NOBODY, SHE CONCLUDED BITTERLY, CARES ABOUT DECORUM ANYMORE.

Books I've read and re-read this year (the ones in bold are the books I loved, loved, loved):

Margaret Atwood - Life before man
Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
Margaret Drabble - The seven sisters
Margaret Drabble - The Garrick year
Margaret Drabble - A summer bird-cage
Margaret Drabble - Jerusalem the Golden
Doris Lessing - Love, again
Doris Lessing - The golden notebook
Marilyn French - The women's room
Joan Didion - The year of magical thinking
Lynne Reid Banks - The L-shaped room
A.M. Homes - In a country of mothers
Tim Lott - The scent of dried roses
Joyce Carol Oates - A fair maiden
Curtis Sittenfeld - The man of my dreams
William Styron - Sophie's choice
Jeffrey Eugenides - The marriage plot
Amor Towles - Rules of civility
Harper Lee - To kill a mockingbird
Richard Yates - The Easter parade
Lionel Shriver - The post-birthday world
Elaine Dundy - The old man and me
Agatha Christie - Sad cypress
Ruth Rendell - A judgement in stone
Ruth Rendell - Adam and Eve and Pinch me
Anita Loos - Gentlemen prefer blondes
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Jonathan Franzen - Freedom
Anita Shreve - Testimony
S.J. Watson - Before I go to sleep
Tawni O'Dell - Back roads
Scarlett Thomas - Bright young things
Carol Goodman - The lake of dead languages
Ira Levin - Rosemary's baby
Hans Fallada - Alone in Berlin
Simone de Beauvoir - The age of discretion
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca

See you in 2013, book blog!

Reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

ALIAS GRACE

Finished reading Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood earlier today.
It was so good.

I TELL YOU I AM JUST LIKE YOU!

I've been so bad at updating this blog but the truth is, I am really struggling with finding something to read right now. I read Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin and it was so good, I just haven't been able to follow up on it. Read the short story The age of discretion by Simone de Beauvoir and then the first part of Jonathan Litell's The kindly ones, but nothing really gets me interested. Well OK, The kindly ones is something I really am interested in (if you haven't read about the controversy surrounding that book, I highly suggest you Google it) but I want to read something else, something that feels like me. Why have I already read The women's room? The golden notebook? The millstone? Cat's eye? Blonde? I don't know what to read, unless I re-read something (Drabble). So while continuing to search for the next great book, allow me to say hi (waving with a very strange hand):

CURRENTLY READING:

Sorry I've been so bad at updating, but won't really blog now either. Read Rosemary's baby by Ira Levin a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I've read some books in Swedish. You can check them out here: http://librisvedese.blogspot.se/

Like a tropical storm,
I, too, may one day become "better organized."
Tropical storm, Lydia Davis

SHE TURNED TO LITERATURE

Read Bright young things by Scarlett Thomas last week. It wasn't especially good, but had to get into reading mode again. Currently reading The women's room by Marilyn French. Finally! It's so good. Will put up quotes soon, when I'm not so busy and stressed out all the time.

Other book-related event: Going to see Lydia Davis at Kultuhuset here in Stockholm tomorrow. Am excited.

Before I went to Eastern Europe, I read Testimony by Anita Shreve. Really wasn't good. Wasn't bad either, just completely blah. Read Before I go to sleep by S.J. Watson and Back roads by Tawni O'Dell while away. The last one was wonderful.

Budapest, August

Read The golden notebook by Doris Lessing. Was truly great. Reading something that really isn't now right now. Going to Eastern Europe on Monday. Will drink cheap wine and eat cheap food and sleep at cheap hostels.

FREEDOM

There are days so bad that only their worsening, only a descent into an outright orgy of badness, can redeem them. 
- Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

So, just finished reading Freedom. Here's what I think: while it's pretty good, quite well-written, sometimes really interesting, it is by no means "a masterpiece", "the novel of the year" and I don't think it "swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls." I do agree with Franzen's wry humour being "delightful" and the dialogue is at times brilliant, but I think the main reason people have so fallen over each other in praising this book to the skies is that it is so easy to read and, because it somehow got billed as great literature and you actually have to follow the thought processes of more than one person, the readers feel proud that they have picked up quite a long book by someone who isn't Lauren Weisberger, not realising that the book itself doesn't have to be great just because it is intensely readable.

