The most beautiful American woman, ever.

What am I reading? I seem to have passed into an alternative universe in which the question no longer means anything. I am reading from seven books most weekday mornings; on the weekends, lately, I’ve been finishing off novels. Am I ready to blame this blog for the fact that I read much less than I used to do? What I ought to blame is the Nano. I was up until two-thirty in the morning loading up a new device, in a vain attempt to get things just right. It is some sort of revenge for all my offhand dismissals of modish personal music systems, which I had “outgrown.” Ha. When I told my friend Nom de Plume how childish I was the other night (or early morning), she riposted, “I don’t know about ‘childish,’ but it seems very masculine to me.” A guy and his Nano — ouch!

Meanwhile, I’m listening to Michael Palin’s audiobook of his Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, and learning all sorts of things while being hugely entertained on my daily walks. Names, for one thing: “Cleese” rhymes with “please,” not “geese,” and it’s “Palin” with a long “a.”  Every time I mention the audiobook to Kathleen, she says, “He’s the one I don’t like,” but this in fact always turns out to be Eric Idle, and of course it was Mr Idle’s characters whom Kathleen didn’t like.

I don’t know which Monty Python routine is my favorite, but the one that Kathleen and I quote most often is, by far, Ann Elk’s theory about the brontosaurus. “And that it is, too, Chris.”

Today’s book was in my pile for about nine months before I realized that I was never going to sit down and read a book about the Lost Boys of Sudan. I was simply never going to begin. So I bought the unabridged BBC audiobook and listened to the seventeen CDs on my daily walks for much of the fall of 2007. What Is the What turned out to be almost as upsettingly unpleasant as I feared it would be, but not quite, and at times it was unexpectedly bright. If Valentino Achak Deng is not the decent man that he appears to be here, I’m afraid that I don’t want to know it.

Without judging Dion Graham’s performance in any detail, I can say that his talents always seem to be quite easily broad enough to encompass the wide range of speaking characters who figure in the book. More than that, though, he reads the story as if he had told it a thousand times already, never the same way twice.

¶ What Is the What.

My infidelities continue astound me; I have fallen so far that I can no longer bear the hollowness of my own resolutions. On Wednesday afternoon, I was seduced by a book lying on a table at Crawford Doyle: Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening. A friend had mentioned seeing the recent film adaptation, which, I was bemused to note, had required nearly ten years of gestation since the novel’s publication. And even then, what fudging: the overweight and blobular Schiller, a seventy-one year-old survivor of the New York Intellectual galaxy, is played by the very dashing Frank Langella. Vincent Gardenia would have been more like it. Now that I want to see it, I’m stuck in the limbo between theatrical and DVD release.

Although the jacket blurb calls the novel “comic,” none of the many testimonials printed at the beginning of the paperback mention how funny the book is. That’s perhaps because I’m the only reader who thinks so. Once I’d calmed down enough to read a passage that had had me coughing with laughter, Kathleen pronounced “clever” and “sweet,” but not “funny.” I was reminded that nobody else finds Verdi’s ballet music side-splitting, either.

I’ll come back to the humor later. For now, the following grave and beautiful passage from very near the end. It concerns Casey, the middle-aged, half-black, half-Jewish professor — this is a very New York novel — whose relationship with Schiller’s daughter, ended years ago because she wanted children but he didn’t, has been rekindled.

The last few months had beden very different from what he’d expected. He was finally ready to begin a project that he’d been thinking about for years, and he’d been hoping for a few distraction-free months in which to concentrate. But now he was getting dragged into the middle of life’s confusions. Worrying about having children with Ariel; worrying about Ariel’s father — it wasn’tg a good time to be dealing with these problems. A part of him wished that he could refuse all this, just close the door on it all and do his work. But of course you can’t refuse it; you mustn’t even try. You have to let it in.

I’m not quite sure why this strikes me as a related thought, but when I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I saw a rack of inexpensive editions of classic novels. I had just picked up a copy of James Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which I fully intend, for what it’s worth (not much), not to open until I have finished Diary of a Bad Year, because George Snyder wrote that he was reading it and because there had been an interesting write-up in Bookforum, while Kathleen, whose idea this visit to B&N had been, looked at beading magazines. Looking at the rows of seriously great and deeply satisfying novels — Emma! Middlemarch! — I was overcome by the strangest sense of luxury. I had all of those books at home; what was more, I knew that I really liked reading them. I could just return to the apartment and curl up in a chair with one of them. Life could be that simple! If only…

He’s right: you mustn’t even try.

