Sunday, October 26, 2014

Women Reading

Source unknown, via The Internets


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?

6 comments:

  1. Some Luck by Jane Smiley. I think you'd like it.

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  2. That Part Was True by Deborah McKinlay. Not bad so far.

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  3. I'm reading 'Excavation', sent to me for a review on my blog, and wow. what a story. it's a memoir.

    and i'm reading non-fiction ' The Heart of Everything That Is ' about war chief Lakota/Sioux leader, Red Cloud ( obsessed with US Western expansion 1800's right now )

    and for novel, i just started ' The Flamethrowers ' which…damn. this woman can WRITE

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  4. I am reading a biography of James McNeill Whistler that I think will take me at least the rest of the year!

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  5. I tried, very much, to read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries but it is a very very very slow read and i could no longer bear it. Can anyone tell me it gets better?

    Am reading Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile and am enjoying it. Always love a new take on the southern novel. And I have Jane Hamilton's The Book of Ruth in the Wings. I very much enjoyed her Map of the World.

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  6. "The Silkworm" by J.K. Rowling (pen name: Robert Galbraith). The writing style is often cliched but it's worth tolerating for the pleasure of a well-spun murder mystery.

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