Category Archives: Books

First of all, the Slaves of Golconda reading group is picking its new book for the next go-round, so go take a look and consider joining in!  The group is open to anybody who wants to read along.  You can post about the book on your own blog if you want, or you can participate in the discussion board, or you can do both.  Or just post comments on other people’s blogs — whatever you like.  Litlove has some fabulous choices for the next group reading, so go check them out and cast your vote for what sounds good.

And now, on to John Darnton’s crime novel Black and White and Dead All Over.  In short, this book kind of sucks.  Sorry for the bluntness, but it’s incoherently plotted and badly written.  What saved it for me is that I went into it with low expectations and so appreciated what I could about the story and the context and let the rest wash over me.

The novel is set in New York City and describes a newspaper modeled on the New York Times.  The main character is a reporter, Jude Hurley, who is asked to write the story after a powerful, much-hated editor is murdered.  Working sort of alongside him, sort of against him, is detective Priscilla Bollingsworth.  These two share information when they think they have something to gain from it, and otherwise are involved in a competition/flirtation as they work toward solving the murder.  The murder soon turns into multiple murders, though, as reporter after reporter is killed off, each in a particularly gruesome way.

This sounds like a promising premise, which makes Darnton’s failure to do anything with it particularly disappointing.  But the book’s flaws are numerous.  The main one is that the characters aren’t interesting; most, really all, of them are stereotypes.  Jude is work-obsessed and ambivalent about the future of his relationship with his cardboard cut-out girlfriend, who does nothing but complain that Jude does nothing but work.  Their conversations are painful to read — painful not because there is any emotional pull to them but because they are horribly written.  The detective is similarly work-obsessed but also surprisingly attractive, capable of letting her hair down and belting out a blues tune when the moment is right.  The reporters and editors at the newspaper are a collection of nasty people, from plagiarists to malingerers to gossip-mongers — well, they are all gossip-mongers — and they might be interesting, if they weren’t very hard to distinguish from one another and very hard to care about.

Even the resolution of the mystery fails to be interesting; I was surprised when I learned who the murderer was, not because it was an exciting plot twist, but because I was given no reason to care.  The resolution seemed to come out of no where, and there was no way anyone could have figured it out ahead of time.  The explanation for the motive was full of information readers didn’t have access to ahead of time, and it felt haphazardly pulled together.

I did like reading about the world of newspapers and learning a little about how the process of story-writing and publishing goes on, but when I met with my book group to discuss the book, two of the members who have newspaper experience said even there he didn’t get all the facts right.  Our conversation turned to the mystery of how this book got such good reviews and why an editor didn’t shorten it drastically.  It could have been a much better book if it were shorter, with fewer characters and fewer incidents that didn’t add much to the plot.

It’s frustrating to think that in a time when it’s so hard for good writers to get published this sort of low-quality writing gets attention.  But this is his fifth novel, and he seems to have had success as a novelist, so something he’s doing is appealing to readers.  I just don’t get it, though.

I adored Jenny Diski’s book Stranger on a Train.  The book won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, and this sums up one of the things I liked about it, which is that it resists genre classification.  It’s a travel book, yes, but it’s probably not very much like what you think about when you think about travel books.  Diski, who is British, travels around America on Amtrak (and she also travels across the ocean on a freighter), but she sees no sights and goes to no tourist locations.  She is on the freighter, on the train, in or nearby a train station, and briefly in the house of some friends, but never does she see anything famous, except for the landscape viewed through the train window.

And the book is autobiography, or perhaps it’s better to call it memoir, and yet its focus is on her travel experiences with only some occasional trips back in time to tell stories from her earlier years.

