Gavin and I are headed up to gold country for a little r&r this holiday weekend. In my luggage, along with the necessary staples, I've packed:
Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires
Julian Fellowes' Snobs
J. Sheridan Le Fanu's The Wyvern Mystery
Chekhov's Longer Stories from the Last Decade
a Kimono-sleeved dress for lounging during the day
Have a lovely 4th of July!
I read Prep: A Novel the other day after having read two other books set at private schools, Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Gentlemen and Players, within the last month. I remember there being a lot of debate/discussion in the blogosphere over Prep when it came out but I didn't really pay much attention to it. Maybe it was the cover that turned me off. After reading it, I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. It seemed very Young Adult Novel to me--sort of a "beach read" (And after googling Sittenfeld just now to see what other bloggers thought, I find that at least one reader/writer I know agrees).
Sittenfeld definitely gets the insecure teen thrust into an alien environment, but I don't feel like I learned anything new or received any real benefit from reading it. In some ways the main character Lee reminded me of Nick in the incomparably better (though perhaps longer than it needed to be) novel The Line of Beauty. Both are keen observers, take everything personally, and imbue all whom they meet with the most negative impulses and motives.
As for Special Topics, it was miles ahead creatively and great fun for a word lover, but I found it lacking in the character department. I guess I expected more after the initial charm began to wear off. I'll be anxious to read the author's next novel to see how she develops as a writer. I started The Moon and Sixpence yesterday. It feels so luxurious to read something this beautiful and elevating after Prep. It's like eating a soufflé that took two hours to make after having just scarfed down a Twix.
P.S. What do you think about publishers adding "a novel" to titles? In general it seems redundant and affected but there's also something 18th century about it that is nice for certain books.
Nicki sent me this picture of Anna Gavalda's charming writing space. We both love her wallpaper and notice the perfume bottle to the left of her computer. So chic and Parisian! (I tried to find the wallpaper source online with no luck.) I'd ordered Someone I Loved after devouring her latest, Hunting and Gathering, last month (my post on it here). Someone I Loved was really good but I was disappointed when I turned the last page--what I thought was only halfway through the book--and found that the rest of the book was the same novel I'd just read, only in French! It didn't say anywhere on the cover that the book came with both the translation and the original French, so I thought I was going to have the pleasure of enjoying a much longer work!
Thanks to a tip from Lux Lotus, I was able to watch the video of Anna Gavalda and singer Rosie Thomas at Barnes & Noble's "Upstairs at the Square." View it here.
Mid-flight on Saturday night I finished the translation of Anna Gavalda's lovely novel Hunting and Gathering through a veil of tears. I'd grown to adore the characters so. As I savored the final chapters, it was almost as if I were about to part forever from my only true love. I've already read Gavalda's first book, a short story collection I raved about a few years ago with a most Miranda July-ish title, I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere. I feel the French author is a kindred spirit especially since some reviewers consider her to be "too sentimental," something I've been accused of more than a few times. This I won't deny in the same breath as I admit that it's not the first time I've cried over a book on a plane filled with strangers.
Earlier in the week I'd read Kate Atkinson's Case Histories and quite liked it, so I bandaged my disappointment at not finding Gavalda's only other novel Someone I Loved at the library (I ordered it online just now) by borrowing Atkinson's Emotionally Weird as well as Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which has been on my wish list for a very long time.
Both I picked up at the library yesterday where I accidentally left a shopping bag filled with lingerie at the information kiosk. (Another thing I've often been accused of is being too distracted.) I had to run back and get it, not even sure exactly where in the library I'd misplaced it--all the while imagining I would stumble over a hunched little eighty-year old man scrutinizing my purchases, holding them up to the harsh light for a closer look. So embarrassing... But the bag was perched right where I'd abandoned it with no one the wiser as to its contents. Disaster averted!
The only sure way I've found to survive economy class flying is to supplement travel with the right books and, naturally, the perfect tempting sweet treats for mid-air mini-snack breaks.
For this trip I had of course already read half of the books that I planned to take in the days leading up to my vacation, so remaining with me for the first leg of the trip were Alain de Botton's charming The Art of Travel and Rachel Cusk's The Country Life. Both were quaint and wonderful. (Nicki and my sister had both raved about The Country Life so I had very high expectations.) While awaiting the final boarding call (why do people queue to get on when we all have assigned seats?), I purchased Turkish Dried Apricots and a small beribboned brown box of Godiva truffles. Nothing is better than untying the bow on a box of fine chocolates when you could be eating a handful of peanuts.
For the journey home--when I wasn't dreaming of the picturesque canal view from the Pensione Seguso--I finished Henry James' The Aspern Papers, a thrilling mystery set in Venice, and started David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. I munched on Candied Ginger (I'd read it was a cure for nausea) and Edmund's Achilles heel, rose-flavored Turkish Delight, purchased en route to the airport via Victoria Station.
More on the middle part later.
