What I've Finished Reading

The Island by Aldous Huxley. Let's be honest with ourselves for a second: the only reason I'm haunted by the feeling that I'm not being fair to Aldous Huxley is that I know he has fans whose taste I respect, not because I'm actually of two minds about the thing. It's not like Lawrence Durrell where I couldn't shake the ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer - in which Freddy is the best and saves the day on several counts before settling in for a carefree life of buying and wearing his beloved waistcoats and clipping all his sentences off neatly at one end like a collection of the finest cigars ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

Yes, my friends, remember how indignant you once felt when the Turks massacred more than the ordinary quota of Armenians, how you thanked God that you lived in a Protestant, progressive country, where such things simply couldn't happen - couldn't happen because men wore bowler hats and travelled daily to town by the ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

The Heart of the Matter

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, ( Read more... )

I guess we're back down to one post a week, since work shows no signs of slowing down and I can't seem to manage my time any better. Oh well.

What I've Just Finished Reading

The Singing Sands was great, and if anything To Love and Be Wise was even better. At least, most of the grouchiness that in other books gets channeled into regional politics ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

I had no intention of reading Persuasion this week, but it happened anyway; I picked it up at the coffeeshop's lending library and couldn't put it down for anything. I know it's not a ground-breaking discovery to announce that Jane Austen is a genius, but jeez. I'd forgotten (or maybe never realized in the first ( Read more... )