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books, good and bad
Jul. 3rd, 2006 09:02 amRead:
Stephanie Bond, Party Crashers (2004). Not very good at all, but it helped carry me through my very bad mood yesterday, so that's one thing to its account. I've read other books by her and liked them better.
Roger Angell, Let Me Finish (2006). Memoir/personal essays by the New Yorker editor and baseball writer. I have read his baseball stuff for years despite my near-total disinterest in baseball (such that I have often never heard of the people he is talking about) because I really like his voice. I envisioned him as a thin ascetic old fellow (he is 86) but from the jacket photo he is actually rubicund and jolly. Essays I especially liked include "Early Innings" (for the baseball fans), "Andy" (on E.B. White, his stepfather), and "Hard Lines" (a recent New Yorker publication). Here are a couple of things that struck me.
E. B. White is suffering from some form of senile demetia:
"Joe told me that in that long year he'd read aloud to his father often, and discovered that he enjoyed listening to his own writings, though he wasn't always clear about who the author was. Sometimes he'd raise a hand and impatiently wave a passage away: not good enough. Other evenings, he'd listen to the end, almost at rest, and then ask again who'd written these words.
'You did, Dad,' Joe said.
There was a pause, and Andy said, 'Well, not bad.'"
During a luncheon with V. S. Pritchett, in London:
"Victor, well along in his eighties by now, told Carol that he'd been startled to find himself dreaming lately about the Queen Mother, who was over ninety and still going strong.
'Well, that's not surprising, is it?' Carol said. 'She's so lively - doesn't everyone here still dream about her?'
'Erotic dreams?' Pritchett said."
Finally, apropos of I forget what, I recalled this morning on the bus that I knew of Darien CT before having read "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," and thus was rather perplexed by the reference in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. I am still bemused by the Land of Preppy Girls' connection to stout Cortes, silent on his peak.
Stephanie Bond, Party Crashers (2004). Not very good at all, but it helped carry me through my very bad mood yesterday, so that's one thing to its account. I've read other books by her and liked them better.
Roger Angell, Let Me Finish (2006). Memoir/personal essays by the New Yorker editor and baseball writer. I have read his baseball stuff for years despite my near-total disinterest in baseball (such that I have often never heard of the people he is talking about) because I really like his voice. I envisioned him as a thin ascetic old fellow (he is 86) but from the jacket photo he is actually rubicund and jolly. Essays I especially liked include "Early Innings" (for the baseball fans), "Andy" (on E.B. White, his stepfather), and "Hard Lines" (a recent New Yorker publication). Here are a couple of things that struck me.
E. B. White is suffering from some form of senile demetia:
"Joe told me that in that long year he'd read aloud to his father often, and discovered that he enjoyed listening to his own writings, though he wasn't always clear about who the author was. Sometimes he'd raise a hand and impatiently wave a passage away: not good enough. Other evenings, he'd listen to the end, almost at rest, and then ask again who'd written these words.
'You did, Dad,' Joe said.
There was a pause, and Andy said, 'Well, not bad.'"
During a luncheon with V. S. Pritchett, in London:
"Victor, well along in his eighties by now, told Carol that he'd been startled to find himself dreaming lately about the Queen Mother, who was over ninety and still going strong.
'Well, that's not surprising, is it?' Carol said. 'She's so lively - doesn't everyone here still dream about her?'
'Erotic dreams?' Pritchett said."
Finally, apropos of I forget what, I recalled this morning on the bus that I knew of Darien CT before having read "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," and thus was rather perplexed by the reference in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. I am still bemused by the Land of Preppy Girls' connection to stout Cortes, silent on his peak.