The girls are out flaunting their Summer plumage but you're stuck inside, reading. What?

The Black Arrow - RL Stevenson. A Romance set in War of Roses period. Worst bit of dialogue so far -

'Where goeth me this track?'
'Let us even try,' said Matcham.

Prithee up your bum, good sirras.

I'm quite enjoying it, even though it's totally confusing, hectic without covering a lot of ground, and stitched together even worse than one of the leather jerkins everyone goes round wearing.

A binge of fun recently...

Richard Stark: Lemons Never Lie
Henry James: The Coxon Fund (a novella--I love the quote from the text on the back: 'The greater the windbag, the greater the calamity.')
William Dean Howells: A Sleep and a Forgetting (another novella, about how much YOU remain YOU if your memory vanishes)
Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic
Eric Ambler: Dirty Story (overweight con man gets involved with making porn movie, becomes inadvertent mercenary "liberating" African territory for a mining corporation)
Somerset Maugham: Christmas Holiday

Evelyn Waugh: Helena
John Gray: Black Mass
Pynchon: Inherent Vice
Henry Green: Party Going
Old 18th-century habits coming back, so slightly scattershot reading of Hume and Burke.

theodore white: the making of the american president, 1960
peter hennessy: the prime minister: the office & its holders since 1945
more cordwainer smith
tony harrison's 'collected film poetry'

glancing in a lot of other poetry - james fenton, paul muldoon. also a cheap collected andrew motion, which is pretty dreadful.

finished the first volume of the man without qualities. finally.

Recently The Spoils of Poynton (James), The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst, reread), The Little Stranger (Waters, a bit disappointing, maybe I'm tiring of her take old genre fiction and bulk it out with my terrific eye for period detail trick), Sorrows of An American (Hustvedt - very disappointing, one of those regrettable books that makes you wonder if your admiration for a writer's earlier work wasn't a lapse in judgement). Started Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.

I finished 'The Corrections' last night. It was really good, had me hooked like few books have in the last year or two. I was really looking forward to every opportunity to escape into that world, which was even more impressive because most of it was so ordinary. It didn't even need the Lithuanian bits, I don't think, Denise's story would have carried the action on its own.

I have a bathroom full of books to choose from now (we're recarpeting and they've been rehoused there temporarily). I'm thinking either 'The Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, or the recent Lennon biography by I think Philip Norman. Not quite ready for the Austria-Hungarian stuff yet.

Maiden Voyage - Denton Welch (much prefer it to In Youth Is Pleasure, although IYIP does have a lovely lyric at the beginning of it. MV is an account of DW's school days, then a voyage to Shanghai. Paradoxically perhaps, it doesn't really go anywhere - that feature woof described in A Voice Through A Cloud - but I find his peculiar form of psychic description powerful enough for this not to matter, without him being at all likable. He is unsparing of himself.)

A Last Sheaf - Denton Welch. (Short stories, including an excellent one called 'Ghosts', poetry and black and white reproductions of some of his late paintings, which share the features of his writing - morbidly detailed, with oppressive sense of deathly life)

Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Attractive if slightly trite-feeling lyrics, imitations and satires, which are occasionally vivid, occasionally cluttered, with that renaissance feeling of classical reference packed with English detail and description.)

Sorry that was a shit description of Wyatt, but I had to leave work for a train, which I didn't get, because I thought maybe I should cycle, but I didn't because I didn't have my mudguards, so I got a BUS, which got stuck in TRAFFIC. And when I got off the BUS, I landed ankle deep in a PUDDLE. And then all the TRAINS were delayed because of FLOODING, and then I got another BUS after standing in the pissing RAIN for an AGE.

Which is all by way of saying, isn't it time for a new thread? I was in Brompton Cemetary the other day and I swear the leaves were turning...

Yes, someone should - not me though, I haven't even got my first train delay through the 'leaves on the line' excuse yet.

Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh. Short and intense early 20s French novel from a man who knew way too much too soon. Or so the cliche goes. Living really is hell.

