Reading
Currently reading: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt 📚
Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚. I wanted to love this book but I didn’t. It’s just too didactic. Like Richard Powers’s The Overstory, it has an inescapably clear extractable message and the story is always subordinated to that message. Alice Gribbin’s Tablet essay on the visual arts makes the point well: “Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of that audience.” When I read Nayler or Powers, I feel that I am being asked to extract a specific message and if I do that I will have done my readerly work. In each of these cases the message is wonderful, necessary, life-giving — but it is a message, and I prefer my messages presented straightforwardly and my stories to be considerably less straightforward. “Tell the truth but tell it slant” is what stories and poems are for; these books are quite upright in their telling.
Currently reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚
Currently reading: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by Ada Palmer 📚
Currently reading: Their Finest Hour (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill 📚
Currently reading: The Gathering Storm (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill 📚
Currently reading: The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn 📚
Currently reading: Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris 📚
Currently reading: Awakenings by Oliver Sacks 📚
Currently reading: Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris 📚
Currently reading: Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris 📚
Currently reading: A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors by David Thomson 📚
Currently reading: Making Movies by Sidney Lumet 📚
Currently reading: And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks by Lawrence Weschler 📚
Currently reading: Some Versions of Pastoral by William Empson 📚
Currently reading: Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston 📚
Currently reading: Science and Government by C. P. Snow 📚
Currently reading: Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray – Murray was born in Woodrow Wilson’s first term and died in Barack Obama’s second. 📚
Currently reading: Collected Essays by James Baldwin 📚