What I loved about the book is summed up in its subtitle: “Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions.”  She does an awful lot of daydreaming and even more smoking; in fact, as she says at one point, smoking, or the quest for a good place to smoke, soon becomes the entire point of the whole journey.  Most of the trains she travels on have a room set aside for smokers, and as far as Diski is concerned, the seedier these are the better.  Smoking for Diski is a form of rebellion, a highly satisfying fuck you to all the rule-followers around her, and she glories in the badness of it:

It was not simply a matter of physical addiction — nicotine-replacement products work quite well in that respect — which prevented me from giving up (even on a pragmatically temporary basis) when confronted with the difficulties of smoking in the face of North American puritanism, it was the puritanism itself.  I didn’t want to do as I was told, I didn’t want to be more comfortable by conforming, giving in, as I saw it, to the pressures of an anti-smoking policy that was reinforced by moral imperatives.  Very childish.  Yes, exactly.  I also didn’t want to become an ex-smoker, not if it meant that I became someone who tsked and sighed whenever I caught a whiff of smoke in the air.

So she hangs out in the dirty smoking rooms with her fellow smokers, talking and sharing stories with them, enjoying their company so much that the non-smokers start to get a little jealous.

The “interruptions” in the subtitle mean a number of things — they are the layovers at various train stations and the visits Diski makes with some friends, but they are also the times Diski gets caught up in the stories and lives of the people around her and loses her detachment and solitude.  She struggles –as I would too — with her interest in the stories of the people she meets (which are invariably suprising and bizarre so that she begins to wonder if there is anybody nice and normal and boring out there — which there probably isn’t) and her fatigue with them.  It’s exhausting to interact with people all the time, even if you will never see them again.

Mostly, though, what I loved about the book is the voice.  I fear that Diski is someone who wouldn’t like me if we were to meet (I’m too much of a rule-follower probably), but I enjoyed her company.  She’s a difficult, prickly kind of person, but one who expains herself so well and has such interesting things to say and has such a great degree of self-awareness that she makes a wonderful traveling companion.

She manages to capture something true about America as well, even though (or perhaps because) she doesn’t set out to “see America.”  Instead we learn something about Americans — or least Americans who ride the trains, which is its own distinct subset.  She captures the voices and the mannerisms and the essence of these people in an open, nonjudgmental way that can marvel at people’s oddities without laughing at or condemning them. I suspect this is because she knows she’s a bit of an oddity herself — and, in fact, she knows that we all are.

I got lucky and found a copy of her book Skating to Antarctica on Book Mooch and am hoping to read all her nonfiction at some point.  As much as I love novels and will always read them (Diski has published quite a few novels too), this kind of nonfiction is what I love best — the genre-bending, voice-driven, loose-association-following kind.

Now that the school year is underway again, I’m back to listening to audiobooks on my drive in.  I started the year off with Henning Mankell’s crime novel The Dogs of Riga, which I snatched up at the library after remembering that Kate from Kate’s Book Blog praised this series highly.  I think Kate was right — I enjoyed the book, both for its plot and for the main character, Kurt Wallender.

Wallender is a police officer in Sweden, and is the kind of character who seems much too nice and normal to get caught up in the kind of violent plots he finds himself enmeshed in.  He comes across as unassuming — he’s not particularly ambitious; he’s competent but doesn’t seem brilliant at what he does, or at least he doesn’t think he’s brilliant at what he does; he can make mistakes and bumble along like any average person.  And yet when he finds himself caught up in a plot involving international politics that could potentially put his life at risk — yes, he hesitates and agonizes over what to do, but ultimately he jumps into the fray.

The story begins with two men out on a ship who see two dead bodies afloat on a life raft; they pull the life raft closer to shore and then abandon it for the police to find.  Wallender is assigned the case.  Initially the case moves slowly, and Wallender has little idea where their few leads will take them.  But then the dead men turn out to be of eastern European origin and are traced to Latvia, at which point the situation becomes an international one and suddenly much more complicated.  Wallender travels to Latvia and has to negotiate a world that is entirely unfamiliar to him — it’s set during the time when the Soviet Union’s grip on eastern European countries is loosening and new forces are beginning to take its place.  The situation is complicated further when Wallender falls in love with the beautiful widow of a Latvian police officer.

