Mondays always come around so fast it just isn’t right. I had no school this weekend and it was so nice to have such unstructured time. Saturday it rained all day so I had a nice hour reclining on the chaise and reading Oblomov and a few other books as well. I will be posting about it a week from today. I am enjoying it very much and am surprised at how funny it is. Russian lit, funny? Who’d a thunk it?
Also read this weekend was some Edith Wharton biography which I am still enjoying, maybe even more so than I was when I first began it since I can read at a leisurely pace with no deadline to worry about.
I began reading Gongora last night. I don’t know what I like more the poetry or Picasso’s art. In addition it is a beautifully put together book. It isn’t long so I will probably be giving it a full-length post by the end of the week.
In the evenings before sleep I am getting in a few minutes of reading the Thomas Mallon book Yours Ever. I have mixed feelings about it. I am enjoying reading about famous and not so famous letter writers but there is not much in the way of their letters present to be sampled. Mallon writes about the correspondence and the writers and will toss out a quote or two but nothing in depth. It is like each little segment is a summary of the published letters so I can decide whether or not I actually want to go to the source. I would like more of the source material and barring that more analysis on the art of letter writing but that is lacking too. Still, I will keep reading if for no other reason than the book is a good annotated bibliography of published letters.
Finally, I started reading The Master by Colm Toibin on my daily commute and lunch break. Oblomov is a library book and a very large paperback and it has begun to look a bit beat up since I have been, however carefully, lugging it around in my bag with me. So a smaller book that I own seemed more appropriate. And after so many people commented recently about how good The Master is it swayed me to pick it up. And so far I am enjoying it very much. It has a delightful Henry James feel to the writing which both surprised and delighted me. So thanks to everyone who raved about it and prodded me into picking it up.
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