Crossposted from Dreamwidth, a day late (maybe not a dollar short).

What I've Finished Reading

I bought The Disaster Artist on impulse and finished it in about a day. It's a largely sympathetic account of Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room, according to the book's subtitle "the greatest bad movie ever made." I'm not sure what I think of it. ( Read more... )

I know it isn't Thursday yet, but something terrible has happened. [Is this a spoiler? I had no idea it was coming.]Albertine is dead. She left Little M. early in the morning one day, and since then he has been trying a number of sad, hilarious schemes to manipulate her into coming back - trying to make her jealous or excite her pity or avarice. She died very suddenly in an accident that was no ( Read more... )

One curious thing was that nobody had ever before heard the Duc de Guermantes make use of the quite commonplace expression "out and out," but ever since the Jockey election, whenever anybody referred to the Dreyfus case, pat would come "out and out." "Dreyfus case, Dreyfus case, that's soon said, and it's a misuse of the term. It's not a question ( Read more... )

For, with a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vinteuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them? And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarrelled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased.

Sodom and Gomorrah ends with Little M. ( Read more... )

"I say, that looks a fine beast," said M. de Cambremer to Mme Verdurin, pointing to a fish. (It was one of the compliments by means of which he considered that he paid his whack at a dinner party and gave an immediate return of hospitality. "There's no need to invite them back," he would often say, in speaking to his wife of one or other couple of ( Read more... )

( Where the men are women, and the women are disappointed )

“Have you noticed how often a writer’s letters are superior to the rest of his work? What’s the name of that author who wrote Salaambo?”

I should have liked not to reply in order not to prolong the conversation, but I felt it would be disobliging to the Prince d’Agrigente, who had pretended to know perfectly well who Salaambo was by and out of ( Read more... )

I felt myself isolated, not only from the great, freezing night which extended far around us and in which we heard from time to time the whistle of a train which only rendered more keen the pleasure of being where we were, or the chime of an hour which, happily, was still a long way short of that at which these young men would have to buckle on ( Read more... )

Moreover, I forgot almost immediately these last weeks of our stay. What I saw almost invariably in my minds eye when I thought of Balbec were the hours which, every morning during the fine weather, since I was due to go out in the afternoon with Albertine and her friends, my grandmother, following the doctor's orders, insisted on my spending lying ( Read more... )

At Combray, since we were known to everyone, I took heed of no one. In seaside life one does not know one's neighbours. I was not yet old enough, and was still too sensitive to have outgrown the desire to find favour in the sight of other people and to possess their hearts. Nor had I acquired the more noble indifference which a man of the world ( Read more... )