Ayn Rand, Katherine Mansfield

Well, I spent the day reading Atlas Shrugged, and I liked it even less than The Fountainhead. Bad writing, bad character names, improbable plot twists, poor psychology of characters, poor philosophical content. It is still selling well, but I don't expect these books will survive much longer.

I also read a couple of Harlequins in French, because Tony picked up French books at random for me, and a book by Flaubert I had already read, and then I read a biography of Katherine Mansfield by Jeffrey Meyers which haunts me because of her sad, early death from tuberculosis. The thought of the hemorrhages, the constricted chest, the weight loss, the ineffectual cure, the exploitative charlatan treatments, all this in poverty. I also read an unintentionally hilarious novel, Unknown to History, by A Lady, about a fictional daughter of Mary Queen of Scots born during the English captivity. It was slight, but it was real researched. The edition I was holding was itself was 120 years old, and the book had been mentioned in my favorite biography of Mary, by Antonia Fraser.