What I've been reading

One of the great things about being a homemaker/online-education drone is that I have tons of time to read.  I wish we had a good bookstore handy, but--and I apologize in advance to the Luddites--but my Kindle is a thing of beauty.  You can get so many books for free! I do prefer reading the old-school paper-based kind, if I have the choice, but the other day I came across a reference to a novel called Lady Into Fox that I had never heard of.  Allegedly, that novel had sparked the 1920's subgenre of "fantastic" novels like Harriet Hume, Lolly Willows, and Orlando.  Anyway, I just went online to Amazon, found Lady Into Fox for Kindle--for free--and nabbed it. Of course, there are about 30 other unread books on my Kindle, but at least I'm well-prepared for the next tedious train ride!

Anyway, here's what I've read in the past few weeks since getting back from our honeymoon:

The Lake      by George Moore

The most remarkable aspect of this book--to me-- is its sense of place. The scenery, weather, and people of County Mayo are so vivid and visual.  If this book had been written by a woman, it would be called "regionalist."  As it is, it's called a tour de force.

The Fountain Overflows  and This Real Night  Rebecca West

These are the first two novels in a semi-autobiographical trilogy about the lives of the four Aubrey children in fin de siecle, Edwardian and WWI England. The first book was the only one published during West's lifetime: the second book doesn't come across as a draft, but allegedly the third is only eight chapters and an outline.  I don't know what this trilogy is about, exactly, but its exploration of the family dynamic from the perspective of a creative child-then-famous-concert pianist is fascinating. This is one clever family whose dinner party you WOULD NOT MISS, e.g., the narrator's description of her older sister's behavior the morning after she confessed to being engaged: "She was still meek, but her meekness was pretentious.  Though she was a lamb, it was one which had got itself embroidered on a church banner."

The Monk   Matthew Lewis

Possibly THE 18th century gothic novel, The Monk is about a wicked monk, incest, sorcery, ghosts, murder, sepulchers, portents, the Inquisition....you get the picture.  It's a ludicrous good time.

Drama in Muslin     George Moore

Drama in Muslin is a comic send-up of the 19th-century Dublin marriage market.  It's insightful and funny, and the characters are almost Austenian.  But it was the fourth book by Moore I read this summer, and you know, I don't think I like George Moore. He's just OH such a man of the world and so kindly condescending to notice lowly females and the deluded religious.

A Doll’s House                                                                                                                   Ibsen
I reread this play after I read Moore's critique of it in his introduction to Drama in Muslin, and I'll be darned if that bastard isn't right: Nora's sudden transformation just strains one's credulity too far.

Kushiel’s Dart        Jacqueline Carey
Look, every eight books or so I need a cheap fantasy novel.  This one's set in an alternative Renaissance/medieval Europe and the main character is a polyglot of a courtesan (*snort snort*) who works as a spy for her guardian before being capture by Vikings, visiting the Welsh court...etc.  This book's not bad...one of the more woman-friendly fantasy novels I've ever read.

Harriet Hume                Rebecca West
Why is West only on the margins of the canon?  Harriet Hume is her foray into high modernism: it's one of those 1920's "fantastic" novels, and this one asserts the necessity of respectful exchange between the sexes by  allowing the boundaries between one mind and another, this world and the next, fantasy and reality, to become fluid.

Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography                                                                   Claire Harman
Warner's another female modernist that deserves a more central place in the canon, but I found this biography to be unsatisfactory.  A literary biography is a strange beast: you can get an encyclopedia like Forster's Yeats:  A Life; you can get a sort interpretive dance, like Lyndall Gordon's T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life; or you can get a rather dry chronology without any sense of a narrative arc, like this bio of Warner.  "Sylvia did this, Sylvia wrote that.  Then she died."  Plus, there's a dearth of pictures in this book, which in my opinion is the death knell of a biography.  Of course, it's not like you have any options: as far as I can tell, this is the only bio of Warner.