It was only a little over four years ago, in the fall of 2003, that M le Neveu began to insist that I start up a blog. My strenuous opposition to the idea was partly rooted in my fear that I’d become a slave to the project — a not unreasonable misgiving, if easily lifted when I recognized that the only difference between slavery and a vocation is the vocation — and ownership. Far more than that, though, I was put off by odor of sophomoric self-indulgence that blogs seemed — or were reported — to give off. One man I talked to dismissed blogs as “what I had for dinner last night.” The very term, Web log, suggested dear-diary entries, and the feedback element, the comments, seemed thoroughly questionable. Not for me!

Four years later, in any case, I have certainly changed my mind about blogging. Comments remain to be sorted out, I think, and I’ve been thinking hard about how to reconceive them (without requiring any changes in the code). I expect that I shall, though, and my belief in the virtues of the Web log as a literary form has never been more intense. It’s dispiriting, therefore, to see that The New York Review of Books is still publishing the kind of thinking that would have kept me away from reading blogs, much less writing one myself, if it had not been for a brilliant graduate student’s impassioned advocacy. (I refer to M le Neveu.)

As promised on Monday, a few words about the kind of coverage that Web logs are getting — almost as childish as the blog writing that it focuses on.*

¶ Sarah Boxer on Blogs, in The New York Review of Books.

* Once again, thanks to George Snyder for linking me to Ms Boxer’s piece a day before the hard copy arrived.

¶ In the Decameron (IV, ii): “He who is wicked and held to be good, can cheat because no one imagines he would.” This reads like a mash-up of two stories, the first a tale of one very silly woman, Mona Lisetta ( given many mocking nicknames — Lady Numbskull, Lady Birdbrain, &c), who believes that she’s so sexy that the Archangel Gabriel lusts after her, and the more slapstick account of comeuppance, in which the Archangel’s impersonator is tarred and feathered, only with honey instead of tar. Throughout, however, the tale is yet another attack on the hypocrisy of the religious orders.

¶ The end of the fifth book of the Aeneid, at last! The strange death of Palinurus — time to re-read Cyril Connolly?

¶ C. K. Williams: the end of “A Dream of Mind,” — again, at last. These poems seem to take place in the absence of gravity; I never know which way is up. Nor, for that matter of that, do I really know what the poet is talking about. This book (also called A Dream of Mind) concludes with a final long poem, “Helen.” I shall try to read it in one sitting, and then close this collection and move on to someone else.

¶ Clive James on Beatrix Potter. “Her stories attract tweeness toward them — the Peter Rabbit Ballet must be hard to take for anyone except a very tiny child — but are never winsome in themselves, mainly because of her tactile, yet quite tough, feeling for language.” Even better:

Written in a age when it was still assumed the children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by just overhead and reaches up, while the parent is reminded of the historic privilege of being born into a civilization where the morality of children’s books, even at their worthily—meant worst, has evolved through supply and demand, and not been imposed by the state according to a plan.”

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mark Frauenfelder, of BoingBoing.net. Something to take up later today, when writing for tomorrow about blogs:

Q: What tips or advice would you like to hear with bloggers?

A: I think it’s really important to write a good headline. It’s better to be accurate than it is to be cute or clever. When you make a post, do a little summary of what it is in the headline, because a lot of people read blogs through RSS and go to the headline first to see what’s going on. It can make a difference in whether you get read.

As for the blog post itself, if you’re writing about something out on the Web, give a good short description of why it’s interesting. When I see something I want to talk about, I outline some of the questions that readers might ask, like “Why is this interesting?” or, “Why is this important?” I write down the answers, and then I post.

¶ Diana to Deborah, in September 1980, on the subject of Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence: “Isn’t it amazing who the person one’s writing to influences one.” Indeed.

Not so much fun:

But what happened with Jebb’s silly film shows the depth of seething hatred Decca feels for us. It is much more painful to hate than to be hated, & I am aware that her life is in many ways rather awful, but not quite awful enough to excuse her behaviour. As far as I go, I put her out of my mind.”

Greetings from the Learning Curve! I used the Dragon to dictate this morning’s read, and as a result the whole business took ages. I’ll get better at it, though. Dictation certainly beats trying to prop thick books open while typing from them. The thing is not to put the books away until they’ve been consulted for cleanup. I wonder: are there any conceptual artists out there who are “working with” unpasteurized dictation? Talk about absurdity on the cheap!

