Nightbird nightsun nighttown

BLOOM

I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.

VIRAG

(Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper.) Insects of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly pulchritudinous female possessing extendified pudendal verve in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear's buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L. B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley! Buzz!

Once again, Happy Bloomsday to my mountain flowers.

Random notes on the California Antiquarian Book Fair

The first time I went to the California Antiquarian Book Fair, it was in downtown Oakland, near where I was working at the time. That year's theme was the Wizard of Oz, always a lure. The themes are pretty loose, however, & many vendors have their specialties that are completely unrelated to the theme. The fair is in northern California every other year; on its last two visits up here it's been at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

That first time, while wandering down the overwhelming aisles, I saw a booth offering a signed first American edition of The Handmaid's Tale. That's what I have! thought I. I wonder what it's going for? The answer was $500, so if I want to re-read that book I need to find a cheap paperback, while my signed hardcover sits pristinely on its shelf.

That was the price as of however many years ago that was (the pandemic messed up the neat biannual schedule). Values, of course, go up & down, depending on desire & fashion & other whim-driven parts of a collector's nature.

(the approach to Pier 27)

Here's how I acquired my signed Handmaid's Tale: when the novel came out in 1985, I was working at a publishing house in Boston. A friend was working in a different publishing house, also in Boston. Atwood was going to appear at the Harvard Coop to sign copies of her new book. My friend couldn't get away from work but I could so I told her I would get her a copy as well. When I handed Atwood the second book to sign, I said, with sadly typical clumsiness when speaking to someone I admire but don't know, that the second copy was for a friend who was "chained to her typewriter" (typewriter rather than computer: that's how long ago this was). I just meant that she couldn't get away from work. But as my fancy phrasing came out, I noticed Atwood stiffen ever so slightly. I realized she was probably fearing that my friend was a writer & that I would press her latest manuscript on the famous published author. I figured the best thing to do was to smile & say thank you effusively & then leave, so that's what I did. 

Ms Atwood, if I gave you a moment's discomfort on that day in 1985, though undoubtedly it's been long forgotten by you, who have better things to think about, then let me offer my apologies!

Signed books are odd things. If the book & author have achieved classic status, then the value skyrockets: meaning that your love for the book & the author has rendered your beloved signed copy essentially unreadable, therefore voiding the thing for which you love the item. It can then serve no practical purpose in a library, your own or a more official collection; it just connects you by principles of contagious magic, like the relics of the saints, with the beloved author, & with those words you now must read in a less costly form.

If only that were the only time in life when our love neuters into uselessness the thing that originally made us fall in love!

Despite all that, I have a deep & irrational love of signed books.

I am reminded of standing in line in a church in Padua, many years ago, to see the tongue of the famously eloquent preacher Saint Anthony of Padua. There I was, surrounded by stooped black-clad crones, waiting in line to see the shriveled, blackened relic. The crones, to my malicious mind, were also shriveled, blackened relics, though lacking in eloquence; Saint Anthony, though of Padua, was born outside of Lisbon, which made him a favorite with the Portuguese, & I have a beautiful old lithograph of him which once belonged to a great-aunt of mine, a singularly unpleasant woman whose conventional outward piety did not prevent her from wreaking damage on all around her, damage which went down through generations, as such damage does.

Book Fair drinking game: down a shot every time you see someone with a New Yorker tote bag.

Of course we're looking for "ephemera". We ourselves are ephemera, & like calls to like.

What we collect is a form of autobiography. I grew up reading the Oz books over & over, which is why I went to that first Fair, the one with Oz as the theme. Each time I've gone to the Fair most of the vendors have something that grabs me but as a sort of relief, there are some booths I can skip, such as those devoted to early medical publications: not my interest, but I could see they were magnets for others. I am happy to leave such things to those who want them. I have enough costly interests as it is.

I heard one young Indian man ask another if he had seen any books in Sanskrit. That made me realize that though you'd think a place like the Book Fair would be a goldmine for fascinating or hilarious overheard conversations, & maybe it is & I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, most of what I overheard was along the lines of "That looks like my copy of . . ." or "So I'll see you in Paris / Copenhagen / London. . . "

(Not a patch on the time I was at the Legion of Honor, looking at Ferlinghetti prints in a side room, when I heard an old lady out in the hall announce loudly, "Every night I wash & perfume my feet. I don't know why, I just do.")

These Fairs, with their double floors each holding dozens of vendors, can be overwhelming. Almost every booth has something of interest, from old prints (baroque European, Meiji Japanese, theatrical flyers of all times & places, all desirable) to rare books to fascinating photographs. It's a lot to take in. Fortunately or not, arthritic joints make it difficult for me to crouch down & see what's on the lower shelves, so a sort of inadvertent winnowing goes on.

The joints restrict me in one way, & poor eyesight in another. Some print, depending on the size & distance, is difficult for me to read. This means that I'm deprived of the harmless but enjoyable voyeurism of looking at what other people are reading on the train.

I made what I thought was the witty & thematically appropriate sartorial choice of my First Folio t-shirt, but the only actual compliment I received was on my bracelets, which I had pulled on without much thought. This seems allegorical, but of what I will let the reader decide.

I sent this photo to a friend who responded by asking if I were cosplaying as the First Folio. 

The Antiquarian Book Fair seems like an obvious place for cosplay, but I've never seen an instance of it: no bonnet-clad Austenites, no exotically appareled Byrons, not even an all-purpose dramatic black cape.. Does the cosplay crowd skew too young for something with "Antiquarian" in its name? Is cosplay more of a "fringes of pop culture" thing? But if so, what could be more fringe in our overly digital age than an interest in paper ephemera?

Maybe next time the Fair is here I should dress up as Aldus Manutius.

Some of the beauties at these fairs are clearly out of my financial reach, & so become akin to museum exhibitions. Then there is the dangerous amount: one large enough to give me pause, but still manageable, "manageable" in the sense that an anaconda finds devouring a warthog manageable: it can absorb it, but it takes a while & there's a distorting effect on the desired slender lines.

