The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

First volume of five, the Cazalet Chronicles. Enjoying it very much so far. Excellent control of shifiting points of view of all members of the Cazalet clan - and the hired help. Little daunted by the fact that there are four more, but only halfway through.

The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz

 

The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley

 

Having suffered through the lousy Peter Sellers movie treatment, I bought the book, which I remember reading in grade school with delight. Three chapters in, it's already much better than the film.

PostScript: the novel is charming and a real achievement. 

Let's go (so we can get back) : a memoir of recording and discording with Wilco, etc. by Jeff Tweedy

 

Okay for awhile, but didn't finish it. He's a fluent, conversational writer, but no really piercing insights.

The Keeper by Tana French

 

How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy

 

good but slight book - reads like a series of creative writing exercises, ballasted with philosophical rejoinders on the importance of creativity to the soul. Liked, didn't love.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

 

Another slow-building marvel from Andrew Miller. Two couple live across a field from each other in an English village - one man is a doctor, one man is new farmer, both of their wives are pregnant and become friends, and the relationships intermesh and are poisoned as slowly as snow falls and as viciously as snow keeps falling.

Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt

 

Liked it okay - didn't love it - haven't kept up with Eberstadt since her groundbreaking ISAAC AND HIS DEVILS.

There is an emphasis on exotic locale - the south of France, in the Pyrénées Orientales - and exoctic character nationality - French, gypsy ish types - and the lifstyle is either in that bohemiand strain - or in a more conventional privileged London class.

But the character don't exactly leap off the page - and everyone is high-minded and culturally snobbish and artistically conversant. I'm such a bitch!

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry by Adam Plunkett

 

Heavy explication of the poetry, with sparse surrounding details on Frost's biographical life (as much as is known). So far I'm very much enjoying the close readings of the early poems - Frost is a towering figure in American poetry and needs constant attention.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

 

Delicious as usual. The episodic nature of the plot - how things develop separately, then come together in the end - is comic and old-fashioned, but deeply satisfying to me, at least, in my immature way.

Ignatius Rising by Rene Pol Nevils & Deborah George Hardy

 

Sort of perfunctory "biography" - but to be fair, Toole died so young, completely unknown, his masterpiece CONFEDERACY languishing in a drawer after two years of interest from a major publisher. Then his book was published to great acclaim more than 10 years later, after the fervent attempts of his mother and the intercession of Walker Percy.

So by the time the world was ready for him, he'd already been dead for the entire 1970s. There are very scant primary sources from his early years.

Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

Good one, about a disgruntled career CIA intelligence officer outraged by the killing of JFK, who decides to track down the real killers behind the assasination, a conspiracy that almost everyone still believes in but can never agreeon.

There's a welcome lack of melodramatic murder and mayhem, and instead a tightening intellectual knot as the agent wrangles who knows what, and what they know, and narrrows down his pursuit until he's got the right people.