Eduardo > Recent Status Updates

Really enjoying it this time. It feels like the first pulp novel. Deliciously trashy. What surprises me is how funny it is in parts. It seems to predate vaudevillian goofiness

I think I begin to see why Ferber is not as well regarded today as she once was. She just killed off an important and it’s just like moving right along. The plot is king it seems. I’m thoroughly enjoying the Salina’s odyssey all the same and can imagine what’s next.

What a great story teller. I’m so invested in the story and her characters. She has you rooting for Selina and So Big without demonizing the other characters.

I have the feeling this is going to be a version of the Prime of Ms Jean Brody. A story about a charismatic but dangerous character. I’m falling short of my goal to read 100 books this year and this story is already about walking away books even as it is a book.

Such charming writing. So engaging and witty. Gotta read me more Ferber

Wright is consistently naive.

Riveting

Ikemefuna. Modernist literature always has to have its victim.

Enjoy the slow penetrating psychological eye now that I’m reading it slower. Everything is being set up so perfectly and gently.

A chapter a day is working. Sometimes I have to listen to one chapter several times. Tolstoy has such a solid agenda and it can be easy to miss if you are too focused on plot.

Reading a chapter a day. Oblonsky is a handsome plump aristocrat who is waking up wondering how to deal with his wife who is angry that he slept with their nannie. Funny, the same thing happened in my other read Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House. In that case the head is household is separated from his wife.

Trying again. Slowly this time.

Ghastly written dialogue and exchanges straight out of Margo Jefferson’s Negroland. I wish the author had sat with a therapist first before using a novel as their emotional catharsis.

Food, drink and networking. He was happy because Paris was dirt cheap and he could write fiction. To him and his expatriate buddies it was cheap but I doubt it was so for the locals recovering from the war as they were.

This book is taking a turn for the worse 😳

A dull gay telenovela but also a fascinating window into what life was like for gay men pre stonewall and pre Aids

Pretty pulpy and pornographic at times but it is interesting to read about the pressure relationships between men endured before homosexuality was decriminalized. It was dehumanizing, awful and brought out the bully in everyone. Thank goodness we are at least in part well past that now.

Whatever happened to baby Jane is just as campy as the movie. Blanche is so delicate and refined while all these bad things are happening to her that she’s just as ridiculous as crazy Jane. Blanch feels like the feckless democrats trying to be so virtuous and Jane like the vicious lunatic republicans out to destroy everything

I’m surprised this story hasn’t been made into an opera or an epic film. It’s such an over the drama. I’m aware of the Bette Davies film but that’s all about La Davies’ histrionics though. What a fascinating history Mexico has.

Just fascinating story

Fermor and King, the walking writers, like to use people to get free things out of them. It seems to give them some sense of satisfaction.

Daddy paid someone else to fight in the civil war so now this poltroon if full of pull-yourself-by-your-own-bootstraps heroism. I wish the author was more questioning and less gushy about TRs antics. I guess the book is 20 years old.

Coming to sensationalist and out of date information about the Amazon fauna

He’s crossing the Delaware now. He’s view or telling of early American history is very waspy and fairly banal. He’s smart but not soaring smart. Just ok smart.
He pays lip service to his white male privilege but it’s more an unquestioning existence

I don’t think the writer wrote this book with Hispanics in mind, needing Colombians. The revolution incited by TR in Colombia to breakaway Panama to build the canal the USA terms gets a passing judgment judgement jingoistic treatment. This is often what happens with these historical books. They are more about propaganda than facts.

Whereas A Time of Gifts was peopled with congeniality (King recommended it), Ramble follows a trail of conflict, persecution and alienation. Fermor depicts Dutch, Germans, Czechs, Jew and gentile in 1933 as kind, welcoming and endlessly fascinating but King’s 21st century suburban Americans are frightened at worst and dogmatic at best. Compare and despair, I suppose.

It reads like a fairy tale with ah these unknown names of places and unknown names of poets. Who were all these people? I wonder if there is a computer program that can make any western biography into a Chinese one. Mostly it’s the story of an alcoholic with a big ego which people tolerated, even endured before of his calligraphy and poetry. Poetry doesn’t translate well so it reads silly.

Reading A Time of Gifts is like sitting in a seminar. I hits keep the dictionary and encyclopedia handy. Fermor is just so erudite it slows the reading down

Feel as though I should be thanking someone for this reco but no one did. I mean one writer spoke highly of it. It’s just so wonderful so far.

An excellent follow up to The Devil Wears Prada because it’s about another driven young person striving to make it big in NYC and it’s an excellent companion to A Time of Gifts because it’s set in the same time period and, like it,it’s about a young man discovering new worlds.