What I'm reading right now is Rappaccini's Daughter. I am in the midst of wrapping readings for my thesis defense, so there's an awful lot of storming through material, but it's fun.

Money? A treat. Read it. Read The Information, too, and all of Martin Amis's nonfiction.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, incidentally, is where you'll find the "mad agility of compound deceit," a wonderful phrase quoted in Martin Amis's Money.



Money was laid aside while I read Arthur Machen's Dog and Duck--a collection of newspaper pieces published in 1924, long out of print, and quite wonderful. An excerpt:

Humour, we may almost say, is a strange and exquisite byproduct of a world which is seen to be all wrong; a recognition that its incoherences and even its tragedies have something wildly funny about them