By wink of water

It’s hot. Unbelievably so – as hot as it ever gets in Seattle, sun pouring into my south-facing apartment until well after 9 pm. Any DC native reading this will justifiably call me a wimp, but I’ll parry with “no AC” – it is somehow unGallic to artificially cool the air. My choices these past few nights have been between the noise and the heat; opening the windows offers a cool breeze, but there are loud cars and people on my street until the wee hours. So, in classic Seattle style, I’ve bought a fan and earplugs.

Still, despite the heat and noise, I love my little apartment. I don’t have internet at home, which leaves me lots of time to read. Perhaps too much time – I often get caught up in my book and arrive at work much later than planned. I brought with me to Paris some well-loved Jane Austens (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Lady Susan) and a few books I had purchased but never found time to read. The Jane Austens I read right away, the best cure for loneliness imaginable, though unfortunately too light to be long lasting. My favorite is Lady Susan, a minor work but so much fun. Then Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, not his best in my opinion, a quick, sad read about a poor fisherman. Back when the movie In Cold Blood came out, I bought Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, packaged with two short stories. Oddly, I think I prefer Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly to the version in the novella. The short stories were quite good though; perhaps I ought to read In Cold Blood, though in general I’m not a fan of true crime works.

A friend of Mike’s gave me In the Beginning…Was the Command Line, an essay by Neal Stephenson and available online for free. It’s a interesting take on operating systems, Windows versus Mac versus Linux, though it basically became immediately outdated with the introduction of OSX. Also, any CS people out there who haven’t read Stephenson really ought to; Cryptonomicon is my favorite (I find Snow Crash too unpolished and The Baroque Cycle trilogy badly in need of an editor), but he is quite prolific, and writes intelligently about our milieu. I then read Middlesex, given to me ages ago by Liz, and very enjoyable, though I’m a little surprised it won a Pulitzer. It’s a well-plotted book, with a fascinating, meandering story line, yet for me it somehow stays on this side of popular fiction. I don’t think it will age well. On the other hand, I didn’t want to put it down.

And right now I’m reading Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. She was a Jewish French novelist, already popular in the late 1930s, when she had to flee Paris; she wrote Suite Française while hiding in the countryside, where she was eventually found, sent to Auschwitz, and murdered. Her daughter had kept the manuscript but thought it was a diary; it was only recently that she realized it was a novel and published it. The book places me squarely in Paris, at the time of the German invasion and occupation, and makes me want to read more French literature. On the other hand, it’s not at all what I expected – the characters are for the most part upper middle class French who stupidly do not realize what is happening to them and are in any case superficial, selfish, and entirely unsympathetic. (Apparently she had quite a bad relationship with her mother, who after the war refused to take in her orphaned children – the scathing portrayal of the rich women in the novel is her only revenge.)

But this too will soon be done. So does anyone have suggestions on what I should read next?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.