Despite its length, I made decent time getting through The Decameron. I'm pretty sure I mentioned that Shteyngart's Our Country Friends was basically a disappointment, perhaps because it didn't use any part of The Decameron in its structure. I'm still leaning towards dipping into The Heptameron, maybe on the trip out to Baltimore. I should balance this with some shorter works. I will likely be finished with Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden by then and perhaps my rereading of Camus's The Stranger. Fante's West of Rome is pretty short, so I might take that, as well as Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
I am definitely feeling pretty gun-shy about taking Dickens along again. I pushed through 500 pages of Nicholas Nickleby, and I finally gave up. It reminded me so much of the worst aspects of Smollett, particularly Roderick Random, not least of which Nicholas is a pretty hot-headed youth who solves most of his issues with his fists, and indeed many people think he is just spirited and has his heart in the right place. Blah. About the only parts of the novel I could stand were when he was in Crummles's acting troupe. I just lost the will to continue when I hit some plot twists that seem to have directly inspired Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick. I went and read the plot summary, and the final plot twists are frankly so stupid that I never intend to go back and finish this. I'm going to give myself permission to drop Dickens a lot sooner, particularly the doorstoppers that are 700-800 pages long. Honestly, aside from Bleak House and A Christmas Carol, he kind of leaves me cold. I never liked George Eliot much either. The only Victorian era novelist that I consistently enjoy is Trollope.
I forget to mention in my post about Age is a Feeling, that I did pick up the script for sale for those with FOMO and who wanted to read all 12 episodes. I had kind of hoped she would stick around and sign them, but it turned out she had signed a big stack of them already. No guarantee all of them were signed. Maybe I was just one of the lucky ones.
In addition to dropping Dickens, I also made a somewhat radical decision in giving up on a jigsaw puzzle. This is the first puzzle that ever beat me, but I just wasn't making any progress at all. It was a large Monet scene but I just couldn't get anything connected aside from the white section in the very middle. I actually moved this from one room down to the basement, and even got another board to spread out the pieces, but it had literally been 3-4 years with making effectively no progress. Perhaps what is the saddest aspect of this whole sorry saga is that I simply wanted to put the puzzle together and give it away, but since I thought there was a very good chance a few pieces were missing, I just threw it away instead. It was not only giving me no joy, it was actively preventing me from working on things that I cared about more, like other puzzles or indeed the quilt I am working on for my son.
It is just really hard for me to give up on things like that, but clearly it was the right decision. I switched to a smaller and infinitely more fun puzzle involving cats, and had it put together in 4 days!
I have a puzzle of boats to do next, and then a Stuart Davis puzzle that I had initially planned on doing right after the Monet! So much for that plan...
Edit (7/3): Well, best laid plans and all that. I was over in Robarts returning some art books, and I decided to check out Frederick Seidel's The Cosmos Poems and a few of his other collections that aren't available on-line. Before I knew it, I had a tall stack of poetry books, all American poets from P (Michael Palmer) to S (Paul Strand), and one novel - Soft Water by Robert Olmstead, which is part of the Vintage Contemporary line. So I guess I will quickly skim the poetry and read Soft Water, and then I'll tackle Darkness at Noon. I think after that it will probably be Fante's West of Rome, Powell's The Golden Spur, Cela's The Hive and The Quick and The Dead by Joy Williams.
No comments:
Post a Comment