An experiment in biblio-biography
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| Nicholas Laughlin's Life List An experiment in biblio-biography |
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Sunday, October 16, 2005 2005 update Good lord, what have I been reading since the end of March? - about two thirds of Crispin Sartwell's Six Names of Beauty - started re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on an airplane (aloft, I need humour), but once I landed I didn't pick it up again - Nicholas Guppy's Wai-Wai - Nick Laird's To a Fault - started the new Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down, & after twenty or thirty pages put it back on the shelf - Denis Williams's Prehistoric Guiana, over & over again, slowly, to review it - Wade Davis's One River, about ethnobotany in South America - the new Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one very melancholy weekend in Tobago - re-read Andrew Salkey's Georgetown Journal that same weekend - Bruce Chatwin's Songlines - B.C. Pires's Thank God It's Friday - Philip Nanton's Frank Collymore book, Remembering the Sea - started John Hearne's Voices under the Window, but didn't get past the first dozen pages - A.J. Seymour's several volumes of memoirs, in stops & starts, when I can get to a library that has them (they're out of print) - re-read Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust to remind myself what he did with Guyana - re-read most of Sebald's Rings of Saturn - the new Zadie Smith, On Beauty, week before last - re-read most of Nicholson Baker's wonderful U & I, & some bits from The Size of Thoughts - have been reading Alain de Botton's Essays in Love & The Art of Travel--both temporarily abandoned on my bedside table - Dan Rhodes's Anthropology--a half-hour read - I've always spurned how-to-write books (except of course for Strunk & White, which everyone should read young), but I picked up Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird & enjoyed it immensely, mostly because it's really a sort of autobiography, & very funny - just finished Shiva Naipaul's book about Jonestown, Black & White - picking my way through V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South - reading the new Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse to review it - & lots of things I can't remember posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 1:08 PM Sunday, April 03, 2005 I do not think that at the time, aged twelve, I could have guessed something I read much later, in one of Sigmund Freud's studies unless I am much mistaken: an observation that immediately struck me as convincing, suggesting that the deepest secret of music is that it is a gesture warding off paranoia, and we make music to defend ourselves against being overwhelmed by the terrors of reality. -- From "Moments musicaux", in W.G. Sebald's Campo Santo (p. 186). posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 7:48 AM Thursday, March 31, 2005 Nearly two years later.... These days I seem to read magazines mostly. I subscribe to far too many of them. I've also become the kind of person who starts books & doesn't finish them, through sheer distraction. There is a more or less stable pile of half- or quarter-read books on my bedside table. I refuse to reshelve them because any day now I'm due to take them up again. Then every few months or so the bedside table tips over & its load of books joins the larger, less orderly pile on the floor. (Cue recollection of John Updike's essay "The Unread Book Route".) I also seem to have less time available for reading (where did it go?)--at least, that's what I'm forced to think when I rack my memory to make a list of what I've read over the last two years & see how alarmingly short it is. (Cue recollection of Virginia Woolf's essay "Hours in a Library", with its wistful thinking back to a youthful time when "one can have done nothing but read".) I began this "experiment in biblio-biography" in April 2003, & didn't manage to keep it going for even a fortnight. Here's a second attempt at charting the evolving self through an ongoing reading list, starting with a patchy summary of what I've been ingesting since my last entry, a year & eleven months ago. 2005 thus far - started the year with what may become my traditional re-reading of Howards End - Dart, by Alice Oswald - lots of John Berryman - Unrecounted, by W.G. Sebald - Robert Antoni's new novel, Carnival (a re-reading of Divina Trace is tentatively scheduled for later this year) - in preparation for a trip to Guyana, I read Pauline Melville's Shape-Shifter & about half of The Migration of Ghosts - re-read Andrew Salkey's Georgetown Journal for the same reason - on my return from Guyana, went on a Guyana-reading blitz--dipping into & out of various books on