Since childhood I have had a low-level but constant fascination with the celebrated Ghent Altarpiece of the Van Eyck Brothers. I tried once, when a child, to duplicate it, using my deluxe 64-pack of Crayola crayons. I would not regard the results as a great success. Two years ago at the Book Fair, I was struggling to take it all in (having just discovered that there was an entire second floor of vendors) when I saw IT: a large & glorious 19th-century reproduction of the Altarpiece, issued by the Arundel Society. I was in one of my ill-advised fits of trying to be fiscally responsible, so I held off, feeling I should consider it at least over night, as it was definitely going for a warthog-in-the-anaconda amount. By the next dawn I had realized that yes, it was imperative that I own that piece. I headed back to San Francisco, but BART was full-on BARTing & between stalled trains & redirected destinations & unexpected transfers, I ended up getting to the Fair over an hour later than I had planned. I immediately headed to that vendor & made a beeline right to the Altarpiece at the back of his booth. My first inkling, as I stood there staring, practically drooling, that something was wrong was that the proprietor didn't come over to talk about the piece or anything, although I must have been glowing with the desire of ownership. After a few minutes I told him I wanted to buy it. He was sorry to say he had sold it five minutes earlier! (So, yes, if BART had been behaving, it would have been mine!) I practically collapsed at his feet. He did take my information down in case he should come across another example, but I think we both knew how unlikely that was. He headed back to England & I to the East Bay. I wonder if he ever thinks about that incident; I do almost every day. I had never known that such a thing as this Arundel Society reproduction existed, & now its absence is a gaping emotional hole in my life.

So often it's the extravagance we decline, the temptation we don't give in to, that we truly regret.

That was the same year an artist at the de Young Open ghosted me when I tried to buy her work. It was also the year I had to replace my roof, my furnace, & my hot water heater, all after losing my job. I wondered what cruel joke the Universe or Fate or whoever (some antic saint?) was playing on me: I had to spend so much on the literal roof over my head, when Art, that might have reconciled me to reality, kept eluding me.

Yes, I know, I know. Why does the Universe keep teaching me lessons I've already learned?

The absurdist emotional economy of those bad with money: "I had to spend [horrific amount X] on [necessary maintenance-type thing that absolutely had to be done] so I am justified in spending [slightly less horrific amount] on [thing I actually want]."

Just as there are people who consider themselves "culturally Jewish", I think (or at least I'm working on this theory) that there are people who are "aesthetically Catholic". One manifestation: veneration for the relics of the saints; see above re: signed books, & for another example, we have The Typewriter of Djuna Barnes.

Towards the end of the Fair, I circled back to one vendor & there was a young man asking the proprietor in excited tones how he had managed to get the typewriter of Djuna Barnes?!? The proprietor told him it came from a man in New York City, a long-time friend of the author. When the excited young man left, I asked where the typewriter was: right at my feet! (The arthritic joints had prevented me from seeing it, of course.) I asked permission to take a photo, because I try to be well-behaved.

Yes, I am slightly amused that all those venerating this relic of the celebrated Lesbian are men.

The reason I circled back to that vendor was I had noticed on his upper shelf a stunning framed broadside (I love poetry broadsides, & feel not enough publishers take advantage of this undoubtedly lucrative market). The poem was North Haven, Elizabeth Bishop's elegy for Robert Lowell – signed by Bishop! I've mentioned how much I love signed items, & I could read this one, as it was a framed sheet, not a book. But I told the vendor I would need to think about it. And I did: for about five minutes. I reminded myself, with the shadow of the Ghent Altarpiece hanging over me, that I knew I would end up wanting, craving, needing the piece, & if I didn't buy it now & carry it off with me, I would have to pay for shipping, & then worry about its safe arrival, & doesn't Socrates assert that the main guiding light of a wise life is to know thyself?

Like a wise man, I knew myself, & what I would & would not regret. Reader, I purchased it.

What I Read in 2025 (Part 4)

Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here.

King Lear

Shakespeare

Obviously one of the greatest plays ever written, & probably my favorite among Shakespeare's tragedies (I'm too much like Hamlet to have that as my favorite!). I'll just restrict myself to one thing here: my standard Shakespeare since I started reading him decades ago has been the Signet Classic edition. I bought myself each volume, long ago, until I had all 40, even having to ask a local bookstore owner to order for me the ones I could not find on occasional trips to the mall's B Dalton or Walden books (remember those?). I have, & have read, other editions, but Signet Classic was my basic. Time is taking its toll on everything & my copies are starting to fall apart. This time around my copy of Lear literally split in two, just like his kingdom. I sure did get my 75 cents worth out of that purchase, though.

All's Well That Ends Well

Shakespeare

I've actually already re-read this one! I'll tell a little story about the one time I saw it, on a far too rare trip to London, long ago. It was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, & the director made the brilliant choice to set it during the First World War, a time of great social upheaval, particularly in the roles of women, which put Helena's work as a doctor in a social perspective. Peggy Ashcroft played the Countess Rousillon, in her last stage appearance. I knew who she was & was excited to get a chance to see her on stage. And she was absolutely extraordinary. She was lambent, & I mean that literally: she seemed to glow with an internal light. Her performance is what I mostly remember from that long-ago staging. I have never seen anything like her luminosity, before or since. For a while I cynically, briefly, thought that it was just stage lighting. But then I realized that that couldn't be the case – if it were, everyone would have themselves lit that way. If you had enough money, you'd have the proper lighting follow you around wherever you went, from soiree to drugstore, the effect was that extraordinary. So I bow to the shining memory of the great Peggy Ashcroft.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespeare & John Fletcher

This one is also a bit static, at least in reading, though I've seen a DVD from the Globe & it seems to work quite well on stage. It's difficult not to feel that at points probably Fletcher is playing off his collaborator's previous work (specifically, the madness of the Jailer's Daughter, which hearkens back to Ophelia's), & of course the whole thing is working off Chaucer. It does have one line that has reverberated in my head for years: "On the sinister side the heart lies". This is on the one hand simply a factual statement: sinister means left, & the heart is on the left side of the body. On the other hand, sinister has some obviously threatening connotations, & lies also does double-duty as "location" & "telling untruths". A haunting set of puns.

The Tempest

Shakespeare

Another work whose familiarity may disguise for us how enchanting & very strange it is.

