What Are You Reading

[Fading Fast]

After a couple of meh books, I grabbed a never-read Edith Wharton off the shelf - "The Buccaneers." She is probably my favorite author and rarely lets me down. "House of Mirth," "Summer," "Ethan Frome" and "The Age of Innocents" are some of her best that I can read time and again. However, some are just good and, so far (50 pages in), "The Buccaneers" is just good.

Just finished Wharton's "The Buccaneers" (which was actually finished by another author as she passed away while writing it - hence, it's not a full Wharton novel) which is a solid novel but doesn't break any fresh ground for Wharton although she seems to have had fun poking fun at the turn-of-the-Century pattern of wealthy American heiresses marrying impoverished English peerage (think, oh, say, "Downton Abbey").

Basically, that's the theme - several wealthy and one not-so-wealthy (but all new money) single American women - shunned as "new" money by established American society - travel to England looking for social acceptance and husbands amidst the financially struggling English upper classes. As always, Wharton excels at drawing full characters that you care about - with their flaws and all - and mixing in some good plot twists, but the book feels a bit tired as she's done all this before and better as in "The House of Mirth."

 

[AmateisGal]

Alan Bullock's biography of Hitler. I was assigned this book in college (undergrad) and sadly did not read it then (I blame the thrill of being a college freshman and all that entailed). Of course, I've read lots of books on the Nazis since - but not this one. So, I decided to remedy it.

 

[Fading Fast]

Starting William Boyd's "Sweet Caress." He's one of the modern novelists I enjoy and am looking forward to this one as it spans the Golden Era (and its wings) 1908 - 1977. I'll post after I've finished it. Anyone read it (and have non-spoiler thoughts / anyone read anything else by him)?

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd," by Eugene Bergmann.

I remember looking thru this quasi-biography of the legendary radio and literary humorist in the bookstore when it first came out, but I'm only now getting around to reading it, mainly because I was put off by early reviews calling it disjointed and not especially informative. But upon reading it, I've come to the conclusion that this is the inevitable result of any attempt to write an in-depth biography of Shepherd -- a man who went to extraordinary lengths to obscure, distort, embroider, and suppress the truths of his actual life, to the point where the line between fiction and reality is hopelessly and forever blurred.

Those who want to remeber "Shep" thru the mists of adolescent nostalgia, or to think of him as the jolly fellow behind "A Christmas Story," will have a hard time with this book -- because Shepherd himself went to considerable lengths to shatter those images. He didn't *want* to be nostalgically remembered, because he hated the whole idea of "nostalgia" as a phony Boys-From-Marketing gloss on the roughness and cruelty of the real world, and it becomes evident that those of his latter-day fans who insist on keeping such an image of him in memory really didn't absorb the lessons he was trying to teach them. Bergmann spoke to as many people as he could who actually knew Shepherd -- but what comes thru in all of their remarks is how impossible it really was to know the real man. Only Shepherd himself knew who Jean Parker Shepherd Jr. really was -- and he took that secret to his grave.

 

[Fading Fast]

Just started "The Paris Wife," by Paula McLain. She wrote "Circling the Sun" - a novel based on the life of Beryl Markham - which I enjoyed, so I thought I'd give this novel, based on the life of Hemingway's first wife, a shot. Also, I'm enjoying William Boyd's "Sweet Caress" so much, that I had to pick up another book to slow me down on Boyd or I'd have finished it too quickly.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Killing time with the August 1939 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. This was the era during which the LHJ was at its most substantial, covering real issues of interest to women in a frank, informative, journalistic style, with none of the condescending foof you find in other womens' magazines.

The most interesting item in this issue is an in-depth discussion of the role of hormones in women's health. Estrogen had only been discovered ten years earlier, and the idea of hormone-replacement therapy for post-menopausal or hysterectomized women was still being tested. The article, "New Life For Eight Million," projects widespread prescription of this therapy in the years to come, but it doesn't predict the use of conjugated horse estrogen instead of human estradiol, which became common after Wyeth Labs introduced Premarin in 1942. The article warns against profligate use of the therapy, or its prescription by doctors not qualified to understand it, but the overall tone is optimistic.

