Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this Christmas?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week – and we’d love to hear what you’re planning to read over the holidays. We’ll be back in the new year (and comments will stay open until then). Have the merriest of times, everyone!
VelmaNebraska has had the “pleasure” of reading Patti Smith’s first memoir, Just Kids:
I love the clarity and simplicity of her writing. She captures at once what it feels like to be an “ordinary” young woman as well as one who was clearly quite extraordinary, becoming adult in an extraordinary time and place, engaging with extraordinary people. The relationship she describes with Robert Mapplethorpe is deep and shining and touching. It is a relationship to envy: the product of loyalty, commitment, openness and the cultivation of very thick skin. This is a book that can’t help mythologising but I’m alright with that.
My mother lent me this book, which was bought at a train station by one of my elder sisters. It is a wonderful story about the wife of Ernest Hemingway told through her eyes. Although the book is mainly set in Paris and focuses on Hemingway’s road to success as a writer, it is really about a shy and insecure 28-year-old falling in love with an energetic 21-year-old genius. It is beautifully written and signposts the sense of impending doom for the relationship, whilst focusing on the joy of a young American couple in love in Paris in the 1920s.
What strikes me after a gap of maybe 15 years since I last read this is the simple yet oddly expressive prose Vidal uses. For once the comment on the jacket is actually accurate: “He can express in a phrase what a more solemn essayist would be hard pressed to put in a paragraph.” His wit and sarcasm are to the fore in most of the essays, but they never become carping – rather, they show up the lunacy that has been at the heart of American political life for the past century in an entertaining and amusing way. [...] The political essays are as good a chronicle of American history, post-independence, as you are likely to find in any more academic work. Finally, as an essayist I would say he ranks just behind Orwell in the pantheon of those I have read. This is a big book (1200 pages) in all respects, but is so readable the pages fly past.
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