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History

Yunte Huang

A very interesting biography/cultural history centered on Anna May Wong, a brilliant performer whose career was limited by, guess what, American racism. Huang has also written books about Chang & Eng, the original "Siamese" twins (now usually called conjoined twins) & about Charlie Chan; he conceives of this book as part of a trilogy about the Chinese-American experience as seen through these particular lenses. I found it an absorbing read, though occasionally there were some assertions that threw me: one that sticks in my mind is that the Supreme Court ended Prohibition. It took a constitutional amendment to do that, not a Court decision. That's a relatively minor point. I'd be interested in reading his other books.

Time Regained

Proust

There's always the feeling, each time one finishes something like In Search of Lost Time & puts it on a list like this, that there should be some sort of profound summation. Instead I've realized that this novel has seeped so deeply into my viewpoint & even personality that it is impossible to dismiss it with a summation, no matter what profundities I manage to throw in there. It is simply one of the books of my life. As I assume I mentioned earlier, I've read it about every ten years or so, since back when it was regularly referred to with Scott Moncrieff's evocative & Shakespearean but inaccurate title Remembrance of Things Past. When I finished this time I will admit I wondered if maybe I was now done with reading & re-reading Proust, but lately I find myself referring to different themes & scenes & pondering different elements & I'm thinking now it will make its way back into the rotation at some point, & I will see how I have changed since our last encounter, & how it has shifted its prisms during my time.

Cymbeline

Shakespeare

I have the feeling this play used to be a lot more popular (maybe just on stage) than it is now (I'm basing this on the delightful collection of Shaw's Shakespeare reviews, which I read avidly many years ago). I've always loved it, partly for its mishmash of different times & places & partly for the amazingly convoluted finale, which step by step unravels the absurdly complicated plot (& as if it weren't complicated enough, right before Act 5 begins Shakespeare throws in some more, completely gratuitous, complications in the form of a dream sent to Posthumus in prison).

Radical Hollywood

Paul Buhle & David Wagner

An encyclopedic look at attempts to convey leftist political messages in Hollywood films. Not surprisingly, despite the political hay made by right-wingers over Communist (or generally leftist) influence on American entertainment, it was a constant, often unsuccessful struggle against timidity & the self-interest of capitalism. The progressivism was generally economic (rather than, say, concentrated on civil rights), which may have made it more suspect. For popular entertainment, Hollywood sure doesn't push for the people (or The People, to use the lingo, which of course refers only to some of the people). Nice to see some respect paid to these idealists, who often suffered for their attempts to bring some thoughtful political depth to mass entertainment.

Coriolanus

Shakespeare

This is another one that gets more fascinating each time I encounter it (which is often enough so that, again, my copy is falling apart). The complex portrayals of both aristocrats & plebes is just endlessly prismatic. Since I mentioned seeing Peggy Ashcroft on stage, I will name-drop seeing Ian McKellan in the title role of this play, also on a trip to London. As I was leaving the show, I overheard two old ladies, one telling the other that she wasn't sure about McKellan's looks, as she had always pictured Coriolanus as "a big, rough, hairy fellow". No idea where she got this, or what she got out of the play, but considering his complicated relationship with his formidable mother, a certain dependent boyishness seems essential to the role.

What Is Remembered

Alice B Toklas

I had read this many years ago, & reread it last year as I was thinking about it in the context of all the other Stein & Stein-related books I've been reading. It's quite poignant, evocative & often rather poetic, but also cagey: Toklas tells what she wants to tell, & the book ends when Stein's life does. An interesting sidelight into a relationship that was more complex than it sometimes seems. (I think I first read this in high school – on my own, of course, not as part of a class – & it's linked with the memory of my French teacher mentioning once the days when he worked in a bank in Paris & one day a fellow teller drew his attention to a dried-up old lady at another window: "That's the famous Alice B Toklas," he informed my future teacher. I wonder if anyone in the class besides me was dazzled by  this glimpse of a vanished world.)

The Book of Revelation: A Biography

Timothy Beal

This book is part of a fascinating series published by Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, which are basically reception histories of some of the world's key spiritual texts. This is a relatively brief book that covers a lot of ground: the background of Revelation, its strange & sometimes controversial fit with the rest of the approved books of the Bible, the ways it has been interpreted, not just theologically but politically & cinematically, & the some of the author's own history as someone who grew up in an evangelical Protestant household that believed in the end-times. In addition to the words of John, Beal also covers visual interpretations of the book (& it is one of the more vividly visual books of the Bible), from the famous woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer to movies of the sort that play not at the cineplex but at evangelical churches. Rich & engrossing.

Measure for Measure

Shakespeare

I've always found this one of the most fascinating plays in the canon. I had read it a couple of times before going to college, but I read it again of course for more than one class; I recall one discussion session in which the opening topic was whether Isabella was "frigid" or not (I will mention right now that the professor was a woman, & a self-described feminist). Something about this approach –starting off with Isabella's presumed sexual peculiarities – struck me as wrong-headed, but I wasn't quite able to formulate my objections (&, being fairly timid about speaking in class, I'm not sure I would have said anything anyway). The point, to me, was that it didn't matter what Isabella's sexual make-up was: she was being coerced by Angelo into having sex with him, & that's rape, regardless of what was going on with her (& she was, of course, planning to enter a strict order of nuns). I'm not saying that the class was defending Angelo, but they were starting with "what's the deal with Isabella?", which struck me as t he wrong way around. What's the deal with Angelo, who, in a city overfull with sex workers, has to single out & victimize the one woman who, in austerity & integrity, most resembles him? Why does he need to humiliate this mirror of himself? Years later, during the notorious confirmation hearings for the notorious Clarence Thomas, I read an editorial that compared him to Othello. That struck me as a stretch, & a comparison prompted mostly by their mutual skin color (at this point I have no idea who the writer was or what newspaper or magazine I read it in). I remember thinking, no, he's like Angelo: why is he singling out a woman who is a mirror of his own experiences? (Yes, clearly, I believed Thomas's word against his.)

