2023

 

This was the year of Downsize Abbey.   We pack up and leave our old home..  

The library of 4,000 books goes to a bookshop in Covina.  We move to a temporary rental round the corner.

Sadly, though I have been reading (and buying) of course, I seem to have fallen severely behind in my writing about reading, so with the news that it is now October – let me try and play Catch Up if I can.

We spent three months in Europe this summer so I’m going to start there.  I remember I had got rather tired of best-selling mysteries and had fallen back on my usual gambit of reaching for the classics.  This is a good stand by, even if they are new translations like the splendid Iliad which I am currently reading.

The Iliad              Homer

This is the first time I have read it through as a story.   It is spectacularly translated, and a gripping read. The characters come to life.  Even the Gods – often so annoying – have their place in the tale.  It is started really by Eris – God of Chaos – chucking the Golden Apple amongst three beautiful Goddesses.  For the Most Beautiful it says.  Like an Award Show for Gods.  Three immediately claim it and Paris is appointed to decide who should be the winner.  Bribed by Hera with the promised reward of the most beautiful woman in the world if he should choose her, he does and is rewarded with Helen of Troy.  Never mind she is someone else’s wife.  Possibly he should win the Poisoned Penis award for he abducts her back to Troy from her husband Menelaus, brother of the Greek King Agamemnon, starting the ten year Trojan War and costing hundreds of lives, when the Greeks raise a huge fleet and head off in pursuit, determined to rescue Helen.  The Iliad itself opens after the Greeks have spent nine years encamped by their boats outside the walls of Troy and are tired of this endless war.  Many wish to go back to their wives and children in Greece.   Many more are dead.  This is the point where the action of the poem begins.  I now believe Eris is the mother of all award shows.  Chuck ‘em a prize and make them fight for it and send the other buggers home empty handed.  That’ll teach ‘em.

A pair of true stories I read recently seemed to be sharing a similar theme, asking the question: when a couple is engaged sexually just how much is the woman not responsible for her actions in breaking the law, and how much is she “controlled.”   I mean these:

Going Infinite                        Michael Lewis

In this, straight from the headlines, story Michael Lewis tells us the odd story of Sam Bankman-Fried’s weird tale of becoming a Crypto Billionaire and the extraordinary collapse of his company.  Now he is on trial and the major testimony is coming from his former girl-friend Caroline Ellison.  Trial now over and he was found quite guilty.

Immediately afterwards I read

The Art Thief                         Michael Pinkel

A not dissimilar tale of a young Alsatian couple who stole major Renaissance art work from small museums in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, accumulating a huge treasure trove which they kept in an apartment they shared at his mother’s.  The similarity is in the influence the man had over the woman.  Here Anne Catherine seems very much part of the duo, until the trial where she testifies against him.  Breitweiser steals for the pure joy of owning art.  He is a hoarder.  He has no intention of selling.

The Shards                            Brett Easton Ellis

I began but he is too much for me. I didn’t get far. I’m not a horror fan.  I understand he can write.

The Romantic                         William Boyd

A picaresque novel, spanning several lives.  Very romantic in the early days when he is hanging out with Byron and witnessing the death of Shelley, and where he meets the love of his life, whom he will meet again towards the end.  When he moves to North America I found the tale less gripping band put it down for a bit but because I am a big fan I restarted it and enjoyed the eventual romantic reunion.

 

Summer reading 2023

 

I remember Nothing.               Norah Ephron

Fortunately she does and makes us laugh even as she lies dying.  What a terrible loss she is.  So funny, so smart, such good company.

A Passage to India

The first time I have read this since reading Damon Galgut’s Arctic Ice.  The underlying theme of homosexuality in this, one of Forster’s best books, is illuminated by Galgut’s own splendid novel, so that the two books seem to dance together and it is impossible to unrecognize the homo-erotic subtext of Forster’s great work, which only gives it greater resonance and truth.

The Metaphysical Ukulele.

A great title and quite interesting tales of the most unlikely instrument.

The Counter? The Comforters?                           Muriel Spark

A strange one.  It has the feel of something written first as a film.   Maybe it was.  As it is it’s the last of her many wonderful novels.

I discover that The Finishing School was the last of her novels.  I need to find this book again in France.  What can I mean?  The Comforters was her first novel, when she was recovering from amphetamine and discovered Catholicism and was aided in her career by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, both Catholic drug abusers… if you count alcohol.

See Is God a Mushroom?  A book I just made up.  Incidentally when you fast for forty days and forty nights in the desert eating only manna you are quite possibly off your bonce.

Mrs. Dalloway                        Virginia Woolf

No.  I’m still afraid of her.

Seize The Day                         Saul Bellow

The haunted wastrel son, the unforgiving father.  This short novella goes to the heart of money and it’s lack and lack of parental heart in New York.

The Duchess of Malfi              John Webster

Visiting Amalfi this summer I was minded to re-read this play, which actually isn’t so much about the Duchess as the intrigues at Court between her brother and her, leading to murder and mayhem.

A Sentimental Education                  Gustave Flaubert

Opened terrifically, like a great Dickens, but trickled away.  Maybe he spent too long on it.  It ran out of steam and I certainly did long before the conclusion.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes               Georges Simenon

The Interest                                     Michael Taylor

Still so shocking, this history of Slavery in the Sugar Trade, and how almost all of the 18^th Century profited and benefited from it.   I find it hard to read more than a few chapters at a time.   Sugar, slavery and the Success of Business in England.  Even in Mansfield Park. Mr. ? goes off to attend to his estates in Jamaica.  And guess what they are growing?  The triangular trade, protected by the British Navy, ensured the success and wealth of British society.  Based round Liverpool and Bristol (Bath!) the West Country profited but so did the woollen trade and shipping.