Finished reading Jane Eyre yesterday,
probably one of the best books I have ever read.

CURRENTLY READING, CURRENTLY RAMBLING ON ABOUT:

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

In London they make a very, very great fuss over nothing at all. I mean London is really nothing at all. For instants, they make a great fuss over a tower that really is not even as tall as the Hickox building [...] So Sir Francis Beekman wanted us to get out and look at the tower because he said that quite a famous Queen had her head cut off there one morning and Dorothy said "What a fool she was to get up that morning" and that is really the only sensible thing Dorothy had said in London.


So this morning Coocoo called up and he wanted me to luncheon at the Ritz. I mean these foreigners really have quite a nerve. Just because Coocoo is an Englishman and a Lord he thinks a girl can waste hours on him just for a luncheon at the Ritz, when all he does is talk about some exposition he went on to a place called Tibet and after talking for hours I found out that all they were was a lot of Chinamen. So I will be quite glad to see Mr. Eisman when he gets in. Because he always has something quite interesting to talk about, as for instants the last time he was here he presented me with quite a beautiful emerald bracelet.


So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up, Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece. 
- Gentlemen prefer blondes, Anita Loos

A COMMON LACK OF MONEY, A COMMON DESIRE TO GET DRUNK

Books I've read lately:

Lionel Shriver - The post-birthday world
Margaret Drabble - The Garrick year
Elaine Dundy - The old man and me
Agatha Christie - Sad cypress
Reading The virgin in the garden by A.S. Byatt now.

Other news:
Went to London with my mother over the weekend, was great but got quite ill.
Got an A on my Creative Writing course.
Will go to Eastern Europe with my boyfriend in August.
Will study social anthropology in the fall.

Highgate Cemetery, London

GITTA SERENY

Gitta Sereny passed away in Cambridge on the 14th of June 2012, at the age of 91. A wonderful journalist and the author of some of the best books I've ever read about the Holocaust, she will be truly missed.

Lionel Shriver, 1972

READING IN TENERIFE, DECEMBER 2011

Tired but the weather was good.

THE TEXTURE OF HER DAILY LIFE

Still, there had been certain evenings like this one, when she would be ushered into a young man's car. The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breath-taking; to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.


It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known - as if progressive intimacy didn't involve becoming ever more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant.


Maybe to live successfully alongside anyone was to come to understand not how much he was like you but how much he was not-you - and hence to allow, as we do so rarely with one another, that the person sprawled across from you on the sofa is actually there.
- The post-birthday world, Lionel Shriver

DISTORTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Finished reading The Easter Parade last week. It was beautiful. Read another Drabble one after that, Jerusalem the golden. Quote:

She knew, moreover, that she had found something that she had been looking for, and that events would prove the significance of her discovery: she wondered only at the means of her recognition. The fact of it never ceased to astound her, and she would return over the ground constantly, searching for marks, for tracks and breaths and sighs and trodden grass and names and cloudy indications, because she could not forget that she had not recognized it at once, that it had required on her part some keenness of perception, some chancy courage, to see it: and she breathed perpetually an air of terror, a cold air of chance, an air in which she might for the whole of her life have missed it, marginally perhaps, but missed it and forever.


Now I'm reading The realms of gold by the same author. I went to Berlin Sunday-Wednesday, but didn't read a thing. Instead I did this:

Photo taken by Jan Bernhardtz,  http://janber.net/

I THINK THERE'S JUST ONE KIND OF FOLKS. FOLKS.

Finished reading To kill a mockingbird last week. I really liked it, and since my good friend Karin has already written about it and I agree with everything she says, you can read that instead: Caryw.

After that, I re-read A summer bird-cage by the lovely, talented, beautiful Margaret Drabble. Finally found that book in a second-hand bookshop a couple of days ago. Now, since I have already written about that book three years ago, you are welcome to revisit that post: Civilized behaviour is sick, isn't it?