The Winter's Tale

Shakespeare

This is one of the plays that has become hugely popular in our own time. I don't think it was big on the 19th-century stage. I love the artificiality of it, the very sophisticated use of the simplest theatrical tricks: someone dressed as Time enters as announces that 16 years have passed. OK! Given the way many of us experience time, I find something like that in a way more realistic than the painfully mundane "kitchen sink" dramas. The telescoped portrayal of Leontes's jealousy is a dramatic & psychological tour de force. I saw one performance that brought out the boyishness of the King (meaning also a sort of sexual immaturity & insecurity, & an almost romantic attachment to his friend Polixenes) that made it all quite convincing (in fact the character reminded me of someone I knew who was struggling with various sexuality issues). Another interesting role is Paulina. She always goes too far, she's even a bit of a nag, but she has a good & generous heart in many ways. I've seen performances that didn't bring this out, which was a mistake: in the scene in which she persuades the guards to let her through with the baby, she harangues the man but at the end realizes she's maybe gone too far with someone who is essentially powerless & she assures him she'll protect him from the consequences of his action. In this particular performance, she sniped those lines at him contemptuously & with condescension. What a mistake. I knew then it would be a fairly long evening.

The World of Christopher Marlowe

David Riggs

With the end of Shakespeare's plays approaching, I decided I'd reread Marlowe, so this was prep work.  Marlowe had a short & not always well documented life; this book is an excellent survey, as its title suggests, of the world in which he grew up: how a poor boy went to University on a scholarship, what he would study there, how he would try to make a living, the sort of intellectual currents he would have come across, & how those are reflected in his plays. Riggs suggests that Elizabeth I had knowledge of the plan to murder Marlowe: a far greater mark against her, if so, than the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

Camera Man

Dana Stevens

About Buster Keaton. Stevens had the clever idea of using Keaton's life, through vaudeville, cinema, & television, & his experiences with writers, studio executives, & others, as an angle on a sort of media-centered history of the 20th century. Entertaining & thoughtful, though I value his film College more highly than she does (maybe it just hits home more for me) & I disliked her rather trendy criticisms of Chaplin, which are mostly based on his sexual history (there's no indication that any of his female friends was unwilling, even if we find some of them, as did some of his contemporaries, a bit young for him).

Hamlet

Shakespeare

Saved this one for last. In the odd way in which certain artists or artworks, while retaining their high position, get put slightly out of the spotlight by other artists or artworks – for example, a few years ago, I stopped hearing about Beethoven as the pinnacle of Western composers, & while he wasn't cast aside, the top spot was increasingly assigned to Mozart, at least by some –I have a feeling that the play now considered the height of tragedy is King Lear rather than Hamlet. Perhaps its almost nihilistic bleakness & absurdity speak more to our century.

Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s

Ethan Mordden

This was an unexpectedly solid history. I had picked up the notion (from where I don't know) that Mordden was mostly going to offer anecdotes of a bitchy/amusing variety, but the knowledge is detailed & wide-reaching. He did a similar volume for the ensuing decades, up until I think the 1970s, & I've added them to the relentlessly growing TBR pile. This one made me want to find recordings of all the works he mentioned.

A Drifting Life

Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I was wandering through the Biography/Autobiography section of the library & saw a thick paperback volume that stood out as it looked like manga rather than a regular biography, so I took it out. I was not familiar with Tatsumi before I read this, but he is  indeed a manga artist, one who helped create an audience for darker stories. This is a wonderful book: a history of manga, a history of post-war Japan, a history of a family, & a history of a young man finding his way in the world & discovering his path as an artist, all evocatively written & drawn, with a sense familiar to readers of Japanese literature of this world as evanescent & in many ways puzzling.

OK, enough for this round.

What I read in 2025 (part 3)

Part 1 is here & Part 2 (which is just Shakespeare's history plays) is here.

As You Like It
Shakespeare

the lovely green & golden world

The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare

This reads surprisingly well, unlike most farces

The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser

I re-read this last year, & loved it so much all over again that when I finished the last page I turned back to the beginning & read it all again. This time I switched from my battered Yale University Press paperback to a lovely copy the Heritage Press issued in 1953 to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It has lovely woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker. It does not have any annotations, but at this point I'm not so reliant on them & if a usage stumped me I could always refer back to the Yale paperback. Spenser is one of the most rich & sensuous of English poets. His subject matter – knights, sorceresses, dragons, quests – will probably always go in & out of favor & fashion, but I think we are definitely in a Spenserian moment (dragons!). Last year in conjunction with the Faerie Queene I read Catherine Nicholson's Reading & Not Reading the Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism, which I strongly recommend if you're interested in Spenser's epic. The subtitle suggests the book is more limited than it really is; it uses each Book of the epic as a springboard for a reception history of the work. The chapter on why The Faeries Queene is still printed with something like the original spelling, rather than the modernizing usually applied to early modern texts, is particularly fascinating (I used to work as a typesetter, albeit an electronic one).

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare

Well, OK. It's a bit slapdash; enjoyable enough, though the wives strike me as a bit too smug ("wives may be merry & yet be honest too": whatever). Its main contribution to the world is in serving as the inspiration for Verdi's Falstaff; Shakespeare, like Plump Jack, is not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others. Somewhere I have a volume of Auden's lectures on Shakespeare (bought years ago, still not read) & apparently for his lecture on this play he walked into the classroom, put Verdi's opera on, & had nothing more to say.

Sodom & Gomorrah

Marcel Proust

Volume 4 of In Search of Lost Time. This is the one in which the secret, mostly queer, sexual engine of this world is opened up for the Narrator, who by chance is made a voyeur at an encounter between the formidable Baron de Charlus & the tailor Jupien. It's the key that unlocks the adult world, foreshadowed in the first volume when the Narrator, as a child, is unintentionally a witness to a lesbian scene between Vinteuil's daughter & her "friend". Voyeurism, unintentional & otherwise, is one of the recurring themes of this series. It's a bit fashionable now for people to roll their eyes at how everyone in this novel turns out to be gay except the Narrator (though the term queer is both capacious & flexible enough to incorporate him; I now people nowadays who call themselves queer with less justification). I think such a reaction is mostly an attempt to be sophisticated at the cost of historical awareness. It's only recently (very recently) that same-sex relations were accorded any kind of respect, & even now that is not a universal attitude.  (And there have been other periods that were relatively open in various ways about same-sex attraction; there's no guarantee that our somewhat positive moment will last.)

