I remember brighter days when all this was a mystery

[sovay]

In the last three or four days, to judge from the pile beside my bed, I have read Mary Renault's The Charioteer and The Friendly Young Ladies, Lawrence Durrell's Justine and Balthazar, Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That, David Mura's Angels for the Burning, and Aischylos' Oresteia (in Greek).

I cannot possibly predict what effect this combination will have on my writing, but I hope to God I like it.

Comments

[deadcities-icon.livejournal.com]

Goodness.

Nothing like a little light bedtime reading!

[sovay]

It makes me happy!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Good heavens, that's rich. Do you never read froth?

Nine

[sovay]

Well, the Oresteia was because I had to: everything else is for pleasure. All right, I don't find Goodbye To All That exactly a pleasure, but I'd finished David Jones' In Parenthesis and this was the only other book from World War I in the apartment. My Robert Graves comfort reading is, naturally, I, Claudius.

Unable to sleep tonight, I read Angela Carter. I am dealing with an intense and hopefully soon to pass envy of her earlier novels, The Magic Toyshop and Honeybuzzard in particular. It's the tactile crowding of objects and setting along with characters who possess a three-dimensionality unassociated with the usual definition; people in her world have weight, their surroundings are cinematically realized down to rust cracks in the sink and thumbprints in the soap. It's the mundane written in such detail that it becomes fantastical. I don't know, I think, how to do that. I wish I did. Nor do I know how to practice it. I should either develop this skill promptly or get over this longing or both.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Isn't she just?

It's the mundane written in such detail that it becomes fantastical.

Yes. It's worldbuilt. A.S. Byatt does that, in her different way.

Nine

[sovay]

It doesn't work for me with A.S. Byatt, for whatever reason. I appreciate Possession, but I don't fall in love with it; her language doesn't fire my brain in the same way. I think the register might be wrong.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Wow, this I must read at some point.

[sovay]

Yes. You must. Honeybuzzard (also published as Shadow Dance), The Magic Toyshop, and Wise Children are my favorite Angela Carter novels; I love almost all her short fiction, but The Bloody Chamber especially. She will do things to your language.

[kraada.livejournal.com]

Well, I must say that simultaneously reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Mansfield Park" was quite amusing.

I read the one: death, intrigue and revenge. In the other, it's the height of action when a male character decides to pursue the protagonist.

However, it has certainly had a singular effect upon my writing. Mayhap it shall be naught but temporary -- though I am amused greatly by it, nonetheless.

[sovay]

If nothing else, it's cemented "mayhap" and "naught" in your conversational vocabulary . . .

[larryhammer]

It's the tossing Durrell into the mix that worries me most. Especially when not leavened with My Family and Other Animals.

---L.

[sovay]

I grew up on Gerald's The Amateur Naturalist . . .

[larryhammer]

I grew up on heaped piles of Gerald Durrell (Catch Me a Colebus) but imprinted most on Family and Birds, Beasts, and Relatives.

---L.

[sovay]

I haven't read any of those. Which do you recommend?

[ebess.livejournal.com]

And I shall pose to you a question I recently asked (http://ebess.livejournal.com/555053.html) over on my journal: how much time per day do you spend on pleasure reading?

Your books have arrived and are now on my bedside, along with Francine Prose's THE LIVES OF THE MUSES, THE GOLDEN BOOK OF FAIRY TALES, Maria Tatar's SECRETS BEYOND THE DOOR and Zipe's second half of his Sicilian folktales collection, the name of which I can't remember just now...

[sovay]

how much time per day do you spend on pleasure reading?

Far, far less time than I used to. Perhaps an hour before bed? An hour and a half on a good night?