The Dogs of Riga offers a satisfying plot, but it also offers much to think about, particularly in Wallender’s musings about the way the world seems to be falling apart around him.  The book has a mournful tone to it — Wallender himself is quietly sad — and much of this sadness comes from Wallender’s feeling that it no longer makes sense to be a police officer and to try to carry out justice in a society that cares about it so little.  He toys with the idea of applying for a job as a security officer and leaving his police work behind because of this loss of confidence in society and because of the toll his job takes on him personally.  He’s drawn back to the fight for order and justice, however; as much as he longs for a life that is simpler, he can’t quite leave his idealism behind. He’s a reluctant romantic — he wants a simpler, less complicated life, but at the same time when the chance comes along to be a hero and help a woman in distress, he can’t say no.

Listening to this book on audio worked particularly well because of the way the reader’s voice helped to create a sense of atmosphere.  I respond more emotionally to a book when I’m listening to it, and this means I get caught up in the character development and the excitement of the plot twists and turns that much more.  Now I’m left hoping that my library as more Mankell books on CD …

David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a moving, beautifully written, emotionally taxing, very well-told novel.  It’s the kind of book that’s difficult, not because of the way it’s written, but because of the direction you know the story is headed in — you get caught up in the novel’s world and want to stay in it, and yet you know things are going to go bad at some point and you dread the thought.

The novel is a retelling of Hamlet, a fact that shapes your experience of it one way or another.  If you are familiar with the play, then you have the pleasure of trying to figure out which character in the novel corresponds to which character in the play, and which plot event is a version of the play’s events.  The novel doesn’t follow Hamlet exactly, but it’s close enough that there are plenty of convergences to pick up on. You also have a general sense of the direction the plot will take and it’s satisfying to watch exactly how Wroblewski works everything out.

The risk of retelling a well-known story is that the reader might lose a sense of urgency or feel that what happens is too expected and familiar, and I did feel a laxness now and then when the novel followed the play particularly closely.  But the method offers plenty of other pleasures (although perhaps “pleasure” isn’t quite the right word, since we’re talking about a tragedy here), not least the experience of hoping against hope that things will turn out differently than you are afraid they will.

If the reader isn’t familiar with Hamlet, there is another possible risk, which is that some of the plot events may seem a little strange and out of place.  I read this book for a book group (which hasn’t yet met) and another member who hadn’t realized that it’s a version of Hamlet was a little startled to find that a ghost makes an appearance in a novel that is otherwise very down-to-earth and realistic.  But this friend said it was only a small jarring moment in what was otherwise a good experience.

If you do get the Hamlet reference, there is the intellectual pleasure of seeing just how Wroblewski reshapes a story originally set in a very different time and place.  He does this wonderfully well; with the possible exception of ghosts, there is no awkwardness in having a Hamlet who lives on a farm in Wisconsin in the 20th century and grows up raising dogs.  Wroblewski handles the relationships among the Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude characters marvelously well, and his take on Ophelia is astonishing.

But to set the Hamlet issue aside, the world of the novel is remarkably well-realized and his main character an appealing one.  Edgar’s life is simple — he attends school but spends most of his time working with the dogs his family is known for, the Sawtelle dogs, distinguished by their unusually strong ability to communicate with humans.  He and his mother and father raise and train the dogs, pouring their energy into them so that they are among the best-trained dogs available.

Edgar’s life is also shaped by the fact that he was born unable to speak, although he can hear normally.  This is a mystery to the doctors, who conducted test and after test on him but could never figure out the problem.  Something about this inability to speak gives him an unusually close rapport with the dogs, so close that his ability to train them sometimes suffers.  His companion, Almondine, is always by his side; she is trained to keep an eye on him and to alert the others if he is in trouble.  Her devotion to him — and his to her — is almost too moving to bear.

The novel’s point of view is most often focused on Edgar, with some chapters that shift to other characters and now and then even to Almondine, and Wroblewski often tells us what Edgar is thinking and feeling, but he rarely tells us what Edgar thinks of his inability to speak.  This fact is simply a given, something Edgar seems to accept.  (The one exception to this general rule is horrifying, however — all the more horrifying because of this earlier reticence.)  We also don’t learn much about Edgar’s life off the farm.  We know he attends school, but what his experience is like there we have no idea, and we never hear of any friends or outside interests or future plans.  For such a long novel, it’s remarkably focused on just a few people in a constrained setting.  This narrowness of focus intensifies the sense of doom that slowly settles over everybody; if things are going to go wrong, they are going to go spectacularly wrong and it will be a horrifying sight.  The farm is all that Edgar knows — it’s his whole world, and this gives him a strength and a vulnerability that are wrenching to behold.