Narrative Poems

Shakespeare

I hadn't read these in a while. Venus & Adonis is quite saucy & delightful, with lots of amusing gender-flipping (Adonis is the coy beauty who isn't interested in love, while Venus is the aggressor; in one rather comic scene, she pulls him off his horse in her eagerness). The Rape of Lucrece is, as is only suitable, more ponderous going. 

The Bravest Voices

Ida Cook

One of my sisters told me about this memoir; I had never heard of it, which, in retrospect, kind of surprises me. Ida Cook was a British woman who, under the pseudonym Mary Burchell, wrote romance novels. She did some other things, too: she & her sister Louise were passionate opera fans, & anyone with an interest in the art form will swoon at not only the performances they heard but the friends they made, among them Amelita Galli-Curci &, in particular, Rosa Ponselle (& later, towards the beginning of her career, Maria Callas). There must have been something special about them; Cook is too modest (too mid-century British, perhaps) to say this, but to become friends with such a series of renowned singers says a lot about their appeal, even beyond the joy in seeing two plucky young women determined to scrimp & save until they could afford to travel to New York & the Metropolitan Opera to hear their favorites (Galli-Curci hosted them & gave them tickets when they arrived). It's like reading a real-life version of James McCourt's Mawrdew Czgowchwz, in which opera is the center of the world. But in the middle of that story is another one: during the 1930s, thanks to their friendship with some European musicians, the sisters used their opera-centered trips to continental Europe to help smuggle out possessions (sometimes wearing the jewels & telling the border patrols that they were paste from Woolworth's) & information for the increasingly threatened Jewish artists. They also helped a number of Jews get out, sponsoring them in England. After the war they resumed their opera-centered lives. An amazing story.

Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling

Ross King

 An impulsive grab from the library (there are more of those coming, lots more). Interesting & detailed account of the painting of the Sistine Ceiling, which Michelangelo didn't want to do, of course.

Mrs Reynolds & Five Earlier Novelettes

Gertrude Stein

Stein wrote Mrs Reynolds during World War II, when she & Alice B Toklas were, as Jewish lesbian Americans, in extreme danger. It is an indirect account of living under such constant tension. The war is happening, & two frightening characters, Angel Harper (Adolf Hitler) & Joseph Lane (Stalin) float overhead. Mrs Reynolds helps control her anxiety by, among other methods, relying on the prophecies of Saint Odile (of Alsace), an eighth-century nun whose ambiguous words pointed towards the ultimate defeat of the Germans. The atmosphere of anxiety is so well captured. The novel would not be improved if it were a more straightforward historical rendering; it is an eternally relevant evocation of living under tension. The name Angel Harper is ingenious. It sounds seraphic & poetic: angels! harps! But the menace is palpable.

Twelfth Night

Shakespeare

One of my all-time favorites. I seldom see it done right, though. There is an underlying melancholy, a poetic wistfulness, a twilight mood, that is often shoved out of the way in favor of a more farcical approach to staging. The Merry Wives of Windsor supposedly was written because Elizabeth I wanted to see Falstaff in love; the "romance" of Toby Belch & Maria is closer to that than the Merry Wives.

The Taming of the Shrew

Shakespeare

I hadn't read this one in a while. It's still staged frequently, which is somewhat surprising. But audiences seem to love it & I think many directors see it as a puzzle to be solved: how to make the gender politics less regressive? I have probably mentioned this before, but not recently so here goes: I saw a production in Boston that for me really nailed a lot about the play. I can't remember the name of the theater; it was in the 1980s, in a small space on Beacon Hill (I still have the program somewhere, I'm sure) It was set in a vaudeville house; Kate started as one of the baggy-pants comedians & ended up as one of the soubrettes; she delivered the long final speech in mincing tones & it was, honestly, one of the most genuinely terrifying things I've ever seen on stage. It stayed true to the play but was thought-provoking. That is my way of stating I loathe The Wink. You know what I'm talking about: Kate delivers her long final speech & then, when Petruchio isn't looking, winks at the audience. What I hate about it is that it turns Kate into Biance: someone who pays lip service to "the patriarchy" but then goes her own way. I think that's untrue to the character. Kate is an extremist: at the start, she is not only a shrew, she is the most notorious, violent-tongued shrew around. When she is "tamed" (using techniques – sleep deprivation, starvation, arbitrary & absurd pronouncements & orders – that are regularly used to break prisoners) she turns into a true believer in a husband' supremacy. Whatever she believes, she is fully committed to. No winking for her! A problem with the play is that the script has not survived in complete form: it's often forgotten (& usually omitted in performance) that there is a framing story, in which a rambunctious drunk (a male Kate, in a way) named Christopher Sly is, in fairy-tale fashion & for the amusement of some aristocrats, fooled into thinking that he is a great lord who has been ill. The Taming story is a play within a play, meant to entertain him. As such, it is not meant as a realistic picture of the world, but a farcical view, almost a parody, of that world's social assumptions. When Bianca & the Widow at the end show that, once they're married, they aren't going to continue to acquiesce in male supremacy, it's an echo of Sly's forthcoming return to his powerless state of drunken obscurity. But sadly that ending was not preserved, & the framing story just hangs in mid-air.

Absolute Monarchs

John Julius Norwich

This is a history of the papacy; though that is obviously an immense & comp0licated story, this is a relatively concise & extremely entertaining history; in fact, a wild ride. I enjoyed it so much I could overlook Norwich's dismissive comments about Robert Browning's The Ring & the Book, which I think is one of the great Victorian novels (which I wrote about here). He also suggests the possibility that Julius II had an affair with Michelangelo! It's a tribute to Norwich that this suggestion seems plausible rather than salacious or sensationalistic (but also: wow).