Another interesting piece is a biographical sketch of Dolly Madison -- the First Lady, not the packaged snack cake -- written by the radical left-wing novelist and historian Howard Fast.

The big fiction feature of this issue is a 40,000 word condensation of Daphne DuMaurier's "Rebecca," which I don't think my weak eyes are up to reading tonite.

Among the regular columnists, Dorothy Thompson's piece this month is interesting, as she denounces the increasingly common idea of college as a "job training" program rather than as an educational institution. She contends with her characteristic vigor that the ten percent of American high school graduates who will begin college in the fall of 1939 can expect to receive a shallow, low-grade education that will serve them no better than a good vocational program.

Huh, ain't dat sumpin'. Here I thought the Class of '43 would be out there matriculatin' on the classics, learning to Think Critically, and reciting Cicero in the original, as taught to them by dignified ivy-covered professors. When they weren't truckin' to Artie Shaw records, exchanging "Confucius Say" jokes and swallowing goldfish.

In the ad section, a blonde teenager in a satin bra poses seductively sniffing her own armpit above the caption "SAFELY CHECKS PERSPIRATION -- SAFELY CHECKS ODOR. NONSPI CREAM DOES BOTH!" Across the page, gash-mouthed comedian Joe E. Brown declares "I Married a Jelly Champion!" as Mrs. Brown stands by in an apron holding a glass of jelly on a saucer. "No costly failures for me! I Use the "Tried and True" Pectin -- CERTO!" exults Mrs Brown, her hand raised as if she is about to thumb her nose and throw the jelly jar at her tedious husband.

Then as now, you can't have a women's magazine without an article about losing weight. But the LHJ manages to offer one with a bit more dignity than you usually get in telling the story of successful advertising woman -- yes, a Girl From Marketing -- Virginia Gates, who got her weight down from 155 to 135 on a diet made up largely of beef boullion, bran crackers, broiled lean meat, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, and eggs. She lost ten pounds in two weeks on this regimen, which shows she's made of sterner stuff than I am.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ It sounds as if the "college as 'job training'" discussion could have come right out of our current thread on the same topic. Nothing really changes that much.

 

[AmateisGal]

I have several issues of the LHJ from the war years. Nice, thick magazines with lots of fiction and interesting articles. I love reading through them.

 

[Steve27752]

I am currently reading 'Men of The Desert Airforce' (WW11) by Chaz Bowyer.

 

[DNO]

I've decided to shelve my noir fiction for the moment and I've gone back to one of my old favourites: George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and the Dragon. Though highly irreverent, it has a bevy of information on the Taiping Rebellion...second bloodiest war in history (next to WW2) and most people have never heard of it. A truly ghastly event but a thoroughly enjoyable read.

 

[Harp]

Colm Toibin, The Master

A haunting portrait of Henry James' disquiet intelligence and tears scratched across literature.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Paging thru a five-volume set of "Copeland's Treasury For Booklovers," published by Scribners' in 1929. This is one of those "instant culture in your home" compilations that were so popular in the 1910s and 1920s, designed to give anyone the veneer of a liberal education in "just fifteen minutes a day." These are very nice books, containing a fine cross-section of nineteenth-century English poetry and prose, bound in "rich red leatherette." It's just the sort of thing a bright high school student might have gotten for Christmas from a middle-class aunt in 1930, but this particular set, which I found while picking the city dump this morning, does not appear ever to have been read.

 

[Fading Fast]

Paging thru a five-volume set of "Copeland's Treasury For Booklovers," published by Scribners' in 1929. This is one of those "instant culture in your home" compilations that were so popular in the 1910s and 1920s, designed to give anyone the veneer of a liberal education in "just fifteen minutes a day." These are very nice books, containing a fine cross-section of nineteenth-century English poetry and prose, bound in "rich red leatherette." It's just the sort of thing a bright high school student might have gotten for Christmas from a middle-class aunt in 1930, but this particular set, which I found while picking the city dump this morning, does not appear ever to have been read.

Were they an abridged version or the full text? I am always put off by abridged versions as it seems that everyone gets cheated - the author's work isn't presented as he/she intended and the reader doesn't experience it the way it was intended. It's kind of why movies of good books don't work or, at least, aren't as good as the book - a talented author has already culled the superfluous stuff, so the movie has to cut into the bone.

