Women Reading

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I'm finishing up Elizabeth Taylor's Angel and would say that it's a slow but beautifully written read whose torpor appeals to me. I've always been a sucker for the slow read, where characters unfold with events as opposed to events unfolding with characters. I think of Trollope, Eliot (George, not T.S.), the Brontes and Austen -- the novels that, when finished, leave you aching not so much from what has happened but more because you'll miss the characters. Here's a little bit of Angel that made me nearly laugh out loud and certainly sigh in admiration:

He thought her extraordinarily placid. He sent for a cab and took her to tea at Gunters; the least he could do, he supposed. She was arch and gay as if she had come to London solely for this treat, and he wondered if she had ever been taken out to tea before; with that moustache, he rather thought not.

I've just begun David Grand's Mount Terminus and will report back at some point if I don't get lost in W.S. Merwin's new book of poetry, The Moon Before Morning.

Reader, what are you reading?