The Captive

Marcel Proust

Just as his characters change through time in the course of the novel (or novels), so do our perceptions of his characters change in our times, as we read &/or re-read & as our world changes around us. That's one way of saying I had misremembered a major point from the end of Sodom & Gomorrah, even though I've read In Search about every ten years since I was a teenager (long ago, for those keeping score at home): my recollection, or perhaps what I wanted to have happen, was that when the Narrator's affair with Albertine is re-ignited by the discovery of her long-time friendship (but how intimate a frienship?) with the lesbian Mlle Vinteuil & her girlfriend, it's because he sees the intimacy between two women as an emotional territory to which he has no access; possessing Albertine is an attempt to possess an emotional life he, as a man, can have no part in. It's actually more regressive than that: he wants to "protect" her from this "vice". He does so by, as the title suggests, keeping her virtually a prisoner. This control is not something most current readers are going to sympathize with. The novel doesn't, though, suggest that we should, or need to: this is one of the varieties of love. I said earlier that the Narrator could be described as "queer", & I stick by that: his openness to same-sex lovers is, in the context of his world, enough of a variation from the straight & narrow. He does refer often to homosexuality as a "vice" but inevitably dances it back, with phrases such as "if it be a vice". Albertine is a slippery character; we (or I) can't help sympathizing with her wish to live her own life, but she also willingly plays along with the Narrator's control of her; she remains just a touch out of reach of the Narrator & of us, which lends some strength to my thought that the Narrator's desire to control her is related to his wish to possess that which ultimately can't  be possessed.

Antony & Cleopatra

Shakespeare

Every time I read this one it strikes me as more & more astonishing: the rapid, almost cinematic scenes; the astute analysis of power, erotic & political; the analysis of gender (the fluid, sophisticated Egyptians versus the forthrightly male Romans); the flashes of great poetry; the whole exotic love-death at the end. . .  Cleopatra is such a great role. Maybe some day I'll get to see it on stage.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare

One of the greatest & most universally beloved of the plays. This is probably the one I've seen staged most often. I will admit that Bottom, to me, is not the great role it is often presented as, but that doesn't really matter. An endlessly rich play, with its mixture of worlds: the fairy world, the Athenians, the workers. It's often overlooked how sophisticated the humor often is. The burlesque of Pyramus & Thisby, for example, often presented as crude farce, is in fact an extremely cultured parody of Elizabethan dramatic poetry & dramatic tropes as well as of Arthur Golding's celebrated translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Titus Andronicus

Shakespeare

I've always had a soft spot for this play. It used to be standard to describe it as Shakespeare's worst play, or even to deny that The Master had any hand in it. On the contrary, it's a very strong play, & works well on stage (as anyone can attest who has seen the Julie Taymor film). It foreshadows King Lear in its analysis of self-willed power destroying itself & its country. The notorious violence plays better for an audience that is used to Tarantino films.

Marcel Proust: A Life

Edmund White

This brief volume is the only thing I've read by White. It was from the library; I think I spotted it when I checked out (last year) a biography of Proust's mother. Its a good brief life; as you might expect, given the author, he's very interested in his subject's sexuality. There is an odd moment when he describes the recessive, scrupulous musician Vinteuil as "a wimp" which seems weird & hardly le mot juste, & not only because "wimp" has, thankfully, fallen a bit out of use.

Romeo & Juliet

Shakespeare

An interesting thing that adaptations of this play often miss is its lightness & fantasy. The intensity of the young lovers seems to take place in a world different from the one they live in (hence their frequent use of the sky, the heavens, the stars, as descriptors for their love). But stories of young love are not really my thing, & maybe that's one of the reasons that, though I've seen adaptations (operas, ballets) of R&J performed live, I've never seen the play itself on stage. Maybe that's OK. Directors frequently stage some obvious "reason" for the family feud (one family is White & one Black! one is Catholic & one Protestant – & we're in Northern Ireland! one family is the Hatfields & the others the McCoys!) but that's West Side Story, not Romeo & Juliet. It's right there in the first line: "Two households, both alike in dignity. . . " There's mention of an "ancient grudge", but no cause for the grudge is ever given. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Shakespeare to slip in a few lines about some specific origin of the feud, so his failure to do so must be a deliberate choice: there is no reason for the state of enmity; it just has long been so, & so it continues. (Let me also note that in the Pyramus & Thisbe episode of the Metamorphoses, often cited as one of the inspirations for this play, Ovid also does not give a reason for the enmity between the families of the lovers.) Making the families specific antagonistic factions gives substantial historical & political precedence for the enmity that is not meant to be there. The "ancient grudge" between the Capulets & the Montagues is merely a habit, & an absurd one.

The Fugitive

Marcel Proust

Our Narrator deals with the consequences of his actions, once Albertine breaks free. Again, multiple perspectives, through time & through different, incomplete & arbitrary, bits of information unsettle where we thought we were.

Wars I Have Seen

Gertrude Stein

It was sort of by chance that this was the Stein book I picked up after Mrs Reynolds, but it turned out to be an excellent choice, as it is the real-life version of that fictionalized account of living through the fascist occupation of France. Written secretly, it is a fascinating account of what it's like to live under the constant downward pressure of the occupation. Stein opens with remembered wars from the rest of her life, including stories told her about the American Civil War.

Troilus & Cressida

Shakespeare

Such a great play, so much anger & corruption amid the official heroism, & such a short, slender tale of love running through it.

I Heard Her Call My Name

Lucy Sante

This is Sante's memoir of her times & her gender transition. Her times sort of overlap mine, so that's one fascinating aspect: a memoir of the intellectual & cultural currents of the time; she was involved in the NY Review of Books, which I was reading at the time, & am still reading. She explores her relations with women both admirable & not so admirable (wives, girlfriends, her mother) as well as with the woman she eventually felt or admitted was inside her. Those of us who have never felt comfortable in our bodies will relate to her discomfort, even if hers takes a different form. I have to say, though, that once or twice she mentions that as a man she had never experienced being dismissed or ignored because of her gender, & . . .  I accept her version of her life, but: really? I am absolutely flabbergasted when men say things like that. Is their experience of being a man in our world really so different from mine? I am frequently ignored, dismissed, or targeted because of my gender, & I'm not even talking about the times when I'm being attacked for my many failures to live up to assumptions about how men are, or supposedly should be; I'm talking about people who just see me as a generic Man & react (negatively) accordingly. That claim was a minor moment in an interesting read, but obviously it's one of those minor things that resonated with a particular reader (in this case, me).

Othello

Shakespeare

This is one of the most psychologically & verbally subtle of Shakespeare's plays, which is saying a lot, of course.

Sonnets

Shakespeare

I hadn't read these in quite a while. They are even stranger & more beautiful than I had remembered.

Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth, & History

Timothy Wilson Smith

I find Saint Joan endlessly fascinating. What I particularly liked about this book was that it continues past her life into a reception history, exploring her changing image & the different ways she was understood & used down the centuries.

