Recent Books

My work schedule has increased and I am having trouble keeping up with blogging about what I've been reading. Here are some micro reviews.

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
When I  picked up Anthony Powell's series 0f 12 books (about 2500 pages), I had to decide whether to read the books over a period of months or years and risk forgetting the early stories, characters and locations OR read them all at once and burn out. I chose the latter course, and it nearly put me off of reading completely. I liked most of the books - especially the war years.

The first several pages of each book is horribly cryptic. I found myself reading paragraphs out loud to get a better handle on 40 word sentences with several $10 words in them. Once past that, the reading was usually interesting. The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, a writer and member of the upper middle class with many musicians, artists, writers and art critics for friends, is an acute observer of human nature. The characters are, well, "characters" and the humor is dry. The settings are typically grand salons or artists' hangouts - pubs and galleries filled with people who seem to have a lot of time to party. The books start when Jenkins is a teen and leave off in his 60s. People come and go throughout the books. The war changes everything and then life starts again. It is truly a dance through time.

I thoroughly enjoyed books 1-3 (see the review of book 1 and books 2-3). Books 4-6 kept me engaged, but were not thrilling. Books 7-9 were a fascinating look at England and London, in particular, during the war years. For me, it could have all stopped there and I would have been satisfied with a "good read". But it didn't. Book 10 introduced an incredibly unpleasant (and highly unbelievable) character who along with her paramours stole the show for the next 500 pages. She is no longer a part of the story in book 12, but that storyline tops 10 & 11 for being factitious. This is humor, (or humour), but it felt over-the-top.

Sometimes when I read a very long book, I'll go back to the beginning and reread sections to help plug the gaps in my understanding. I felt no desire to do that with this series - and in fact, am not sure that an exercise of that sort would be of much value. The books have depth, but not in that way. I think that I would notice changes in style and treatment of character - and perhaps personal philosophy - Jenkins does get more conservative as he ages. I do not think I would find great and deep themes to ponder - but perhaps I'll try the exercise at a later time and see what I've missed.

BTW: There is a reader's guide for the books which I own (but have loaned out, and can't recall the title) which helped to keep names and places straight.****

LUCKY JIM
You would have thought I'd had enough of English Humor of the 30s after Powell's Dance and try something completely different next. But instead I picked up Lucky Jim by Powell's friend, Kingsley Amis.

No dry humor here, this is slapstick. The story is about an agreeable and easily victimized professor of history trying to make his start in a temporary position in a back-water college in England. He is mentored by an old professor who prefers putting on plays to teaching history classes and who invites him to preposterous parties where he drinks too much and gets into hilarious fixes. He is befriended by and nearly betrothed to a neurotic colleague who plays suicide games to get what she wants. He is nearly done in by an exercise to create and give an "important" lecture on the topic of Merrie England. However, there is hope in the form of a lovely lady, the fiance of his mentor's son, who conspires with him in various ways. This, of course, causes more problems, but by the end, he pops out of the tangled mess, lands on his feet and  thumbs his nose at the bunch of them. This is a very silly book. Not sure why it is on the Time 100 except to fill out the humor genre. Pleasant enough. **

POSSESSION
I read and finished Possession by A. S. Byatt while on a trip to Boston last week. It is a book with a great amount of detail and a great amount of Gothic poetry and 19th century letters - plus it is 530+ pages long. This is no quick read. I started out trying to blaze through it, and then eventually had to come back and reread the better part of the first 200 pages. Fortunately, I managed to slow down and enjoy the book. I found it very enjoyable in the end. ****


THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG
I got to page 113 and then gave up on it. It is awful. The only reason I read that much is because I was traveling and had no other book on me. The word that comes to mind is cloying. *


AND MORE .....That's a lot of books. I travel a lot, and so I have large chunks of time for reading. I am currently reading three books. I picked up Willa Cather's, My Antonia, which is a soft sweet book and had the crazy idea to use it as antidote for what I figured would be two venomous books, Cheever's Falconer and the last half of Gone With the Wind.

Scarlet is certainly venomous. Farragut, the protagonist in Falconer, seems, if not innocent (he is in prison for the murder of his brother), then at least agreeable, but his prisoners are sadists.Taking turns with the three books is making it possible to finish two of them but is absolutely destroying my pleasure in My Antonia.

In any event, Falconer is going fast, and will be completed shortly - this is not a book I choose to read slow and savor. I also learned not to read it late at night, because you never know when the sadistic games will show up. They are fodder for very bad dreams. Gone With the Wind feels infinitely long. After letting it lie unopened for six months I come to it with more patience, but until I hit the last 10 pages, I will not be happy.