I read Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics for Roof Beam Reader's TBR challenge. That's my third!
Reading a review of the new collected letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport sent me off to reread Davenport's translation of the poems of Archilochos (with an introduction by Hugh Kenner).
Briefly Noted
I guess I'm late to the party on this one, but that's OK, it was still quite a party. Very entertaining.
Googling for images shows that there are lots of cool covers for the book, but this is the one the library sent me...
Aphorisms by the Scottish poet and musician. With a collection of aphorisms one expects only to like some. But I had hoped for a higher percentage of hits. Still there are some good ones:
"'Not reaching one's full potential' need be no disaster, speaking as a failed mass murderer..."
Top of the Stack
I'm nearly finished with R. K. Narayan's The Painter of Signs (very good!). In it Raman, the painter of signs, falls in love with the practical, medically-minded Daisy. (Daisy runs the local population control clinic in Indira Gandhi's India.) That got me thinking about Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels in which Fred Fairly falls in love with a practical, medically-minded Daisy. (His Daisy is in training to be a nurse.) Both men are kind of hapless ditherers. I think Narayan's ending will be quite different from Fitzgerald's, but anything that brings Penelope Fitzgerald to mind can't be bad....
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| It's all about a girl named Daisy, almost drives me crazy |
Saturday Baking
Sunday Salon seems to require Saturday baking. Madame de Stael had servants to provide her interlocutors with petit fours, I assume. Around here it's me. But what's a salon without a piece of pecan pie:
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| I wanna see stars! |
How is it with you?
If you are late to the party, I guess I'm trying to get in after the gates have already been locked. I will add Diary of a Provincial Lady to a list I'm making for my next Classics Club list.
ReplyDeleteThere is something about Sunday Salon that seems to insist I do some baking, too. The stars on your pie are lovely.
I don't think I've ever read a collection of aphorisms. I would hope that most of them would be striking.
I hope you have a good week!
Seems like a bunch of people have been reading Provincial Lady lately. I was looking for something good and fun & it definitely fit the bill.
DeleteAll the scrumptious looking desserts at your website have definitely been an inspiration!
I have that copy of the Diary of a Provincial Lady. Very pretty and while I was late to reading it as well, I found it very satisfying. It made me think that surely Helen Fielding read it before she wrote Bridget Jones.
ReplyDeleteLove the possible link between The Painter of Signs and The Gate of Angels, though I’ve read neither. I just think it is neat when a reader has read enough to make those connections. It makes an already good book that much better I think.
For me, that cover makes the book look more saccharine than it is. It's, uh, not Charles Bukowski or anything, but I'm not sure about that flower print...
DeleteNot Bukowski. LOL! I like the wallpaper print. It makes me think of the end papers of Persephone books (who also published the Diary too, I think!).
ReplyDeleteThe pie looks tasty! If you loved the Provincial Diary, you might enjoy the other volumes (I think there are four in total, and although Virago originally published them in an omnibus, I think the newer edition only contains the first)?
ReplyDeleteTPL only has the others as eBook, which I don't like reading, but I may have break down & do so.
DeleteOr just buy a copy!