Tender Buttons

Gertrude Stein

Echt Stein. I've read this before. People often wince when I mention Stein; my theory is that if you connect with her rhythms on a deep level, you're all in. If you don't you don't. What is meaning? what does meaning mean? As Stein said, if you enjoy it, you understand it.

Love's Labors Lost

Shakespeare

This is a gorgeous iridescent bubble of a play, but I have to admit I'm not always in the mood for it. It is an early example of Shakespeare's fascination with lovers who fight a battle of wits that both conceals & reveals their feelings (see: Beatrice & Benedick). I have to confess that I am, as they say, triggered by scenes in which people talk during a performance; in this one, while the allegedly witty lords & ladies mock the best efforts of the lower orders to put on a pageant, one of the performers stands up for himself by pointing out, "This is not just, my lord; not generous" & YES.

These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Martha Ackmann

This is an example of the trend in biographies on taking isolated moments & using that as a way of telling a life (rather than a chronological procession from birth to death). I find this an excellent approach, as it plunges us right into what we're there, & earlier & somewhat extraneous information can be fit in where suitable. This book gives a lively sense of what Dickinson was doing & feeling.

OK, I think that's enough for this entry. More to come. . . .

What I read in 2025 (part 2)

 Part 1 is here.

King John

Shakespeare

So now we get into the history plays. This one is unrelated to the main series, but covers similar themes (chiefly, where does power come from & how does it operate & maintain itself). I'm surprised this play doesn't get staged more often; it has a lot going for it, including many characters any actor would find a gold mine.

Richard II

Shakespeare

As they say in the movies, it begins. That is, the arc of royal history as seen by the Tudors, from Richard II losing out to Henry IV, the kingdom descending into the chaos of the War of the Roses & the final triumph of the youthful Henry VII (I am deliberately omitting Henry V, as I'll have more to say about him & his play in a bit). But this first spectacularly inappropriate king is foreshadowed for us by the vacillating King John, who is weak in a different way from Richard. It can be difficult at first to realize just how weak Richard is, as he is an endless fountain of whirling words. But it's his creation of himself through histrionic speeches, his over-reactions, his theatrical self-representation, that occupies his attention, not governing a kingdom that is slipping away from him. (He provide an interesting contrast with Henry V, another theatrical, self-created king, as I discuss below. Interesting that Richard captures my sympathies in a way Henry does not.) I love the abdication scene, where Richard displays the dazzling bounce of wordplay so beloved of Elizabethans (& me, though not everyone responds to it) to such an extent that one exasperated noble interrupts to ask if he's actually going to, you know, do something, meaning abdicate. The wonderful thing about Shakespeare is that the dizzying puns carry psychological weight: 

Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be.

Therefore no “no,” for I resign to thee.

Now, mark me how I will undo myself. . . . 

"No [I]": exactly. He's fascinating, but would you really want to have to rely on him as ruler?

Henry IV, Part One

Henry IV, Part Two

Henry V

Shakespeare

The Henry IV plays are of course endlessly rich, but I've always found Henry V a bit of a slog. The first Henry IV play was apparently so popular it required a sequel, & the characters (particularly, of course, Falstaff, but we shouldn't underestimate the depth of the others) are so rich that the story could easily continue, even though the basic psychological dilemma – Prince Hal's insistence on acting the wild man, to his father's dismay – is, if not actually solved in Part One, mitigated enough so that Henry IV & Hal can enact the same process of transgression then forgiveness at the end of Part Two. But then that's the beauty of Hal's behavior: he sets it up so that he will only be what his father wants him to be once the father is safely dead, & therefore can never know that his son did not disgrace him. Henry IV may be a master of realpolitik, but Hal's cynicism puts him to shame: at the end of his very first scene, he announces to us via soliloquy that his wildness is all an act, a deliberate choice so that, in a PR coup, he can suddenly, upon accession to the throne, become dignified & stately. It's almost just a side benefit that his behavior until then will cause pain to his usurping father.

Causing pain to father figures is just part of who Hal ineluctably is: witness his treatment of Falstaff, who shows genuine, if self-interested, affection for the heir to the throne, whereas there's often an edge to Hal's rejoinders, most particularly in the scene in which he & Falstaff act out Hal's reception by his royal father (again, note the theatricality of what they do; it's all playacting with Hal). the one ending with Falstaff exclaiming "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!" to which Hal, his mask slipping a bit, gives the chilling response, "I do, I will." Other characters rush in with news, breaking the moment.  One wonders where they would have gone from there without the interruption.

Banish all the world is pretty much what Henry V has done; he is a hollow man, one who has played a part for so long that all he can do is play parts. The play Henry V is often described as Shakespeare's portrait of a model King. I raise an eyebrow sky-high at this. For one thing, that's just not how Shakespeare operates. His characteristic mode is excess, & that includes multiple angles on his characters. He's not really in the business of setting up paragons & ideals. There's just too much in the play that works against the view that it's some sort of handbook for royal governance.

The play opens with a Chorus, meaning a single narrator, who cries out "O for a muse of fire!" I remember my Shakespeare professor at Cal, Janet Adelman, pointing out what an odd line this is: "Shakespeare had a muse of fire" were her words, & surely by this pint in his career he knew it. Later, the Chorus will decry the inadequacies of the theater to portray the mighty events & royal splendors it's representing. I think what we have here is Brecht's alienation effect avant la lettre: we are constantly made aware of the staged, theatrical quality of what we're seeing. It's all constructed, like Hal/Henry V's persona, only with enough nails & sutures & taping shown to raise doubts for those paying attention.

Look at the whole invasion of France, which forms the major action of the play: at the end of Henry IV Part Two, the dying king gives his son classic advice on what to do when your hold on power is shaky & you need a distraction from looming troubles: "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels . . . . " (You know, like invading Venezuela, or claiming Greenland.) Henry V opens, once the Chorus bounds off, with the bishop of Ely & the archbishop of Canterbury essentially saying that in order to forestall a bill that would take some of the riches of the Church, they will give Henry a huge sum (that is, a bribe) to conduct wars in France. It's never, ever a good thing in Shakespeare when the Catholic hierarchy gets together to try to control things (or protect their own interests, which amounts to the same thing).

