What Becomes of the Broken Hearted Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

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,

Comments

[osprey_archer]

Oooh, Heartsongs sounds fascinating.

[evelyn_b]

The diary selections themselves are great! The editor doesn't seem to have done a lot of work toward establishing/reassuring her readers that they're real, unfortunately, or providing any way for the reader to try to track them down -- most are previously published and now obscure, but the introductory sections are so sparse.

This is a minor complaint that could easily become a major one if I stuck with it long enough. But the diaries so far -- even if some of them are fictions -- are brilliant.

[osprey_archer]

The editor doesn't even include basic bibliographic info so you could ILL the original sources if you wanted? WHAT. That would take, like, two lines, editor!

[evelyn_b]

They're listed on the copyright page, so if you know to look for them there you can go and hunt them up if you want, but there's no bibliography and only the sketchiest introductions. It's a weird decision! This is a "popular" rather than an academic publication, but there's really no call to be that non-academic.

[therck]

The only Graham Greene I've ever read was an excerpt from Our Man in Havana that turned up in an anthology (I think it was one of Robert Arthur's. Probably Spies and More Spies or the one after it the title of which I've forgotten). I thought the excerpt was funny, but it wasn't quite enough to make me want to seek out the book. As I recall, I did look for some of the books that had excerpts in those anthologies, but I was dealing with a very small library at the time and so couldn't find most of them. (This was pre-computers, so ILL wasn't nearly as easy. As I recall, it involved looking in books that listed other libraries' holdings and that might or might not still be accurate.)

[evelyn_b]

That's fascinating about ILL. When was this? I would have expected the process to be more like, "phone the other library and ask," but with long-distance charges I guess that would get pretty expensive, so checking the big book first is better.

Someday (maybe) I am going to Get Into Spies the way I have gotten into detectives, but I don't think Graham Greene is going to be the one to flip the invisible switch in my brain that makes me care all of a sudden.

There are funny moments in The Heart of the Matter but then they all get drowned in misery. :(

[therck]

This was the early 1980s. Long distance charges would have been prohibitive as even a place thirty miles away was likely to be long distance and thus a lot more expensive to call. Also, the library never had more than three people working at a time, and they had a lot of other things to do. Calling a couple of dozen different libraries to ask them to check their card catalogs for a particular title would take a lot of time

[evelyn_b]

It's funny: I grew up with long-distance charges as a major element of family life, and I still forget to take them into account; it's just one of those little important details that have slipped my mind (unlike microfiche and the card catalog, which are still vividly present for some reason).

I do remember the grocery store being the primary source of new books, and how breathtaking it was to walk into a dedicated bookstore (a Waldenbooks!) for the first time. I always felt a little hurt by cultural commentary that hated on the big chain bookstores; it was all very well if you lived in a city where hip indie storefronts were the threatened norm, but in my neighborhood that was not the situation at all.

[a_phoenixdragon]

Yeeaahhhhh Greene sounds less and less appealing just from the descriptions of his work!

Keats is always awesome..and his early work sounds adorable!

*HUGS*

[evelyn_b]

Keats is a friend to man and I'm glad someone was around to teach him to read and write.

Greene is too, for some people. I don't bear him any ill will for not being my thing exactly, but it's probably best if I let him go for now.

Hope things are going better on your end!

[a_phoenixdragon]

They are, honey - thank you! :D

[liadtbunny]

I'm irritated with Scobie after one paragraph! I'm glad you had Keats after, much better! (except I have Genesis stuck in my brain)

[evelyn_b]

Oh, and here I thought it was one of the less irritating Scobie paragraphs, hah. Well, there you go. I don't think Scobie being the worst is necessarily a point against the book -- I'm kind of impressed with how much I hated him, when I started to hate him, given how little he actually does. But yes, Keats is an improvement, for me at least. :)