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Heady times in the republic of the spirit
If I'm not posting, it's not for lack of incident. A phone call from an old old friend on Thursday, Korean barbecue Friday night, a shopping expedition in the snow yesterday, brunch and a trip to Patel Brothers today, conversations about social networking and personality types, frustration at work, worries about the future--in fact, there's so much to post about I'm stymied to sort out what I really want to focus on so I'm just going to write about books.
I finished My dream of you and while I don't regret reading it, I wouldn't particularly recommend it. It's a reasonably engrossing tale of an Irish exile's mid-life crisis and nothing really more than that. So on the way to Andies last night, I dropped into Women and Children First hoping to find a friend's out-of-print book and perhaps another Irish novel and left satisfied with a remaindered volume of Edna O'Brien's short stories. So far, I've encountred more good writing in the first fourteen pages of it than in O'Faolain's entire novel, which tells me life's too short for most of you to bother with the latter.
I remarked to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu that the O'Brien can take its place on the shelf next to Chopin, O'Connor, Porter, and Mansfield in my ever-expanding section of top-drawer short fiction by women authors. After finishing Summer, I went back there to retrieve Roman fever and other stories, but found it less than engrossing. Then today over violently purple pancakes at Broadway Cellars Chirpy and I ended up summarising the plot of House of mirth for M³, which convinced me it was high time I finally read the novel to see if it would elucidate some of the plot twists that baffled me in the movie. So far it's such an unalloyed delight that I can just about put out of my mind the tragic reverses to come.
I finished My dream of you and while I don't regret reading it, I wouldn't particularly recommend it. It's a reasonably engrossing tale of an Irish exile's mid-life crisis and nothing really more than that. So on the way to Andies last night, I dropped into Women and Children First hoping to find a friend's out-of-print book and perhaps another Irish novel and left satisfied with a remaindered volume of Edna O'Brien's short stories. So far, I've encountred more good writing in the first fourteen pages of it than in O'Faolain's entire novel, which tells me life's too short for most of you to bother with the latter.
I remarked to
monshu that the O'Brien can take its place on the shelf next to Chopin, O'Connor, Porter, and Mansfield in my ever-expanding section of top-drawer short fiction by women authors. After finishing Summer, I went back there to retrieve Roman fever and other stories, but found it less than engrossing. Then today over violently purple pancakes at Broadway Cellars Chirpy and I ended up summarising the plot of House of mirth for M³, which convinced me it was high time I finally read the novel to see if it would elucidate some of the plot twists that baffled me in the movie. So far it's such an unalloyed delight that I can just about put out of my mind the tragic reverses to come.