¶ The theme for stories on the Fourth Day of the Decameron is “those whose love ended unhappily.” The first tale, about Ghismonda, the daughter of a jealous prince, tells us that “she was youthful and vivacious, and she possessed rather more intelligence than a woman needs.” It’s curious that the story has never received operatic treatment. It has a climactic scene to rival Salome, followed by a kind of Liebestod. Before dying, however, Ghismonda rattles off the old medieval delusion about the wheel of fortune, so beloved perhaps because it offered the promise of respite from an increasingly stratified society.

Many kings, many great princes were once poor; many a ploughman or shepherd, not only in the past but in the present, was once exceedingly wealthy.

¶ The Aeneid: The Trojan fleet is set on fire, but most ships are saved in a providential thunderstorm. Aeneas is advised to leave the women and children behind while he sets out for Rome with just his fighting men. This seems to be the first appearance of women among the band of Trojan exiles; they’ve been introduced, not surprisingly, only to be got rid of.

¶ C K Williams, “To Listen”:

For the dead speak from affection, dream says, there’s kindness in the voices of the dead.
I listen again, but I still hear only fragments of the elaborate discourse the dead speak;
when I try to capture its gist more is effaced, there are only faded words strewn on the page
of my soul that won’t rest from its need to have what it thinks it can have from the dead.

Sometimes, I think that this is what poetry is for: memorizing lines that seem right even though they’re not understood; later, their sense becomes clear, enlightened by experiences that we would have missed without them.

¶ Clive James on Alfred Polgar:

Critics are always remembered best for how they sound when on the attack. Schadenfreude lies deep in the human soul, and to read a tough review seems a harmless way of indulging it. But the only critical attacks that really count are written in defense of value.

(In an interesting note: “Alfred Brendel put me onto Polgar.”)

¶ In September 1979, Diana writes Deborah to regret that she can’t come to Sophy’s wedding because her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, is too ill to be left in France. “I will get her present next week, there’s a list at PJ isn’t there.” PJ stands for the stylish emporium in Sloane Square. Last night, Kathleen and I had dinner with the banker who lives right behind Peter Jones. Her life is being made a perfect hell by adjacent construction (nothing to do with the shop). The runaround that she gets while trying to find someone responsible to talk to sounds perfectly universal.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mike Masnick, of Techdirt. Aha! Someone else who claims to have been a blogger before there was blogging. An interesting thing about this business site is that its legitimacy is thought, correctly, I’m sure, to be enhanced by the presence of advertising. Some of the advertisers are clients of the firm!”

¶ Speaking of business, while slogging through an impenetrable passage having to do with commercial leases in Le rouge et le noir, I accepted the fact that I am going to have to get a trot. I can’t go on wondering if Stendhal is addicted to non sequiturs.

While tidying up over the weekend, I got a bit drastic with the bedside pile. I am actually reading all of these books. What’s more: at the moment, I am not reading any other books. I regret having stalled on J M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, because it’s a very interesting book. That’s part of the problem: because of its three interlocking story lines, reading the book requires greater than ordinary attentiveness. Nancy Mitford’s two best-known novels (one volume) are there for bedtime reading.

While nothing could be more trivial, or of less general interest, than the ups and downs of my reading piles, casting the glare of publicity on the matter from week to week has proved to be instructive and salutary. I can hardly bear to buy a book at this point — all the new ones in the house are Amazon orders made weeks ago. Happily, there’s nothing in this week’s Book Review that tempts me.

¶ Death’s Army.

James Collins’s new book is not perfect, but it is very good and, even more, very promising. The novel is extremely well-written and its wit most welcome. Its failing is the most forgivable fault that an author can have: Mr Collins is a little too easy on his hero, Peter Russell. Peter is a great guy, and deserves only the best that life as to offer even if he is an investment banker. If you don’t like Peter, you need a pill of some kind. As the protagonist of a novel, however, it is Peter’s job to be tried and tested a bit more rigorously than the author — a softie? — seems to have the stomach for. Assuming that Peter is something of an alter ego, we may assume that Mr Collins has got his tender-hearted anxieties out of his system, and will be appropriately merciless (up to a point!) to his next bunch of characters.

¶ Beginner’s Greek.

Who wouldn’t be a bleeding-heart liberal, writing in such cushy surroundings?

As a rule, I agree with the articles that inspire my Friday Fronts. This week’s ticked me off.

¶ George Packer on Hillary Clinton and “inspiration.”

