Stories & Shout Outs #30

It’s my day off work and we should be heading off to lunch with friends, but their daughter has come down with a cold – tested for Covid and not positive – but in this new world we all live it, it’s enough to put a lunch date on hold for a week.

I spent last night down a Twitter dark hole when I tried to research the furore around J K Rowling. I deliberately curate my twitter account to only included bookish people, so I forget how hateful some people (or bots) can be on social media platforms. I learnt nothing edifying and still feel dirty this morning.

So I need some bookish solace to cleanse my soul! And I need it now!What I’m Reading:

• Rodham: A Novel | Curtis Sittenfeld (fascinating but now finding the political manoeuvrings dull as we near the end.)
• Humankind | Rutger Bregman (nice to be reminded that human beings generally err on the side of kindness. Not always easy to remember that at the moment.)
• Homeland Elegies: A Novel | Ayad Akhtar (I have no idea where this is going, but loving the ride so far!)
• The Fire This Time | Jesmyn Ward (it was time to read this book that has been lingering on my TBR pile for too long.)
• War and Peace | Tolstoy (chapter-a-day readalong that has fallen off the rails a little. A rainy day today & a cancelled lunch date, may mean that I catch up this afternoon.)
• The Parisian | Isabella Hammad (started reading this in March, but put it aside as Covid lockdown started. I was enjoying it, but it required concentration….)

New to the Pile:

• Mammoth | Chris Flynn (looks quirky and unusual.)
• Griffith Review 68 Getting On (my last GR took me 6 months to read all the articles. I wonder how long this one will take?)
• The Plague | Albert Camus (for all the obvious reasons!)
• Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez (ditto!)

Cover Lover:

• Is it bad that I want to read a book based entirely on the cover?

Abandoned:

• I started The Golden Bough Readalong with Jean and Cleo in the hope I would finally finish the edition I’ve had lurking on my bookshelves for a couple of decades now. But alas! The first chapter defeated me. I just couldn’t work up enough interest in the ‘dodgy anthropology’ as Jean has so delightfully tagged her most recent recap posts. I admire her tenacity.

Keeping an Eye On:

• • Rather excited to hear that Kazuo Ishiguro has a new book coming out next year – Klara and the Sun.
  • The Miles Franklin Award is announcing their shortlist via Youtube at 4pm today.
  • The winner of this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is Christine Dwyer Hickey with her book The Narrow Land.
    • The Judges of the Prize said:

‘It’s a risky business, portraying the marriage of two artists, particularly when both the marriage and the art have already been picked over by biographers and art historians. Christine Dwyer Hickey has embraced the risk and created a masterpiece. In The Narrow Land, she reaches into the guts of the marriage of Jo and Edward Hopper and into the heart of the creative impulse itself. And more, much more. Quietly, inexorably, and with pinpoint perception, our winner has brought to dramatic life not just the Hoppers’ intimate eruptions but the tensions and complexities in those around them, from two young boys scarred by war to the transient summer crowd at Cape Cod, and though this forensic lens we glimpse the upheavals that were to shake all Americans in the post-war world. With the pull of a shifting sea, The Narrow Land drew the judges back again and again, each reading richer than the one before.’

Shout Outs:

• Tamara is once again hosting her very elegant, very enticing Paris in July. Sign up here and share the badge. I have a couple of Maigret’s to while away a grey winter’s day and a new French cookbook with which to experiment!
• Coco Chanel | “Elegance is when the inside is as beautiful as the outside.“