The Book Group Choice

Tiring of angst, agony, irony, and other vestiges of the postmodern in our literature, the book group unanimously elected to pursue the reading of P.G. Wodehouse's The Mating Season.  As I have yet to make it through a Jeeves and Wooster novel or even collection of short stories, this will present a signal challenge and opportunity.  Wodehouse is much like Chesterton for me--legions of vehement fans--but I just don't get it.  So let's hope that this is my opportunity to get it--and, if not become a rabid fan, at least have a new source of gentle comedy to turn to when the angst of the new age becomes too overwhelming.

By the way--the entire group hated Brockmeier's The Illumination.  The verdict--beautifully written--but too many unrelated gimmicks in a story that was really too dismal for words.  That said--I know that there are a great many out there who will enjoy it and my overall ranking for it--despite by personal distaste remains four-star.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take
Read more

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Read more