Hard to believe your find made it all this way without being read. Is it in good condition or are you basing it on the spine not being bent, etc.?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The poetry is full text, but most of the prose is selected chapters rather than full works -- for example, the courtroom scene in "The Pickwick Papers" instead of the whole novel. The idea was to give all the most famous bits of English literature in an easy to digest format, so you could recognize a reference to, say, Mrs. Bardell, without having to have read the entire book.

There was a lot of this kind of "instant culture" at the time, usually under the imprimatur of a famous academic. Dr. Charles W. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf Of Books was the most famous such product -- it included a heavy salting of Greek and Roman classics along with the familiar stuff from English literature and translations from familiar French and Italian works. Dr. Charles T. Copeland, who packaged the set I found, was the "Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard University," which was no doubt impressive at the time.

The bindings are very tight and still crack when you open them, although some of the gold embossing is rubbed off the covers. That's the sign of books that have been moved around from shelf to shelf a lot over their lifetime, but haven't actually been opened much, and the pages are still uncreased and creamy white.

All that said, it was very convenient if you were a writer to have a set like this around in the pre-internet era, so you could confirm the opening lines of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner in a hurry, in order to work them into, say, an article about an old infielder who lets a lot of ground balls get by. "He stoppeth one in three..."

 

[Fading Fast]

The poetry is full text, but most of the prose is selected chapters rather than full works -- for example, the courtroom scene in "The Pickwick Papers" instead of the whole novel. The idea was to give all the most famous bits of English literature in an easy to digest format, so you could recognize a reference to, say, Mrs. Bardell, without having to have read the entire book.

There was a lot of this kind of "instant culture" at the time, usually under the imprimatur of a famous academic. Dr. Charles W. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf Of Books was the most famous such product -- it included a heavy salting of Greek and Roman classics along with the familiar stuff from English literature and translations from familiar French and Italian works. Dr. Charles T. Copeland, who packaged the set I found, was the "Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard University," which was no doubt impressive at the time.

The bindings are very tight and still crack when you open them, although some of the gold embossing is rubbed off the covers. That's the sign of books that have been moved around from shelf to shelf a lot over their lifetime, but haven't actually been opened much, and the pages are still uncreased and creamy white.

All that said, it was very convenient if you were a writer to have a set like this around in the pre-internet era, so you could confirm the opening lines of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner in a hurry, in order to work them into, say, an article about an old infielder who lets a lot of ground balls get by. "He stoppeth one in three..."

It is absolute amazing to me how the internet has all-but eliminate the need for home reference material. I used to have encyclopedias (plural), dictionaries (plural), almanacs (plural), guidebooks, style guides etc. that I regularly bought updated versions of - some annually. And of course, a ton of crazy one-off topic stuff around the things I was writing about. While I still have some of that (especially the one-off stuff) - just couldn't part with it all - I no longer update it or, in truth, use it except very, very rarely. It is just easier and faster to use the web.

Thinking about my parents' bookshelves (which included their parents' bookshelves when they passed away and, even so, they were not extensive at all), there were some of those "instant culture" books on them. But while I was mildly encourage to read, there was no reading culture in my family so the book shelves sat untouched for long periods of time. But being a reader from a young age, I explored them and had a weird early reading history based on that - which improved a lot when I was old enough to go to the library on my own.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Reading further thru the Copeland set, Dr. Copeland leaped in my estimation when I saw that, in the last volume, he'd included selections by Heywood Broun and Robert Benchley. If he'd compiled the set ten years later, he'd have to have included Winchell, too.

 

[Fading Fast]

Benchley is one of those guys that you don't really see today - a jack of several trades: journalist, humorist, actor, author...a personality.

 

[AmateisGal]

The second novel in the Clara Vine series: The Winter Garden. These novels are set in Berlin in the 1930s. Very well done. The period detail is astonishing.

 

[Fading Fast]

The second novel in the Clara Vine series: The Winter Garden. These novels are set in Berlin in the 1930s. Very well done. The period detail is astonishing.

Based on this, I just added "Black Roses" to my Amazon cart.

 

[MisterCairo]

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.