Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Alcohol, which I wrote about before. My remarks on it remain pretty much the same, except to note that Raymond Chandler did in fact appear in the last couple of chapters, just in time to prove that he was an enormous fucking jackass. He wrote - and this was

Comments

[evelyn_b]

He wrote - and this was after he had stopped drinking, five years after - that his children had ruined his life, eaten him alive, and he didn’t just write it, but had it published. In public. Where his children could read it.

Oh, no. :( Come on, Chandler, that's what fiction is for.

The dressmaker book sounds really good, though.

[osprey_archer]

It's just like CHANDLER, DUDE, WTF?

The dressmaker book is awesome, though! It's very much a book about an artist devoted to her art, and treats the dressmaking with that level of seriousness, and I really enjoy that. Plus all the details about Vienna - whenever I read Ibbotson I always remember that I've been meaning to learn more about Vienna (Ibbotson grew up in Vienna before fleeing on the eve of World War II), and Austria, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire... but there's so many things to learn about!

If nothing else, I want to learn more about Austrian pastries. They sound amazing.