This is Wroblewski’s first novel, and I’m very curious to see what he will publish next; this is a wonderful debut from a writer I hope gives us many more books in the future.

(If you decide to read the hard cover version of this book, I’d suggest not reading the front flap, as it gives away way too much of the plot.  After all I’ve said about Hamlet, you might think I’ve given away too much too, but the description on the front flap gives many more details than I have here, and I wish I hadn’t known them when I was reading.)

I’ve just started some lovely new books that I would like to tell you about.  One is Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, which starts out at a fast pace, with a quick survey of the heroine’s childhood and then the early years of her marriage.  I am horrified at her struggle with her in-laws, who do their best to make her life as miserable as possible by ordering, manipulating, and guilting her into living as they think she should.  It reminds me of Evelina and the way that character got knocked around and ordered about by nearly everyone.  It’s painful.  But I have a feeling the action hasn’t really gotten going yet, and the book is about to take off in another direction.

Then I started Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, a collection of thoughts from a 14th century Japanese writer.  I picked up this book because of Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, which has a brief selection from Kenko.  I was utterly charmed by the very first entry (it is now on my sidebar):

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

This is such a perfect description of blogging!  Or at least what blogging can be.  It doesn’t really describe my method, as I tend to keep my nonsensical thoughts to myself, but I enjoy reading bloggers who use the medium this way, and I love the idea of spending whole days doing nothing but jotting down thoughts.

While comparing Essays in Idleness and Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, the editor of my edition writes that both books:

… belong to the random mode of composition known as zuihitsu (follow the brush) in Japanese.  This form — or lack of form — was most congenial to Japanese writers, who turned to it perhaps because it was less “dishonest” than creating fiction.  The formlessness of the zuihitsu did not impede enjoyment by readers; indeed, they took pleasure not only in moving from one to another of the great variety of subjects treated but in tracing subtle links joining the successive episodes.

Leaving aside the question of the honesty or dishonesty of fiction versus nonfiction (a point we could argue about for days), I’m drawn to this lack of form, the loosely associative kind of writing you find in essays and diaries and blogs.

Thinking of loosely associative kinds of writing brings me to my third book, Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train, which I already have fallen in love with.  It’s a travel book, sort of, but also an anti-travel book, meaning that Diski seems to be fighting against the usual approaches to travel every step of the way.  In the book’s first section, she describes riding all day on the London underground’s Circle Line, which, as the name implies, travels in a continuous circle, so she never had to get off.  She would visit the library, find three books to check out, and read them as she rode around in circles underground.  This is a perfect introduction to a book that, so far at least, is about trying to stay still while moving through space, or maybe I should say it’s about the hope that moving through space can offer a novel way of staying still.  The next chapter describes a sea voyage she took that allowed her to spend three weeks doing hardly anything but staring at the sea.  She’s traveling, but really she’s trying to find a section of time where nothing at all happens.  As someone who believes that if only life would slow down and nothing would happen for a while I would be able to think and come to grips with things and finally do something, I find this immensely appealing.  Of course, the attempt is doomed to failure, but I can’t help but admire her for trying.

Diski might be trying to stay still, but her book wanders all over the place, through time and space and from story to philosophical reflection back to story.  It reminds me of Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, another travel book that is about learning to stay still, and which also has a difficult, prickly persona who meanders through places and ideas, trying to make sense of life.  This is another genre I need to read more in — the anti-travel travel book.  I wonder what other examples are out there.

First of all, the reminder: the Slaves of Golconda are reading and discussing their next book soon — it’s Ruth Hall, and posts are due September 30th.  Anyone is free to join the group; just write about the book on your own blog and/or join the discussion at Metaxu Cafe.  It will be fun!

