decisions. The first part of the book claims to show this hijacking by establishing distinctions between logical and mathematical propositions. I didn't think he could argue what he claims to with this kind of support, but I didn't follow the math that followed. However, in the second half of the book, he talks about the claims of intellectual production by Marxists, and that seems to me to be well-founded. I also read Theorie de la contradiction, which confirmed my earlier impression that Badiou is a critic of Marxism.

I also read Mama by Terry McMillan. It's a novel about a black mother's oppressed life, with quite a few characters that are now stereotypical to the Angry Black Novel. It is naturalistic, it was an easy read. McMillan did go on to be very well known, just like the book jacket predicted. This was her first novel.

March 29, 2006

I got as a present a book about Leibniz and Spinoza, which I've finished: The Courtier and the Heretic, by Matthew Stewart, who 'retired to lead a life of contemplation' and lives in NYC. There is too much philosophy and not enough biography about these two, who only met once and had only a slight correspondance. However, I got an idea of a book to read (the letters of the Princess Palatine), and this little nugget: Leibniz was refused his Ph.D. on his first try, joining Einstein, Descartes, and Immanuel Kant in the pantheon of academic injustices.

I couldn't sleep later than 4:45 am, so I just got up and started reading. All of what I read so far today is by Alain Badiou, and they are:

Abrege de metapolitique: a short essay about philosophers whose work applies to the understanding of politics, but at a very high level of abstraction. It's another one of those books he wrote stringing articles together.

Rhapsodie pour le theatre: there comes a time when an author has written and published so much that anything he writes gets published. Beckett got to that point with the novels about, as far as I could figure out, a headless limbless torso on a bed of sand (that's one novel) and a worm-like creature in a jar (that's another novel). His anal fistula invaded his creative processes, if you ask me. It never would have been published if Beckett hadn't been the name, and the same is true about Rhapsodie and Badiou. It's a string of columns from a theatre periodical presented as 'eighty nine chapters, radically different one from the other.' Whatever.

Saint Paul: this was an interesting book -- I found myself disbelieving that Badiou is an atheist, because he discusses Paul in the same tone and way as so many book of theology I have read. What I remember the most clearly is this: we are no longer before God under the rule of law, so to speak, but under the rule of grace.

Les citrouilles: a play entitled 'Pumpkins' about Art. In fact, it's about Ah-ht. It's billed as a comedy, but I thought it was very broad and ought to have been, like another of his plays, a farce. Lots of characters, including a soubrette and the minister of culture, and lots of rude comments about the right and the left in politics. I thought one got the point at about page 10, but the play went on for another 95 pages.

I chose not to read Ahmed philosophe, not because it's for children, but because it's all short pieces, skits, and my rule is to read full-length plays and books.

March 28, 2006

I finished Holiday by Stanley Middleton last night, since I couldn't sleep. A fairly boring novel about a man's marriage, bracketed by the few weeks that he spends on the seashore. An easy read, at least. Hohum.

I also read Lamb in his Bosom, by Caroline Miller. I do enjoy a good pastoral, and this is a very good one. It is an easy read, and the plot starts with the mariage of the principal character Cean, a woman pioneer. Yes, there is death by illness -- childbed, bloody flux, heart failure -- and by accident -- fire, blood poisoning after getting an axe in the foot. There is sowing and kneading and building of cabins, and second chances at love. I really enjoyed it.

March 27, 2006

I read three books by Alain Badiou: Manifeste pour la philosophie, Petit manuel d'inesthetique, and L'ethique, essai sur la conscience du mal. I was motivated by the news that five other books were waiting for me at the library. All three were very short, two at around 100 pages each, the third a little more. I can't say that I found them heavy, despite being written by a philosopher.

I found that the paragraphs in Ethique and Petit manuel were badly structured, and Petit manuel badly structured analytically as well. Things were strung together pretty loosely, as far as that argument about the link between philosophy and art is concerned. The author is clearly cultured, and could quote great literature and discuss all the visual arts. But I mostly remember reading sentences that I disagreed with. Is a work of art required to say something new? What is new, anyway? Does Heidegger propose a step back to pre-Socratism? I've read all of Heidegger that is available in English and French, and I didn't get that. At the close of this first book, I actually asked myself: "Is this author a poseur?"

Ethique is also poorly structured and light-weight, if I may say so. No doubt having observed the media successes of Bernard-Henry Levy, he says the odd very provocative thing: that human rights are compatible with the selfishness of the wealthy, the powerful, and of commercials. So? He also says that bureaucratized or socialized medicine needs patients as stastitical or indistinguishable victimes, but quickly falls apart in conditions of real demand. Golly.