history, politics, society, Cheddi Jagan's West on Trial, A.J. Seymour's poems, Denis Williams's Prehistoric Guyana, Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-two Days, the chapter on Guyana in Naipaul's Middle Passage (the bit that sticks in my head is his complaint about the impossibility of finding decent coffee in Georgetown), etc. - am currently reading three books by turns: Pauline Melville's Ventriloquist's Tale, Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good, & W.G. Sebald's Campo Santo 2004 - I started the year by re-reading all of Forster's novels, Howards End first, then, probably in this order, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View, The Longest Journey, A Passage to India, & Maurice - this seemed to lead naturally to Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love - Ian McDonald's Between Silence and Silence - Salman Rushdie's Step Across this Line - read E.M. Cioran's Anathemas and Admirations & re-read Walcott's Another Life in St Lucia - re-read The Years in Jamaica - Falling Slowly, by Anita Brookner - Angela Carter's Wise Children (wondered why I hadn't read her before) - Nobrow, by Jonathan Seabrook, most of the contents of which I'd previously read in the New Yorker - three of the books in the Oxford/NYPL Seven Deadly Sins series--Simon Blackburn's Lust, Francine Prose's Gluttony, & Joseph Epstein's Envy - on a short trip to Tobago I re-read Dave Eggers's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius because there happened to be a paperback copy in the house I was staying in. I seem to remember finishing it on the plane on the way back, which means I actually stole it - at some point I picked up Fortress of Solitude again & finished it - my friend Jan Woolman's Expecting Good Things of All, a history of the Blake School in Minneapolis - The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst - The Biographer's Tale, by A.S. Byatt - started Kafka's Amerika but got barely twenty pages in - James Christopher Aboud's new Lagahoo Poems - re-read Vahni Capildeo's No Traveller Returns - the last three months of the year I read & re-read poetry more than anything else--in intense bursts: Heaney, Hughes, Walcott, Yeats, Muldoon, Stevens, Pound, Marianne Moore, cummings, Randall Jarrell (also his letters), Roethke, Swinburne, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Graves, Keats (also his letters), Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Spencer Short, Wislawa Szymborska, Brodsky, Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, A.R. Ammons, Keith Douglas, May Swenson, Richard Wilbur, Auden, Basil Bunting, Rilke's Duino Elegies, Christopher Smart.... Late April to December 2003 - Tropisms, by Nathalie Sarraute - my friend Vahni Capildeo's first book of poems, No Traveller Returns - Timothy Donnelly's Twenty-seven Props for a Production of "Eine Lebenszeit" - Sidney Smith's letters, in the old Oxford World's Classics paperback edition; this was my Underground reading for a week on a trip to London - Keats's letters - Speaking of Beauty, by Denis Donoghue - Invisible Forms, by Kevin Jackson - Joe Orton's diaries - Literary Occasions, by V.S. Naipaul, most of the contents of which I'd previously read in earlier books - Errol Hill's Trinidad Carnival, which I must have read years ago at school - Paris Trance, by Geoff Dyer - Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes - Halls of Fame, by John D'Agata - Timoleon Vieta Come Home, by Dan Rhodes - Politics, by Adam Thirlwell - The Calligrapher, by Edward Docx - Stephen Spender's journals - much of Paul Auster's Art of Hunger - tried very hard to read Wilson Harris's latest novel, The Mask of the Beggar, but as usual found him impossible - much of Paul Muldoon, in a few sittings - The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt - half of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude - the little Hesperus edition of E.M. Forster's unfinished novel Arctic Summer, right at the end of the year posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 1:47 PM Friday, May 02, 2003 Yesterday, looking for information on Philip Pilgrim's oratorio The Legend of Kaieteur (based on A.J. Seymour's poem), I plucked Andrew Salkey's Georgetown Journal from my office library, & started reading it last night. This is a longish account of Salkey's trip to Guyana in 1970 for the Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference--a sort of predecessor to Carifesta, I imagine. Lots of anecdotes about Sam Selvon, John La Rose, Austin Clarke, Wilson Harris, Martin Carter, Beryl McBurnie, & other less celebrated figures; lots of gossip; lots of dialogue, supposedly verbatim. One or two gems, such as: Shortly before I left for Station Street, I heard the creative rumour that, immediately after the declaration