What I'm reading right now is Roger Chartier's The Order of Books.

Finished In the Name of Salomé. Though not a good novel by any means, it is certainly not as bad as its first pages led me to believe -- some passages are downright lovely, and its twin structure running time at opposite ends is ingenious and works well, for the most part. It is nonetheless plagued by artless watery prose and by heavily contrived situations.

For CWW. I'm three pages into it and cringing: sloppy, matter-of-fact, artless, no ear, nothing. Maybe it'll get better.

Finished the assigned portion of Books and the Western World and have done the report and fact sheet for Monday's class. The book catalogs a great deal of people and places -- there's a richness there that is both pleasing and alarming, and I had a moment of Borgesian panic when I reached the Sixteenth Century and I realized that, for all I know, the author could be pulling in these places and these bibliophiles and many of these works -- these cosmographies and atlases and prayer books -- out of the ether: that given my limited knowledge he could be making it all up. Anyway: exhausting. But fun.

Right now I'm reading Maryse Condé's Tales from My Heart -- it's a small volume for next Thursday's Caribbean Women Writers class. The first segment is lovely. It's a very short book, and there's something to be said for the feeling one gets when holding a very light, very thin hardback.

The Talisman sits at home. I'm halfway through it. I really want to finish it. If I finish Thursday's reading today I'll barrel through my New Yorkers tonight and tomorrow morning and get cracking on it -- I left it off at a really good place.

Condenotes: Gwoka drums. (p 15). topi tamboos (?) & dannikites (?) (p.30). bream (pic), purslane (pic), ramekin (p. 66). Gerard Philippe filmography. (p 133)

Finished Tales From My Heart -- icy, precise, and beautiful: the best thing I've read so far in the CWW class.

Finished The History of Mary Prince -- it's an invaluable document of a terrible time, and it's brief, and it reads well, but as literature it leaves me cold.

It had some great moments, and the letters re. Mr. Wood's reputation are a hoot. (By the by -- shouldn't captivity narratives be free? They should, indeed! Here it is.)

  

What I'm also reading right now is The History of Mary Prince and Krik? Krak!, both for my Caribbean Women Writers class. Both are surprisingly good. The Dandicat book is punchy and way dark and lean. (Thicker borders mean they are assigned. Nothing wrong w/ assigned books, though there's a definite difference between that which you pick out for yourself and that picked out for you.)

Finished Krik? Krak! -- good, but often muted.

Mary Prince words: Osnaburg, cooper.

What I'm rereading right now is The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I read it as a freshman in high school and I do remember enjoying it. So far, so good.

What I'm also reading is Karl Schottenloher's Books and the Western World: A Cultural History, for my History of the Book class. I have a report due on it on the 28^th. So far, so good.

Finished Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century, which mentions Trollope near the end -- which by the way is a close a parallel as you can get: this book sprawls w/ life, w/ all the wonderful ephemera and pop cultural buzz spawned by the New Media and the New Economy and every other bygone detail that seems to be fading away, specially now, w/ the recession and w/ the unimaginable turns this new century is taking us. For all the purported cynicism it's a rather sweet story, and well worth your while. (Caveats: the novel does sprawl, and it loses much of its narrative steam near the middle, though once you're there it's a pleasant ride.)

More Nabokovilia (p 395):

Dianne hands Ben the two stacks of Friday-afternoon reading. There's his trading stack (companies' fresh quarterly and annual reports, clippings from newsletters about metallurgy and cable TV) and his making stack (conceptual designs from his NASCAR track architect, deal memos for the rights to William Gaddis and Vladimir Nabokov books, the April P & L from BarbieWorld).