The Great Gatsby                    F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I always learn something new.  The ending always takes me by surprise.

Dark Ride                     Lou Berney

A man sees two kids who have been tortured by cigarettes.  He sets out to discover them and their mother to see if he can get anyone to help him rescue them…. A charming thriller.

The Fraud                    Zadie Smith

The book of the year for me.  She is an outstanding novelist.  Here she writes a brilliant story set in 1873 in Victorian London, which includes a scene with Dickens, The Tichbourne Trial, and the problems of being housekeeper to a less than brilliant novelist.  I read engrossed and happy and was sad when it stopped.

 

Fall Reading 2023

 

When I got back from France I fell in love again with Eve Babitz: First her collection of pieces

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.   Eve Babitz.

which seemed to mention so many of my friends, Derek Taylor, Steve Martin and David Giler.

“No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.”

 

And then I read everything I could get my hands on.  Including:

L. A. Woman.  Eve Babitz

A novel.     Her stories are essential about herself and her friends anyway.

Black Swans         Eve Babitz

Stories.

After which I read:

Hollywood’s Eve, Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. by Lil Anolik

which is a decent biography although she seems to suffer slightly from Venus Envy, as who wouldn’t when your best friend walks away with the best life, the best drugs, the best boyfriends, and was also the better writer.

But I also discovered The Sean Duffy Series by Adrian McKinty, to whose work I had been introduced by the extraordinary Don Winslow.   But I loved this series and read:

The Detective Up Late

The Cold Cold Ground

In the Morning I’ll be Gone

I Hear The Sirens in the Street

All of which are set in the civil war torn streets of Belfast.  A detective tries to solve “crime” amidst constant civil violence, death threats, turmoil and an armed insurrection. It’s not dissimilar to the trope

used so brilliantly by Philip Kerr in his unforgettable series about Bernie Gunther, where an oddball detective solves crime in Berlin first during the Weimar Republic and then under Hitler and the Nazi regime.

 

Now we are in November.

 

Something Wonderful                               Todd S. Purdum

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution.  A wonderful book, made even more joyful for me by the re- opening of Spamalot at The St. James Theater, where they opened so many of their wonderful shows…and where I was at the First Night of Mel Brooke’s The Producers, where he mercifully brought back Musical Comedy from its hiding place deep beneath the Paris sewers.  Musical comedy has been the most enjoyable theatrical form since Offenbach and then Gilbert and Sullivan brought it to London and then on to Broadway.

Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century    Stephen Purdy

Fortunately we’re not in this book!   A fun romp through other people’s misfortunes.  It is a fact that only 17 per cent of Broadway musicals make their money back.   But this is a tale of some musicals that didn’t even make it to the second night. So much ambition.  So much skill.  So  much hope.  So much disappointment. Failure is not spared even the finest of Creative teams.  And then there are the rock and rollers, and the repeat failures.  Some people keep on trying. Perhaps the most fascinating tale is the three year attempt to get Spiderman to fly.   Was it the single handed determination of Julie Tamor who led them into trouble?  Was it the mistake to put this on Broadway instead of in Vegas, where it belonged.  More of a ride than a musical, it would still be running there.   But alas trying to invent new technology is no way to solve the problems of the plot. Fascinating read.

See Postcards from The Edge another book I just made up.

On the flight home from Broadway Baby I re-read

The Left Handed Twin            Thomas Perry.

Which I re-read with just as much enjoyment as the first time.

Paul Auster                             Baumgartner

Day.            A Novel                Michael Cunningham

I tried hard – indeed I started over again – but he really isn’t my cup of tea.   I find it hard to concentrate on his writing…

The Last Tycoon            F. Scott Fitzgerald 

The last unfinished novel.   Fascinating reading.  The Narrator is female and Celia is the daughter of a Top Studio Executive so her insight into the boy genius boy of Hollywood should be more accurate than it appears.  It’s hard to tell whether he could have pulled this narration off, once he was sure of what he was writing and what was to happen.  Surely it would be the early death of Monroe Starr from overwork.  I am very fond of Fitzgerald’s bittersweet  Pat Hobby Stories and it’s possible this would have been the best book, but at the moment it seems a rather sentimental story about someone Scott clearly admires.

The Course of Love        Alain de Botton

Well I know precisely when I was reading this because a ticket from The Shed’s Griffin Theatre fell out, dated Friday December 29^th 2023 when I was attending the wonderful production of Sondheim’s last work, Here We Are with a book by another genius David Ives, based on two movies by Bunuel The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Bunuel’s 1972 film that was so popular with Python, back when we had our own screening room. I tried hard to get backstage to see David Hyde Pierce who was magnificent in it.  Only alas to discover we could not actually find backstage in the warren of interesting architecture that is that splendid place. So Alan Zweibel and our Spices fled to dinner.

On Love               Alain de Botton

So this must have been the first one I read previously back in November when we were opening at The St. James.  I remember reading it a very long time ago but this time it had a profound effect on me and I was considering even trying to make it a musical!   I loved the way he steps out of the narrative to explain what is going on.  I think you could do that with a play.  I guess the Chorus kinda did that in early Greek drama.  It’s both a novel and an advice book.  But it could be a very funny device.  If only I had the time…

The Greeks           Roderick Beaton

A Global History.   A very long book a very long time ago. It was taking me a long time to read but as I am pretty much totally ignorant of Ancient Greek History, with a few vague exceptions like the plays of Sophocles, I decided to go back and dip.  So it’s a dipping source not a main course.

Pax                     Tom Holland.       War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

Rome is always interesting.  Did you know it was not built in a Day?   It just looks like that.