¶ Today’s Decameron story (III, ix), about Gillette de Narbonne and Bertrand de Roussillon, is an original — although not the original, which is in Sanskrit — of the plot of My Geisha, the bittersweet Shirley MacLaine comedy of 1962, with Yves Montand….¶ O wearying Book Five of the Aeneid! Today’s reading: the boxing match between Dares and Entellus, which would be bad enough; but then Aeneas interrupts the fight, apparently because Entellus, enraged by having fallen into his own missed “roundhouse right,” pummels Dares too gruesomely. An odd reason to break off a boxing match! I am only now old enough to tolerate the tedium of these stretches….¶ “Shells” and “Room” from A Dream of Mind: for me, very nearly impenetrable. Of all the Williams that I have read, these dream poems are the only ones not to engage me at all. Nice turn of phrase, though: “A dubious plasma”….¶ Clive James on Sir Lewis Namier (like Conrad, a Pole):

The war having been decided by the New World’s gargantuan production efforts, the United States should logically have become the centre of the Western mind as well as of its muscle. Men such as Namier ensured that the Old World would still have a say. With their help, it was English English, and not American English, that continued to be the appropriate medium for the summation and analysis of complex historical experience.

Still quite true; we have learned to speak better English in America….¶ Wonderful letter from Decca, written from Yale, where she was teaching a course in journalism, in the spring of 1976.

Am loving the students. The first few days were pure torture as I had to choose 18 students (max size of class) out of 200 applicants, goodness it was difficult. They’d all had to write on a card why they wanted to take the course. Mostly I rather followed instructions of higher-ups (deans etc) & chose illustrious-sounding people with Rhodes Scholarships. But one boy aged 17 wrote on his card “I believe I have the qualifications for a journalist as I am tall enough to look over walls & thin enough to hide behind trees,” so I could see I would worship him, & let him in. A girl wrote “There comes a time in every person’s life when he or she must burst into some new form of action.” She’s an athlete, so I let her in mainly because I long to see her burst into some new form of action.

Evidently, however, Decca’s policy of letting in the illustrious was not a complete success. (Do see Decca, two letters of January 1976 to her husband. Wonder who the snotty newspaper heir might have been!)….¶ Chapter XXII of Le rouge et le noir too long for one sitting. Without Mme de Rênal on hand, the novel is tough going….¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mary Jo Foley, of All About Microsoft. Why am I reading this business book? To know the territory? Arguable but dubious plasma. More to the point: why did McNally Robinson stack it among all the legitimate general-interest nonfiction titles at the front of the shop?

The pile has been edited a bit: I’ve removed all the unopened books. The week’s big read, Beginner’s Greek, spent a night or two in the pile — no more — but never made it into a group picture. The bad thing about a treat like Beginner’s Greek is that it spoils both one’s taste and one’s appetite. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that such books don’t come along very often, because I should never get anything done if they did.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that neither the Prexy nor the Veep reads for pleasure, but — Condoleezza Rice? According to Jacob Heilbrunn’s review of Elisabeth Bumiller’s new biography, the Secretary of State was so excessively force-fed books as a child that — but I can’t bring myself to excuse or explain such an appalling failing. To give up reading for pleasure is to set one’s imagination out to pasture. It is a form of self-mutilation. Better never to have been a reader in the first place.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Living with Ghosts.

Last year, it was Call Me By Your Name. James Collins’s novel is different in most but not all ways, yet it is just as intensely pleasurable to read. Thanks to Kathleen, whom I tore away from what she was doing, for taking the snapshot with an unfamiliar camera.

This picture might have been taken at any hour today — aside from the time it took to take Kathleen to see Atonement, across the street, and to make a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches afterward. I didn’t even look at the Times.

Since I will undoubtedly finish reading the novel tonight, no matter how long it takes, I won’t have any excuses for staying away tomorrow. Except, of course, for getting a haircut, if the barber’s open. Looking a little woolly!

A few weeks ago, Kathleen flew down to West Palm for a conference. On the flight, she overheard a lady in the row behind her tell another passenger about her visit to New York. She had come up from Palm Beach, where she lived, to hear her son give a book reading. His new novel, which she said was “light” and “fun,” was called, as best Kathleen could make out, Beginner’s Grief, or maybe Beginner’s Brief.

When the plane landed, Kathleen had a chance to take a look at the lady, whose voice had sounded not unfamiliar. Indeed, it was Mrs Collins, the mother of one of Kathleen’s schoolmates from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Carol Collins. Ordinarily, I would not be telling you any of these details, but as you can already guess — because you’ve seen the generous ads in Condé Nast publications and perhaps even read the brief review in The New Yorker, the novel that Mrs Collins had flown to New York to hear read by her son was James Collins’s Beginniner’s Greek.