of the new Republic, the mango would be re-named the Burnham Apple. posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 11:01 AM Thursday, April 24, 2003 Yesterday the new Charles Simic arrived--The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems. Weird, improbable, profane little jokes about the world & history & the soul; funny, angry, unaffectedly sorrowful (though less devastatingly beautiful than Adam Zagajewski, who Simic at his best seems to recall). Reading in bed last night, I felt a little start of recognition when I came to this poem: Nearest Nameless So damn familiar Most of the time, I don't even know you are here. My life, My portion of eternity, A little shiver, As if the chill of the grave Is already Catching up with me-- No matter. Descartes smelled Witches burning While he sat thinking Of a truth so obvious We keep failing to see it. I never knew it either Till today. When I heard a bird shriek: The cat is coming, And I felt myself trembling. About a week ago, reading late at night, I was suddenly perturbed by the agitated cries of a kiskidee, coming perhaps from the garden next door. Kiskidees of course are not nocturnal birds--some small, awful accident must have happened to wake & alarm this one. Like Simic, I heard the bird's shrieks tearing through the silence as ungentle hints of the world's inevitable rupture. posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 11:03 AM Tuesday, April 22, 2003 At the moment I'm reading Caryl Phillips's new novel, A Distant Shore. Unrelentingly bleak so far--loneliness, boredom, fear, illness, death. The weather is always grey & damp, streets always dirty, passers-by always bitter or rude. Two unhappy people--a retired schoolteacher & an immigrant from an unnamed African country--both trying to escape their pasts, take refuge in a quiet English village. Gradually they're drawn together, then violently, unexpectedly, pulled apart. Were Naipaul still seriously in the business of writing novels today, he might come up with a plot & characters like these. But Phillips handles his men & women with an entirely un-Naipaulian tenderness, & he demonstrates a remarkable narrative imagination in his creation of the schoolteacher, Dorothy Jones, in whose pitch-perfect voice the story begins: England has changed. These days it's difficult to tell who's from around here and who's not. Who belongs and who's a stranger. It's disturbing. It doesn't feel right. I'm 270 pp. in, 40 pp. from the end, & more moved by the story than I expected. No pleasant ending is possible. posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 9:04 AM Sunday, April 20, 2003 2003 thus far: a reconstruction from memory - The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz - The Married Man, by Edmund White - A Box of Matches, by Nicholson Baker - Atonement, by Ian McEwan - most of Poetry and the Age, by Randall Jarrell - most of Finders Keepers, by Seamus Heaney - re-read most of The Waves, & also most of vols. 2, 3, & 4 of Virginia Woolf's Diary, as well as much of vols. 1 & 2 of the Essays (McNeillie edition) - started re-reading Pater's Renaissance, currently somewhere near the top of my bedside stack - a little more of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - Songbook, by Nick Hornby - Memoir of the Hawk, by James Tate - about a third of What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, by Joseph Roth, trans. Michael Hofmann - On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald; also re-read most of Vertigo, my favourite of Sebald's books - The Romantics, by Pankaj Mishra - much of John Carey's Faber Book of Utopias, a nice fat anthology - Waiting for Snow in Havana, by Carlos Eire (the clear front-runner so far for the 2003 Nicholas Laughlin Book Award for biography or autobiography) - browsed extensively through The Western Isles of Trinidad, by Anthony de Verteuil - Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer - The Pieces from Berlin, by Michael Pye - What I Loved, by Siri Hustveldt - re-read Lytton Strachey's Literary Essays - Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis - re-read most of Death in Venice - Lady Nugent's Journal (ongoing) - Where the Stress Falls, by Susan Sontag - Another Voice, by Auberon Waugh - have been reading a fair amount of Adam Zagajewski again lately - have just been re-reading Rebecca Elson's Responsibility to Awe - have just finished Fred D'Aguiar's new novel, Bethany Bettany - & yesterday all I could bear to read was Keats posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 5:33 PM 2002: a (no doubt incomplete) reconstruction from memory - The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch - The Bell, by Iris Murdoch - The Path of Minor Planets, by Andrew Sean Greer - The Breaking of Style, by Helen