39 & 40: L'egypte et la belle epoque de Colette
39. The Red Pyramid, Rick Riordan, adapted by Orpheus Collar
I picked this up because it was on top of the graphic novel display in the children's library -- it's an adaptation of a novel. I am a sucker for Egyptiana and this delivered, with more esoteric details about the gods than I could really keep track of, and an interesting enough magic/otherworld design. The characters weren't very deep, though maybe that just didn't translate well. The art was also a little uneven, and very obviously just a vehicle for the adapted novel text. Frequently I had the feeling I was reading a particularly pretty storyboard for the film adaptaion. But the art did have flashes of beauty, here was Sadie's encounter with the night goddess, Nut:
I'm a sucker for Nut. The story, generally, is that separated (multi-racial!) siblings Sadie and Carter Kane are the children of some bad-ass gods, and they have to save the world. There are some clumsy adolescent crushes that pop up along the way, but mainly the kids are action! heroes! and not so much actual kids. I liked this, but maybe not enough to seek out the other sequels, in novel or comic form.
40. Secrets of the Flesh: a life of Colette, Judith Thurman
This is a beautiful, long, dense biography. I offer Thurman high praise by saying she's almost as good a biographer as Hermione Lee; this is dense with so many Belle Epoque and wartime French literature and politics and art references that it was a bit dizzying. Previously, I'd only been familiar with Colette through Roxanne's costume so this was a fascinating way to get to know a fascinating woman/character/author/actress/personality. Perhaps the most shocking thing to me was her cruel childhood, and her cruelty to her young daughter, too (also a theme in another writer I'm reading concurrently, Violette Leduc). This cruelty is remarked on and studied in her literature and her biography, so it's nothing new, but it also felt strikingly opaque, to me. Sometimes, for all this book's brilliance, I wasn't entirely certain I was getting a view of a person. Colette's letters are quoted frequently, and sometimes the phrasing was just baffling to me, like I wasn't entirely certain I was hearing her considered thoughts, perhaps it was just a phrase she thought sounded good. Frustratingly, this is the same criticism often leveled at her prose, so I felt there was something missing in the biography that might have helped unlock it. But Thurman's view was quite clear on another front, that of Colette's collaboration with the Vichy regime, publishing in some of the most virulently far right publications. This was not unusual among the French literary crowd, apparently, who were not entirely convinced either way (unless they were directly persecuted) and really only switched sides to the Free French once it became clear the Germans were going to lose -- not out of conviction but out of self-preservation, Thurman and others have suggested. Thurman also suggests, as have others, that much of Colette's opacity comes down to this kind of unconcerned ego-centrism, and in some cases (i.e. Colette's judgments of the younger lesbian set, in comparison to her own turn of the century cohort) more a product of her provincialism or lack of education, not really understanding the circumstances in which others might live. She gave herself a lot of credit but could be harshly judgmental of others. For all that, she was a renowned author, and I haven't read any of her work. I'll be interested to see how it comes off, after reading this.
.
I'm pleased to have hit 40 books total, with only two months remaining in this year. This is probably quadruple my normal reading total in prior years -- I've never committed to the library the way I have this year, it's really fueled me.
The stack I have ongoing (a Vogue sewing guide from 1957, two Violette Leduc books, a book of essays on Dante in art and literature, Under Fire (memoir of WWI from one of Colette's contemporaries), and Kim Stafford's memoir) is probably entirely too much to complete, given that I plan to spend November writing NaNoWriMo, but I'm hopeful. I started planning ahead by deliberating culling books from the pile (I won't be finishing that biography of Beatrix Potter with the adorable illustrations on the cover, for example). I plan to keep this project ongoing in 2013, as much as possible! In the meantime, surely some reading will get done in November, since I will have to take a break from writing at some point, yes? Here's hoping.
I picked this up because it was on top of the graphic novel display in the children's library -- it's an adaptation of a novel. I am a sucker for Egyptiana and this delivered, with more esoteric details about the gods than I could really keep track of, and an interesting enough magic/otherworld design. The characters weren't very deep, though maybe that just didn't translate well. The art was also a little uneven, and very obviously just a vehicle for the adapted novel text. Frequently I had the feeling I was reading a particularly pretty storyboard for the film adaptaion. But the art did have flashes of beauty, here was Sadie's encounter with the night goddess, Nut:
I'm a sucker for Nut. The story, generally, is that separated (multi-racial!) siblings Sadie and Carter Kane are the children of some bad-ass gods, and they have to save the world. There are some clumsy adolescent crushes that pop up along the way, but mainly the kids are action! heroes! and not so much actual kids. I liked this, but maybe not enough to seek out the other sequels, in novel or comic form.
40. Secrets of the Flesh: a life of Colette, Judith Thurman
This is a beautiful, long, dense biography. I offer Thurman high praise by saying she's almost as good a biographer as Hermione Lee; this is dense with so many Belle Epoque and wartime French literature and politics and art references that it was a bit dizzying. Previously, I'd only been familiar with Colette through Roxanne's costume so this was a fascinating way to get to know a fascinating woman/character/author/actress/personality. Perhaps the most shocking thing to me was her cruel childhood, and her cruelty to her young daughter, too (also a theme in another writer I'm reading concurrently, Violette Leduc). This cruelty is remarked on and studied in her literature and her biography, so it's nothing new, but it also felt strikingly opaque, to me. Sometimes, for all this book's brilliance, I wasn't entirely certain I was getting a view of a person. Colette's letters are quoted frequently, and sometimes the phrasing was just baffling to me, like I wasn't entirely certain I was hearing her considered thoughts, perhaps it was just a phrase she thought sounded good. Frustratingly, this is the same criticism often leveled at her prose, so I felt there was something missing in the biography that might have helped unlock it. But Thurman's view was quite clear on another front, that of Colette's collaboration with the Vichy regime, publishing in some of the most virulently far right publications. This was not unusual among the French literary crowd, apparently, who were not entirely convinced either way (unless they were directly persecuted) and really only switched sides to the Free French once it became clear the Germans were going to lose -- not out of conviction but out of self-preservation, Thurman and others have suggested. Thurman also suggests, as have others, that much of Colette's opacity comes down to this kind of unconcerned ego-centrism, and in some cases (i.e. Colette's judgments of the younger lesbian set, in comparison to her own turn of the century cohort) more a product of her provincialism or lack of education, not really understanding the circumstances in which others might live. She gave herself a lot of credit but could be harshly judgmental of others. For all that, she was a renowned author, and I haven't read any of her work. I'll be interested to see how it comes off, after reading this.
.
I'm pleased to have hit 40 books total, with only two months remaining in this year. This is probably quadruple my normal reading total in prior years -- I've never committed to the library the way I have this year, it's really fueled me.
The stack I have ongoing (a Vogue sewing guide from 1957, two Violette Leduc books, a book of essays on Dante in art and literature, Under Fire (memoir of WWI from one of Colette's contemporaries), and Kim Stafford's memoir) is probably entirely too much to complete, given that I plan to spend November writing NaNoWriMo, but I'm hopeful. I started planning ahead by deliberating culling books from the pile (I won't be finishing that biography of Beatrix Potter with the adorable illustrations on the cover, for example). I plan to keep this project ongoing in 2013, as much as possible! In the meantime, surely some reading will get done in November, since I will have to take a break from writing at some point, yes? Here's hoping.