I’m not sure that I’d have ordered a copy of Beginner’s Greek if it hadn’t been for this extenuated connection — I have no business indulging in “light” and “fun” books at the moment, especially with the holidays just over — but I must say that I’m enjoying it very much, and not as a guilty pleasure, either. The writing is very good: I want to interrupt Kathleen by reading almost every paragraph aloud.

Why was Peter marrying Charlotte? Why was Charlotte marrying Peter? Charlotte worked in the New York office of L’Alliance Générale et Spécifique des Pays Francophones. The AGSPF fostered economic and cultural exchange among the French-speaking peoples of the world and tried to promote the French language and Francophone civilization in all places sadly suffering from their lack. Dogged and intelligent, Charlotte had mastered the politics of Chad (Djamous, the finance minister, was on the rise, though not supported by the Quay d’Orsay) and the diplomacy of Laos. She was, it seemed, always writing a report on intra-Francophone trade. There were lot of tables. In addition to this intellectual work, Charlotte also participated in the AGSPF’s busy social life: no minor Algerian poet could pass through New York without a reception. That’s what was happening tonight. Charlotte had to attend a dinner for a Belgian economist, who had appeared in town unexpectedly.

For a time, Charlotte’s father had worked in the Paris office of a New York law firm and the family had moved there when Charlotte was seven. With this credential, she could legitimately make France her thing, which she proceeded to do. After her parents divorced, when she was sixteen, Charlotte’s father and her stepmother bought a small property in the countryside, where they went every summer and where Charlotte would visit. Charlotte majored in French and she spent two years in Paris after college.

There she had had the requisite love affair with a Frenchman, with lots of tears. Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore had been thirty-seven, an incredibly ancient and sophisticated age for Charlotte, then twenty-two. He was always lurking in the background, supposedly poised to swoop in and carry Charlotte back to Paris forever. That never seemed to happen, but on a regular basis, heavy-smoking, black-whiskered French friends — Héli, Valéry, Claude, Hilaire-Germain, Alexandre-César-Léopold, Gilles — would pass through New York. They would take Charlotte and Peter to obscure rock clubs and talk endlessly about American bands and films and writers whom Peter had never heard of. Of course, they all spoke English perfectly, and from time to time one or the other would engage Peter in conversation, while making it evident that he was merely doing so out of politeness.

Without wishing to be in any way reductive, I’ll nevertheless venture that Beginner’s Greek is the acerbically romping Knickerbocker comedy that Louis Auchincloss has declined to give us.

As Kathleen and Mrs Collins were parting, after their effusive greetings at the airport, the author’s mother — who hadn’t seen Kathleen in decades — asked Kathleen to be sure to “give my best to Kathy!” Oh, well.

Books that I am probably never going to read again (alas!) make up a great deal of what’s filling up the shelves at Westphalia, our expensive storage unit (see below). Reading Susan Dominus’s column in today’s Times set me to wondering if there’s some way that I can hook up with Tommy Books and Leprechaun.

Perhaps it’s the thought of lugging all those books somewhere that’s making me so lazy that I’m actually considering 27 Dresses as my Friday movie. Why? It’s showing across the street. If you’ll all think positive for a minute, maybe I’ll find the oomph to get myself to Kip’s Bay for Cassandra’s Dream. (But didn’t I just see that? And didn’t it star Philip Seymour Hoffman?)

In this month’s Harper’s, Ursula K LeGuin asks a very good question: why are big corporations interested in literary publishing? Why don’t they leave it alone? Click through to Portico, below, to read more.

Midway through her essay, Ms LeGuin discusses the “alternatives” to reading.

Of course books are now only one of the “entertainment media,” but when it comes to delivering actual pleasure, they’re not a minor one. Look at the competition. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.

Ahem. I make no claim to creativity here at The Daily Blague. But I daresay I’m as literate and reflective as the run of good, published books. Ms LeGuin, you need to get out more!

¶ Ursula K LeGuin on Books and Publishing, in Harper’s.

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Okey-doke: time to put a lid on this pile. Really, the idea of reading more than five or six books at a time is absurd. NO NEW BOOKS!

Looking back over the snaps that I’ve been taking of this heap since November, however, I note more change than I expected. If you’d like to check for yourself, simply click on the “Book Review” category in the left-hand sidebar, and scroll away.