Over the weekend:

Henry De Montherlant - Chaos and Night. I really liked parts of this once everyone goes into Spain - the bullfight was incredibly vivid, and I suspect that the more I'd re-read the more terrifying it could get. I like it that Montherlant makes it hard for you to engage with the man's utter sense of loneliness and the way he works at a blankness to everything.

Musil - Young Torless

Now: Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March

Not me either - I done it last time, and have regretted going full stop-capital letter, rather than ellipsis, ever since.

'The Devil in the Flesh' is great. His 'Count D'Orgels's Ball' is pretty good, too.

And then he died.

i just read that hustvedt book too, frankiemachine - i enjoyed it! i dunno, i really like the she writes, i find her style incredibly engaging and i like the way she builds this really sinister vibe that turns out to be quite marginal to the story (same thing in all her other novels). i've got yonder to read next.

Okay, rather reluctantly I have ushered in the autumnal equinox. Tell us what you're reading here -

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

Hope that works. I'm new to this.

Yeah, well done Gamaliel.

Yeah Dan the Hustvedt was generally well-reviewed and I really enjoyed "What I Loved" so I was looking forward to it. But I found I had massive problems with it.

They started with the epigraph by Rumi. "Don't turn away/Keep looking at the bandaged place./That's where the light enters you."

I didn't much care for this -- does light really enter a wound? Even a bandaged one? Even if it did, would you learn much from looking? It became a kind of metaphor for what I didn't like about the book. If you're going to be as relentlessly gloomy as Hustvedt is in this book, you'd better have some real insight to compensate. She certainly kept looking at the bandaged place, remorselessly so in fact, but for me not much light entered. Intelligence, sensitivity and truth to life are not enough - your book has to enrich the reader's life. I felt this one rubbed my nose in a lot of unpleasant stuff about life that I already knew, and mistook that for seriousness of purpose and unflinching integrity.

My second problem was what seemed a lot of undigested autobiography. Obviously you can't split the autobiographical from the fictional easily, but the starry New York intellectual lifestyle, the neurotic, beautiful, cerebral woman married to a famous novelist, the recently deceased father all point one way. I'm not objecting to fictionalised autbiography per se, but I started to read Inga particularly and some strands of other characters as versions of the author, and found myself increasingly turned off by the self absorption implied. For example, I'm sure the prying of prurient journalists into the lives of celebrity authors (and their wives) is pretty damn unpleasant, but the weight given to it by Hustvedt seems disproportionate in a novel that takes itself so very, very seriously.

Similarly Inga's near psychological collapse at the fear that her book might be published and pass without public notice is passed off as the justifiable fear of a hyper-intelligent woman that she won't receive due recognition in a male-dominated world. But it comes across as something much weirder - a sense of entitlement to the status of celebrity intellectual. This jars because, although we don't doubt her abilities, the number of people who become famous (or even semi-famous) for producing intellectual work will always be a vanishingly small fraction of the number of people who produce outstanding work. To hope for due recognition, the approbation of your professional peers and so on is natural and healthy. To believe that you'd have a legitimate grievance against the world if it denied you celebrity, even the somewhat rarified kind Inga aspires to, seems more than slightly loopy. Which would be fine if she was pure fiction, offered up for judgement as she is. But in a character who's manifestly a version of an author who has achieved some celebrity partly as a consequence of having a famous husband, and whose stock in trade is self awareness, it comes across as a curious and unattractive mixture of self-justification and self-pity.

This post has grown unexpectedly long and self-indulgent, so I won't lengthen it by going into detail about what seem to me egregious faults of structure (a mess IMO) and style. Generally Hustvedt writes well but there is a generous sprinkling of jaw-droppingly ugly or pretentious sentences. Some of the negative reviews on Amazon nail a few of these with more more perception than you might expect from Amazon reviewers.

This is highly subjective stuff - how gloomy is too gloomy, how can you be sure this is autobiographical - and plenty of reviewers liked the book. But it's damaged my romance with Hustvedt, probably beyond repair.

Still, as I say, the book was well reviewed and plenty of sensitive and perceptive readers seemed to like it.