Vendler - The Quest for Corvo, by A.J.A. Symons - The Gastronomical Me, by M.F.K. Fisher - The Book on the Bookshelf, by Henry Petrowski (I must admit I bought this solely because I liked the cover) - thanks to Ian McDonald's kindness, I finally got a copy of A.J. Seymour's Collected Poems, 1937-1989, practically unavailable outside Guyana, & have been reading & re-reading him ever since (read my review here) - browsed extensively through The Anatomy of Bibliomania, by Holbrook Jackson, put it aside for dipping into at leisure, then promptly forgot - most of The Art of Hunger, by Paul Auster - most of Midland, by Kwame Dawes - C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean, and World Revolution, by Farrukh Dhondy (read my review here) - Where the Sea Had an Ending, ed. Brian Dyde - Textermination, by Christine Brooke-Rose - The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde - Mona and Other Tales, by Reinaldo Arenas - most of Travelling Mercies, by Lorna Goodison - the first quarter or so of Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino - Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer - Gould's Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan - The Ambassadors, by Henry James - about half of The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James - rapidly re-read The Tempest after seeing it performed by a theatre troupe visiting from the U.K. - The Elusive Eric Williams, by Ken Boodhoo - The Last Days of St. Pierre, by Ernest Zebrowski, Jr. - Discretion, by Elizabeth Nunez - A Rough Climate, by E.A. Markham (read my review here) - Without End, by Adam Zagajewski - browsed extensively through Geoffrey Hill's New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992 while sitting for an oil portrait - re-read much of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae while sitting for the same portrait (it was lying around in the studio) - re-read Caryl Phillips's A New World Order in order to review it (read the review here - Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley - attempted yet again to read Finnegans Wake - Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana, by Isadora Tattlin - Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling through Castro's Cuba, by Christopher P. Baker - Sugar and Slate, by Charlotte Williams (read my review here) - Werewolves in Their Youth, by Michael Chabon - barely glanced through Mr. Potter, by Jamaica Kincaid - read & re-read a great deal of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, & Richard Wilbur during April, May, June - browsed extensively through Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy - about three quarters of The Immediate Experience, by Robert Warshow - A Responsibility to Awe, by Rebecca Elson - re-read about half of Persuasion just before leaving for a six-week vacation - Accidents in the Home, by Tessa Hadley - about three quarters of Prague, by Arthur Phillips (who I barely missed meeting in San Francisco last July) - The Flaneur, by Edmund White - London Walking, by Simon Pope (good book to read on an airplane) - The War Against Cliche, by Martin Amis - The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis - The Writer and the World, by V.S. Naipaul (most of the contents of which I'd previously read in Naipaul's earlier books) - re-read About a Boy, by Nick Hornby - nearly a quarter of The Polished Hoe, by Austin Clarke, until one of the lead characters fell asleep from boredom & I put the book aside, lest I follow - much of Pat Ismond's Abandoning Dead Metaphors - Beyond the Front Page: A Caribbean Journalist Remembers, by George R. John - After Nature, by W.G. Sebald - Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons - Salamander, by Thomas Wharton - How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen - Nobody's Perfect, by the divine Anthony Lane, most of the contents of which I'd previously read in the New Yorker - Bloomsbury, by Quentin Bell - about half of the Penguin Classics edition of Jose Marti's Selected Writings, trans. Esther Allen - browsed extensively through The Barbadian Rumshop, by Peter Laurie - The Autograph Man, by Zadie Smith (read my review here) - Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (read my review here) - the first nine months or so of Pepys - In Ruins, by Christopher Woodward - After the Dance, by Edwidge Danticat - a few stories from Joe Ashby Porter's Touch Wood - the first volume of Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (I don't own the other seven or eight vols.) - In Praise of Shadows, by Junichiro Tanizaki, trans. Thomas J. Harper - The Autobiography of Alfred H. Mendes, 1897-1991 (read my review here) posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 5:27 PM |
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