The thing is, these aren’t the books that I’m reading every day. The books that I’m reading every day — every morning, after the Times — are in another pile, stacked alongside my favorite chair. I read so much of each one every weekday, and have been doing so for months now. As a result, I may get through the entirety of Aeneid and Decameron, in both cases, perhaps, before the summer! I’m still shy about this project, and have decided not to discuss it at any length until I’ve finished at least one of the six original titles. I can think of one at least that I’ll have done with by the middle of February, and possibly much sooner. But — not another word!

As for this week’s Book Review,

¶ Say What You Will.

So far, this is the second of Tom Perrotta’s novels that I’ve read. It is much heftier — richer & more satisfying — than the other one, The Little Children (good as that one was). Mr Perrotta has hit, I think, upon a way of critiquing suburban life that suburbanites themselves would be comfortable with.

¶ The Abstinence Teacher.

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This is the first PodCast that differs from the Portico page. In the attempt to make the audio sound more conversational, I edited a bit and cut out a lot. My aim is to talk “ex tempore” from a series of talking points lifted from the page. As for the production side of things, I hope to upgrade all of the equipment, hard and soft. If nothing else, I’ll mute those plosives!

The top of One Gracie Square, which presents two façades to Gracie Square (the easternmost block of 84th Street). Nice little terrace up there.

Yesterday, I put Christmas away. I removed the ornaments and the lights from the tree, which I single-handedly wombled into a very large plastic bag made for the purpose. As a result of this successful operation, I was able to transport the green but very dead tree to the freight elevator room without carpeting the corridor in fir. That was just the beginning, of course. Boxing up the decorations and sliding them back into their hard-to-get places took a few hours. The music that I listened to while I worked was distinctly un-seasonal: Schoenberg’s lush Gurre Lieder.

¶ James Wolcott on Books About Bush.

The pile would be even taller if I slipped in the two books that Miss G gave me for my birthday. It’s the damnedest thing, but I can’t remember whether I’ve read V S Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.  I’m absolutely certain that I’ve read the first couple of pages — can I possibly have stopped? O age, I know thy sting. 

Interestingly, there are only two novels in this heap. The new Coetzee, which I wasn’t going to read until a critical mass of reviews convinced me that I must, and Daniel Martin, which I’ve wanted to read ever since Thanksgiving in Ste Croix.  (I’m willing to say “Sant Croy,” but writing “St Croix” is illiterate. My inner tween thrives on such problems, and it’s best to indulge the less obtrusive ones.) That hasn’t stopped me from reading three or four other novels first. The rest of it is — arduous-looking. You can see Peter Gay’s new book near the bottom. I hereby vow that I shall not open it until I’ve finished Mr Krugman’s book. A few other impetuous purchases are beginning to stale as well. Ay di me.

“Ay di me” is my latest affectation — do admit (my second) that it has been a while since I sported one. I’ve no idea what it means, beyond it’s being an Italianate expostulation that somehow found currency among the British. Which British, I don’t yet know. I’ve stolen it, as anyone can tell, from the Mitford sisters, who had it, probably, from Violet Hammersley, their mother’s impossible friend — but perhaps not. To me, “ay di me” means, “I’ve got to sit down for a minute,” but only as spoken by someone who does little or no physical work.

And just what do I call making dinner — even if it is burger night? (Well, especially if…)

As for this week’s Book Review,

¶ Islam.

As we begin a new year of reading, I wonder how my own book list will track the ones that appear in the Times at the end of the year. If I was looking for official validation of my judgment in 2007, the Times was not there to provide it. Each year, the Book Review selects ten best books, to which the principal critics of the daily paper add another thirty. I read only one of the Book Review’s best books (Joshua Ferris’s wonderful Then We Came To The End), and I owned only one of the daily’s thirty (Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, about the CIA). Worse, I realized that if anyone asked me for a list of the ten best books of the year, I wouldn’t be able to answer off the top of my head — although I would certainly mention Mr Ferris’s book. It occurs to me that list-building is not an activity to reserve for December.

What with the holidays, I haven’t been reading very much. The bedside pile just gets higher. What’s dispiriting isn’t so much the rising altitude itself as the incongruity between enjoying reading and feeling compelled to consume books. One instinct puts books in the pile while the other tries to knock them out. It also bothers me that there seems to be no plan behind my reading choices; it’s just one damned thing after another. Now, that’s something to work on in 2008. It’s certainly more important than deciding what the “best books” were. 

As for this week’s Book Review,

¶ Strong Opinions.