Manifeste is much better written, much more like a traditional essay. It constitutes an argument in favour and a defense of philosophy. I was not aware that any argument was needed, particularly not in France, and I had already encountered more detailed and convincing arguments regarding science and its impact.

March 26, 2006

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. I started yesterday with a Western and I finished with one. When I finished reading this novel, I remembered an Indian professor dismissing Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things with a shrug: 'There is no difference.' Meaning no originality, no departure, nothing new to say. That is how I feel about this book.

I also read today Docherty by William McIllvenney. It is an excellent book, a loving, elegiac study of a coal mining Scot at the turn of the century, told through the eyes of his son. It has one major problem -- the dialogue is in a heavy Scot dialect, too heavy for me to understand. Whereas any writer knows that he should only suggest the pronunciation, not make it unintelligible. Impossible to understand even when read aloud with a heavy Scots accent, and the vocabulary is from the West of Scotland. What a shame.

March 25, 2006

I just finished Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. McMurtry certainly knows how to create interesting characters. I found myself primarily interested in the women, and I read the whole book just to find out what happened to them. I liked Clara best of all, even though she only really appears in the last third. An easy read, 945 pages in two days, although it took a little while to build up.

I also read Martin Dressler, by Steven Millhauser. Yawn. I enjoy rag-to-riches stories, and I enjoyed this one. There was slight note of fantasy at the end, when the protagonist overreaches himself. I suppose the simplicity of the prose and the lack of realistic detail is supposed to suggest fable or symbolism. Well, what symbolism? I didn't get it, and I'm usually quite alive to what is suggested or implied, to metaphors. Whatever. Lots of unbelievable praise on the back cover of the paperback.

Much better was Ian McEwan's Child in Time. I suppose parents or people who have lost children will relate very well to the searingly accurate descriptions of grief -- he captures the telescoping in time of shock particularly well. I like just about everything about this superb, masterly novel but the ending. Oh, the fact that we don't know the gender of the newborn is tres O. Henry, but I wish he could have found some other way to reconcile hope, to provide redemption, after such a great effort. I can't think of another ending, but I still wish the cliche hadn't been used.

I got a load of books from inter-library loans this afternoon, including the first three of Alain Badiou's. They are all mercifully short, so it should be a quick read when I get to them. Also among them is a National Book Award winner -- in general, I find those better reads than the Pulitzer winners, since they are chosen by book critics, i.e. professional readers.

March 24, 2006

I read Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy over the last two days, while I was traveling. It is very cinematic, and I can see how it was turned into a BBC series. I didn't find it particularly insightful as far as the psychology of the characters were concerned, but it did engage me slightly, in the dislike of a character over the course of the three volumes. Overall, though, it was an easy read that didn't hold my thoughts very much unless I was actually reading it. The setting, prewar Romania, was completely unknow to me, so that helped hold the interest slightly more.

March 22, 2006

I read Mary Magdalen, Myth and Metaphor by Susan Haskins this morning. I got the reference from an article on Mary Magdalen in the New Yorker, something my partner dug up and put in his eclectic reading. Unfortunately, just like a preview, the article had the good bits from the book. Still, a lot of plates of the Magdalen in painting throughout history, and the best bit was the analysis of the early Church and the Gnostic Gospels, where she was not yet assumed to be a prostitute.

Am now reading The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Ah! The Mitford sisters --weren't they Fascists in the 1930's? Didn't Diana introduce her husband Oswald Mosley to Der Fuhrer? Here it is, on p. 111: a character enjoys calling the Nazi leaders in Berlin, 'they never can resist a call from London.' Tasteless, really. Anyway, it is a snobbish bit of a comic novel, fairly pointless, not funny, not witty, and predictable. It must have been on someone's winner's list.

Finally, I squeezed in Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. A Booker winner. Blah. Boring and bland, but well written and a quick read. The diary of a dead woman reveals the Foreign Secretary to be a cross-dresser. Her former lovers honor her by printing that in the opposition press. Could have thought of better ways to honor her, myself.

I am going to Toronto for two days, and I'm bringing Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy and Larry McMurtree's Lonesome Dove to read as I wait around.

March 21, 2006

I read Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi yesterday -- a physical chemist of some distinction ponders the nature of scientific knowledge as affected by humanity. Published in 1958, it certainly treads ground I know well, having read quite a lot in epistemology. It also reminded me of how professors are often so convinced they know everything, that they wind up reinventing the wheel. No such thing as objectivity...duh!

