I didn’t really mean to re-read this, but I picked it up and was instantly hooked. Perhaps the most fun of all his books. And certainly working on What About Dick? I can see just how much it influenced me, particularly Helena and Beebe. It is a lovely novel and a lovely film, and I think real as opposed to the Downton Abbey soap shite.

On I Pad. Impossible to pick him up without learning something or wanting to quote him on something. This final book is written in his nineties!

I had been meaning to re-read Stevenson’s fine novel and picked this up at Earthlight Books. I was fascinated by Stevenson’s own story, told very succinctly here but the actual novel is printed in Italics which I cannot read! I am unable to read any book that has long passages in italics, particularly books that start with them. I don’t like books that change font, or shape, or turn into screenplays, or cell phone conversations, or even god forbid, texting. I’m not quite sure why I have this prejudice except perhaps I think it is tricksy and showy-offy and unnecessary. It shows us the framework, when I wish to forget the scaffolding and enjoy the building. I shall re read Dr. J and Mr. K, but first I must re-read Nabokov’s quite brilliant lecture on it, where he physically draws the house, and actually makes you see the scaffolding of the novel, which until then has been entirely concealed. So his essay is a revelation of the book, as indeed are all his lectures on books. If you think you are a good reader, read Nabokov’s lectures on literature and think again.

So sure was I that I would enjoy it I managed to buy it twice. The fact is though, I got bored. He is dry and brittle in his writing. I liked the history, but it was the whole theological world of Purgatory that I found, well, nuts. So I threw it. I have a ridiculous prejudice against almost all religious writing, with the possible exception of the Bible, which is only tolerable in the St. James version, thanks to the historical accident of its being translated during Shakespeare’s time, which was, perhaps, the richest period of the English language. Only Churchill has as rich a sense of prose writing. Although of course the Bible is poetry. And metaphor. Like all religion.

I re-read this happily while waiting to attend a college rehearsal of The Birthday Party. I found it downstairs in a Book Fair which was selling paperbacks for a dollar and hard backs for three bucks, so that when I took them three first editions to pay for, they charged me nine dollars. I felt like a small kid who has just won the lottery and is being paid in sugar. One of the books was a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The illustrious Mike Nichols turned me on to Cheever with a fine present of the Collected stories a Christmas or two ago. I never used to like short stories but this changed my mind. I love them, and especially his. Carver is good but Cheever is better. I also like linked stories in the Julian Barnes manner. This first edition I found in Washington and gave to Sophie Winkelman, a very brilliant and intelligent and extremely funny gal (ex-Cambridge Footlights natch) who has become a devoted fan of Cheever. I can’t imagine how I missed him until now, but what fun it is to discover a new writer as one gets older and know there is a whole stack of books to discover ahead of you.

I had an old gag in the UK: “Norman Mailer will be resumed as soon as possible.” This book of short pieces reminds me why. Mailer is a son of a bitch who went crazy with fame and alcohol, but who at heart is a great writer. I was inspired to buy this because of the several bitchy chapters on a disastrous appearance he made with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show. He is enough of a good writer to show us that even when defending himself he reveals he was in fact an asshole…. I love many of his early books, and also quite a lot of the journalism (Fire on The Moon and the boxing one) but when he began to refer to himself as Mailer in the third person, and ran for Mayor and thought he could fight everyone, he became a dick. Well we’re all dicks from time to time, and he has left many treasures.

I very much enjoyed Cowboys are my Weakness, but I swiftly tired of this one.

Pulitzer Prize winner. A fine novel recommended by Anne (Mrs M) The memoir of an old pastor, son of an old rather bastardly pastor, written to his young child. Very fine writing. I noted this to send to my kids: I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you. …only to discover that my daughter had not only read the book but had written a twelve page paper on it. A fine thing education.

I have been reading this on and off since picking it up in London. Hard to categorise but fascinating in short bursts, like Modrić. (Pointless soccer comparison: don’t go there.) As the blurb says life is made up of humans meeting one another. 101 such encounters here in a circular form, Marilyn Monroe with Frank Lloyd Wright, Tolstoy with Tchaikovsky. All true, and most fascinating.