Now I'm reading The easter parade by Richard Yates.

A LETTER TOO LONG, A VERB TOO INSISTENT, AND AN ADJECTIVE TOO OBVIOUS

Finished reading Rules of civilty last week. Read 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, but in Swedish. Reding Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird now.

OLD TIMES, AS MY FATHER USED TO SAY: IF YOU'RE NOT CAREFUL, THEY'LL GUT YOU LIKE A FISH

Read some books in Swedish (check them our here). Reading Rules of civilty by Amor Towles now.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT

Finished reading The Marriage plot by Jeffrey Eugenides a couple of hours ago. Trying to decide on what to read next, but it looks like it will be The women's room (finally!)

UNEARNED UNHAPPINESS

Finished reading Sophie's choice a couple of days ago. Beuatifully written. I feel like maybe Styron had some facts wrong regarding the Holocaust, but then this was written in 1979 so all the research probably wasn't there yet. Anyway: Brilliant. Stunning.

LIFE BEFORE MAN

Re-read The man of my dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, then I read Life before man by Margaret Atwood. Finished it a couple of days ago. Is it possible to write as well at Atwood? How can she be so good? Sometimes I feel like I am making her words up, because it must be impossible to be that great. Anyway, reading William Styron's Sophie's choice now.

TO HELL WITH THESE ROTTEN DOUBTS. I DEFY THEM AND SPIT ON THEM. MERDE!

Since I spent pretty much the whole day yesterday revising a short story for my course in Creative Writing, I thought this quote was appropriate:

Another thought that helps a writer along - let him write his novel "the way he'd like to see a novel written." This helps a great deal freeing you from the fetters of self-doubt and the kind of self-mistrust that leads to over-revision, too much calculation, preoccupation with "what others would think." Look at your own work and say "This is a novel after my own heart!" Because that's what it is anyway (...)

- Windblown world: the journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, Jack Kerouac

Subsequently, I handed in my short story 300 words too long.

YOU WANT ME TO NAME ACTUAL REASONS?

Books read:

Tim Lott - The scent of dried roses

More than OK, less than good. Average, I guess. Liked his descriptions of his parent's childhood in pre-war (and then post-war) Britain, but when he was writing about himself, I just didn't care much for it anymore.

Joyce Carol Oates - A fair maiden

In a way, if you have read one Oates book, you've read them all. Her story is always young, innocent girl who meets older man, and either she is the one conning him or it's the other way around (the moral is always: no one is innocent). There is always sex, there is always a sense that Oates doesn't actually like girls very much, and after Blonde, there is always a sense that Oates simply wishes she could go back in time and write it again. Just like I wish I could go back in time and read it again, because it really is so very good. Anyway, having said all that: I did like it, because I knew what I was in for. I have to say though, since Oates declared herself an antifeminist, I feel like maybe our love story is over.

Now I'm re-reading Curtis Sittenfeld's The man of my dreams. I found myself not being able to decide what to read, and it has been ages since I read anything by Sittenfeld. There is a stillness to her writing that is so wonderful. Will never stop loving her, despite the fact that the covers to her books are so awful, I'm actually embarrassed to pull the book out of my bag on the underground. However, maybe she wants one to be taken by surprise by the story inside? "Don't judge a book by its cover?" How involved are authors in these decisions?

Books read:

Margaret Drabble - The seven sisters

Doris Lessing - Love, again

Lynne Reid Banks - The L-shaped room

A.M. Homes - In a country of mothers

SHED SOME LIGHT ON THE WASTE LANDS OF THE CITY'S RUBBLE

Find it weird that I haven't read a book in English since the beginning of January. All the updates on what I've read is on the Swedish blog. Anyway, was in Edinburgh Wednesday-Friday. Obviously I bought some books:

Doris Lessing - Love, again

Margaret Drabble - The seven sisters (reading now)

Lynne Reid Banks - The L-shaped room

Irène Némirovsky - Suite française

Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a dutiful daughter

Started the year by reading The year of magical thinking by Joan Didion. Read it last week.