And now for the used bookstore.  I spend a couple hours yesterday afternoon with friends (three of whom have blogs!) browsing in the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.  This is no ordinary used bookstore.  It’s got multiple buildings, first of all, each of which is jam-packed with books, over 350,000, as I learned from the website.  These buildings vary in size and in their holdings; there is the main barn, which is where the store first began and which has all kinds of subjects, from African American studies to women’s studies and woodworking.  There is also an area called Ellis Island, which houses books new to the shop that haven’t yet been sorted.  You can shop here, but nothing is alphabetized.  Then there is the Annex, where the fiction is kept and where I spent most of my time.

There is also Hades, with this sign:

And there is the haunted book shop (horror, mystery, science fiction), the “last page” (travel, sports), and another building about a mile away, with a whole range of subjects.

And that’s not all — there also also sheds and tents and other makeshift spaces that hold books that you can look through on your way from one building to another.  And there were goats!  And cats too, and the shop owners offer coffee and donuts, just in case you tire yourself out from all that browsing.

It was a mix of indoor and outdoor shopping — people sat around on park benches and at tables scattered around the property, and you wandered indoors and out and hardly noticed the difference.  It was lovely!

Of course I came home with some books:

• Elizabeth Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses.  I love Elizabeth Taylor and want to read as many of her books as I can.  This one is a Penguin edition, but it was also published by Virago.
• Vivian Gornick’s The End of the Novel of Love.  This is a collection of essays on love in novels by people such as Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, and others.
• Margaret Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate, a Virago edition.  The store had a lot of Viragos, and I could have come home with a dozen, easily.
• Rosamund Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets, another Virago.  This is a sequel to her novel Invitation to the Waltz.

I will certainly be visiting this store again!  After shopping, our group went out to dinner and told stories of bike crashes through much of the meal.  These friends are readers, and they are also cyclists.  Who could ask for a better day, right?

I’m working my way slowly through Franco Moretti’s collection of essays The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture and am about halfway through it.  It’s the kind of book that’s best for browsing in rather than reading straight through, except that I’m the kind of person who prefers to read straight through if possible, and this book rewards it.  I decided when I picked the book up that I would give up on any essay that wasn’t interesting, but I’ve quit reading only one essay (because it was horribly written, full of the worst kind of academic jargon) and have skimmed my way through only a couple more.  Otherwise, I’ve read and enjoyed each one.

The essays generally take up a time period and a country and give you an overview of what was happening with the novel at that time, so, for example, there are essays on the novel in 19C Japan, premodern China, 19C Russia, ancient Greece, medieval France, and early modern Spain.  There are also essays that take up a particular type of writing that is related to the novel or to narrative more generally and explain that relationship, forms such as midrash, myth, monogatari (a Japanese form), romance, and qissa (an Arabic form).

I just finished a section with some of the most fascinating essays in the book so far.  The essays in the section take up the question of book production and consumption in various locations at various times.  So, for example, the first essay analyzes how many novels were published in Britain from 1750-1830, as well as how many novels were published anonymously, how many publishing companies were involved in producing new novels, how many of the new novels were epistolary in form, and how many translated novels were published and from what languages.  There are similar essays describing the situation in the United States, Italy, Spain, India, Japan, and Nigeria, covering periods from the 19C into the 20th.  Each of these essays has lots of tables and charts, and each one makes an argument about how looking at statistics on book production and consumption can alter the accepted wisdom about each place and time.  Literary critics and historians tend not to be number crunchers, but these essays make the case for looking at the publishing and marketing context within which writers write.

There is so much good information here!  I’ve been tempted to write posts on individual essays as I’ve gone along, but it was the kind of thing that got pushed aside when I had other books to write about.  But if all this sounds interesting to you, the book is worth a look.

It is written by various people, though, which means the quality of writing varies, as well as the level of difficulty and the use of jargon.  My biggest complaint about the quality of writing is that many of the essays seem to presume the reader is already familiar with the field.  This would be fine, as it seems to be marketed toward academics or at least toward very knowledgeable general readers, except that the book covers so many fields that even an expert can’t be an expert in all of it.  With my academic background I’m pretty well equipped to read this book, and yet I still found some of the essays disorienting and difficult to follow because I lack a background in, say, narrative forms in ancient Greece.  I sometimes wanted a little more explanation, a little more by way of introduction to each piece.

