Vargas Llosa, Kassow, Lacey, Mariani

Since my last post I've read an issue of The Economist. I've also read some excellent Vargas Llosa. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is an unbelievably vivid novel, I loved it. His book Perpetual Orgy on Madame Bovary is one of the best books on literature I've ever read -- the chapter on how Flaubert actually wrote was particularly interesting. I read Vargas Llosa's Nobel lecture. I also read Kassow's Who Will Write Our History?, about an archive that survived the Warsaw Ghetto. For all my reading about the Shoah, this book contained more heartrending details, and was also inspiring about what survives and what does not in human history. I also read Introduction to Film by Nick Lacey, which was full of excellent detail about the types of shots and types of cuts which are going to be useful to me. Finally I read a biography of Gerald Manley Hopkins by Paul Mariani, which was either uninformative or the poet's life was very uneventful indeed. One unusual characteristic of the biography was that the author would put in the day of the week and date at the start of various paragraphs. I found it distracting and wondered if the author was being lazy, but for references it would be very useful.