Some of his writing stimulated my own thinking. On p. 15, he refers to the fruitfulness that comes from restoring the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagoreans took for granted. I have found that restoring the blend of the human and social sciences, on the one hand, with the humanities and the arts on the other, has been extraordinarily fruitful. On p. 65, Polanyi talks about the intellectual commitment as an act of hope, 'striving to fulfil an obligation' to be a thorough scientist or scholar. That is both true in general and rare in academic life.

I also had a flash of recognition when I read, on p. 130, that "the most daring feats of originality are still subject to this law: they must be performed on the assumption that they originate nothing, but merely reveal what is there." Polanyi goes on to discuss scientific passion, intellectual beauty, mental economy (a favorite topic of mine), ecstatic vision, the dangers of uncritical tacit knowing, all topics I wish I had known about when I wrote my first book!

On p. 186, Polanyi says that "It now appears that the logical structure...is not quite that of inventing a game, but rather that of the continued invention of a game in the very course of playing the game." That is exactly how it feels to develop theories!

Finally, he recognizes that the structure of science in philosophy is the same as the concept of deity once had, which I have long thought. And he defines belief in a wonderful way: "No longer a higher power that reveals to us knowledge lying beyond the range of observation and reason, but a mere personal acceptance which falls short of empirical and rational demonstrability." (p. 266)

March 20, 2006

Having just received notice about several interlibrary loans' arrival, I sat down and finished Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. There is a lot of wit in that novel: a character who says: "A man without a belly has no appetite for life."; a character surnamed Cashondeliveri; a bulldog named Jawaharlal, after Nehru, but nicknamed Jaw Jaw -- a famous Churchillian witticism. This is the last of my Rushdie novels.

Rather than taking up the Icelandic saga again, I picked up Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi -- I picked this title up after reading Knowing As We Are Known by Parker Palmer. Looks very interesting. I've read several Polanyi's, including The Great Transformation by Karl. Evidently, the whole dynasty is brilliant -- John won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in the 1980s.

March 19, 2006 -- Week-end

I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie over the week-end. Hawthorne was a quick and easy read. There is a lot of narration compared to dialogue, and the descriptions go on for much longer than in more recent novels, a reflexion of the pre-radio, pre-television days where a long novel was a good novel. As for Rushdie, this is the second to last of his novels I have to read to have read him in entirety. I don't think he's going to play well in a hundred years from now, he doesn't have the gripping plots that the classics have, among other differences. He has certainly been covered with honors, but I remain sceptical. In any event, the less magical realism there is, the more I like him. I've got The Moor's Last Sigh on the go right now, and I am also now reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness. Yes, the great Icelandic saga, all four hundred pages of it!

I read an article about the philosopher Alain Badiou somewhere, announcing the translation of more of his works into English, and I've ordered through interlibrary loan all of his books, so that's my next author to be read in his entirety. I shall read him in the original French, I avoid translations like the plague when I have an option. He has written plays and novels as well, which I find interesting since I also have written plays and essays, although I have no finished novel as yet.

March 17, 2006

This week, I read Steps by Jerzy Kosinski. It's a short novel that is easy to read, about the sexual reminiscences of the inhabitant of a authoritarian country. The sex is a metaphor for the existential lack of control. It is a lot less explicit than Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth, thank goodness, and has a lot more redeeming artistic value. I say this despite bestiality being depicted in Steps. The author's first language is Polish, but he writes only in English, and so joins a number of authors who don't write in their first languages: Salman Rushdi, V.S. Naipaul, Etienne Gilson, and, of course, yours truly.

There is an inadvertently revealing incident recounted, where the narrator (which I took to be the author, since all of this is transparently autobiographical) captures butterflies in a jar and then sets them on fire. I've encountered this sort of thing two or three times before, where the author tells a story to get it off his chest seemingly, and this is small peanuts compared to the confession in Soul Mountain, where the narrator recounts finding, then abandoning to its fate, a three year old child on an isolated country road. I suspect that author, Xu Jin, winner of the Nobel Prize, of writing the whole book just to ease his conscience. I'd be surprised if it worked.

The Big Read

Other Blog

A reading blog?

Complete Works

Blog Archive

About Me

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Turgenev's Fathers and Children and Smoke

Friday, March 30, 2007

Turgenev's House of Gentlefolk, On the Eve

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Ivan Turgenev's Rudin

Clinton's Autobiography, Roland Barthes

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Dostoievsky's Journals

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Contacting Laure Paquette