But not all essays have this problem, and some of the best have made me think about time periods I’m familiar with in new ways.  One of the best essays is by Franco Moretti himself, and it explores, among other things, the role of “fillers” in fiction — those sections of a narrative where no major plot events, no turning points in the narrative, occur.  One of the main innovations of the 19C novel is the way it draws on this filler more and more; whereas 18C novels often have one major plot event after another in quick succession (unless you’re Samuel Richardson, I suppose), Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice gives us three major plot events and the rest of the novel is made up of smaller moments:

Narration: but of the everyday.  This is the secret of fillers,  Narration, because these episodes always contain a certain dose of uncertainty (how will Elizabeth react to Darcy’s words?  will he accept to talk with the Gardiners?); but the uncertainty remains local, circumscribed, without long-term consequences “for the development of the story,” as Barthes would say.  In this respect, fillers function very much like the good manners so important in Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the “narrativity” of life under control – to give a regularity, a “style” to existence.

He then goes on to talk about the role of the everyday in the 19C novel — why it all the sudden became so important and what this has to do with the social and economic conditions of the time.

I’m only about halfway through the book, so I’m looking forward to what’s coming up, although at the rate I’m reading, it might be another half a year before I finish.

A while back I mentioned that there were some local library sales coming up, and, of course, I had to check them out (and volunteer at one — this year I volunteered for the second day of the sale, so I wouldn’t miss being able to buy books on the first day, a lesson I learned from last year).  I came back from both sales with quite a stack, and now I’m hoping to be finished with buying books for a while (but we’ll see of course).  Here’s what I found:

• Barbara Pym’s An Academic Question: The one Pym novel I’ve read I loved, Excellent Women, so I couldn’t resist snapping up another.
• Matthew Sharpe’s The Sleeping Father: I don’t know anything about this one, but the name was familiar, and I later remembered he wrote Jamestown, which got some blog attention, I believe.  Anyway, it sounded interesting.
• Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls: I haven’t yet read Rankin, and he definitely should be a part of my reading in the mystery genre.  A couple friends recommended him.
• Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost: This one is a Linda Wallender mystery; I knew there were Kurt Wallender ones, but not Linda Wallender ones.  I’ve got one of the Kurt mysteries on audiobook, so these two together will make a nice introduction to Mankell.
• Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams: This one has been on my wishlist ever since reading Lightman’s book on science, A Sense of the Mysterious.
• Anthony Trollope, The Eustance Diamonds: It seemed to me like a good idea to have an unread Trollope novel lying around, just in case.
• Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher: I’m not sure I’ll like this book, but I’d like to read Jelinek just to see what I think, controversial figure that she is.
• Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls: I’ve read the sequel, The Silver Swan, and now it’s time to read the first in the series.
• Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch: After having a great time reading Fingersmith, I couldn’t resist another Waters novel.
• James Salter’s Last Night: This is a collection of stories by an author I’ve heard praised by fellow bloggers; I might have preferred to find a novel, but this will give me a chance to read more short stories.
• Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches: Eventually I’ll have read everything Baker’s written.  Well, maybe not — his latest nonfiction doesn’t interest me very much.  But thanks to Book Mooch I have The Fermata on the way to me from Verbivore.
• Jane Gardam’s The People on Privilege Hill: I’ve heard of Gardam’s novel Old Filth and so was intrigued by this collection of stories.
• Robert Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica: I’m always happy to find NYRB books around, and this one looked particularly good.
• Jane Urquhart’s Away.  Verbivore is the inspiration for this purchase; she sounds like a writer I will like.

There were many more I could have gotten, but that seemed like enough …

I just got an email advertising an upcoming exhibition in New York City about Virginia Woolf, This Perpetual Fight: Love and Loss in Virginia Woolf’s Intimate Circle, and I’m really excited about it. It features “over 200 items, including books, images, letters and other manuscript materials, some of which have never been exhibited publicly.” It’s open September 17 to November 22. I’m sure I could drag Hobgoblin to see this, but he’s not exactly a Virginia Woolf fan (one of his very, very few failings). Is there anyone out there in the NYC area who might like to meet up one day to look through it? It could be a fun book blogger outing, for sure. Let me know.