And this claim to France is apparently vague enough so that Henry has to have it explained to him, which is done in a very lengthy speech of dazzling obscurity, based on whether women can inherit & where Pharamond (you know: Pharamond!) thought the "Salic land" was & blah blah blah. I assume even people more adept at genealogies than I am find this forest too thick for easy traveling. How could this not be intentionally ironic on some level? And at the end, it turns out Henry had already decided: the ambassador from France is waiting outside. He'd already decided, but he needed the cover story. It's a consistent pattern with Henry that he avoids responsibility: if, during the invasion, he threatens to destroy a town, giving them gruesome details about how they're going to suffer, then it's their fault, not his, because they didn't surrender. Even when the outcome is good, in his mind, he disclaims responsibility: after his victory at Agincourt, he repeatedly announces that the credit goes to God. That's because Henry himself doesn't quite exist, except as a performative gesture that seems suited to the moment.

He's this way with his own people to, as witness his whiny "Upon the king!" soliloquy, when he, in disguise (again), essentially tricks a common soldier into giving his opinion of the King & his wars. The soldier feels that if he's killed in a foreign land, without having the chance to say goodbye to his family or to receive the last rites, the King has responsibility for his end. Henry, of course, doesn't like this, but Henry, of course, is incorrect. He brought this war on, he uprooted the common soldiers from their towns, & he does bear responsibility for what happens to them there. 

That scene with the soldier also results in a mean trick played upon both the soldier & Fluellen, the Welsh captain who is possibly the only truly boring character Shakespeare ever created (but even he deserves better than this sub-frat-boy-style prank). It's a bit of tomfoolery about striking someone who is wearing a glove given as a pledge. The predictable ensues, & Henry buys them off with money (which is pretty insulting, & so much for that sentimental touch of Harry in the night). This happens after God wins for him at Agincourt. The bathos of the descent from a great military victory to stupid pranks, again, has to be intentionally pointed at some level. (Incidentally, people often point out that Magna Carta is never mentioned in King John, but the real sin of historical omission is the failure to mention the English longbows & their role in Agincourt in Henry V.)

By now, it's clear to those paying attention that Henry V has no real core to his being, but shifts guises (& evades responsibility for his actions) at all times. This brings us to the scene in which he "courts" Princess Katherine of France. She's listed as an article in the peace agreements, & it's clearly a dynasty-driven choice of spouse, but Henry pretends he's just a bluff soldier unskilled at wooing the pretty girl, even though we've seen him, as Prince Hal, slinging wit & woo like a pro with Doll Tearsheet & Mistress Quckly. After saying he's just no good at this kind of thing, gosh darn it, he them proceeds to talk her (& our) ears off, pirouetting prettily among the puns like the daintiest sonneteer at the most refined court.

And what is all this for? For a stake in France that is meltingly brief but will distort & haunt British history for years after. And the audience was aware of this: the Henry VI plays had been hugely successful, & there is a constant theme in them of the loss of France. In fact, at the end of Henry V, the Chorus shows up for a farewell appearance, & spends the final half of his/her last speech reminding us that what we've just seen won is going to be quickly lost, very quickly lost, with tragic results, as we all know from seeing the earlier plays. So Henry's brief victory was not only pointless & unnecessary, but an on-going cause of grief: a model King? Really?

Henry VI, Part One

Henry VI, Part Two

Henry VI, Part Three

Shakespeare

I really love these plays, & though the Henry IV plays are obviously superior in many ways, I might even have greater affection for these plays than for their betters. There's something about the descent into chaos, through heedlessness, selfishness, & cruelty, that, to state the obvious, seems very resonant with our times. I would love to see a staging of the trilogy, & I mean pretty much as written, not some War of the Roses mash-up done so that people can put on Richard III without having the audience spend the whole play going "Who is Queen Margaret, & why is she so upset?" Henry VI is another in Shakespeare's portrait gallery of Inappropriate Kings; he strikes me as an interesting prefiguration of Hamlet: both men are thrust by fate & chance into an active role for which they are temperamentally ill-suited.

Richard III

Shakespeare

Shaw gave the perfect summary: the greatest Punch & Judy show ever written. Richard is one of those Elizabethan villains so zestful in their scheming that they become almost lovable. But even here, with an official Tudor villain, Shakespeare humanizes him: his night terrors, his complex attitude to his body.

Henry VIII

Shakespeare (& John Fletcher)

A bit removed from the series, but it serves as a capstone. I find this play, like Henry V, a bit of a slog, but for different reasons: it seems a bit diffuse, a bit on-the-surface, a bit pageant-like, with plenty of colorful processions & suchlike separated by set-piece moments of pathos, exemplary stories of the fall of the great. I have heard it's very effective on stage; I've never had the chance to test this proposition in person, but it makes sense, as pageants are, by their nature, things better seen than read about. There's an interesting dance going on in this play; there's sympathy for Katherine, but not too much, as where would that leave Elizabeth I, the daughter of her successor; Anne Boleyn's fate is not mentioned; Henry is presented with "plausible deniability:" his roving eye is caught by Anne, but we're also supposed to think he's genuinely troubled by the validity of his marriage to his brother's widow. The characterization of him is not too probing, mostly limited to his tendency to exclaim Ha! I guess it's appropriate for Shakespeare to end his examination of British royalty with a slightly dull, noncommittal pageant: a foreshadowing of royalty in our own time.

OK, I guess that's enough for now. More 2025 reading to come!

What I read in 2025 (part 1)

I wrote one of these in 2023 (you can find it here) & figured I would do it again, though I feel as if I've had less time to read this year. I don't know if that's actually true, as I don't really track reading time, but it sure feels that way. Maybe it's because I've developed the habit (or this tendency has worsened) of starting a book & then reading it only in fits & starts, so it takes much longer to finish than you'd think it would, based on its length. Despite all that, this list will be long, but lots of the items are plays, which are, for obvious reasons, fairly short.

If you read the introduction to the 2023 list, you'll see I lay out the rules (books completed in the year, cover-to-cover, even if I started them earlier) & I mention some reading I do every morning: one chapter of the King James translation of the Bible & one poem by Emily Dickinson. I am now up to the epistles in the Bible, so nearing the end of the cover-to-cover read-through; when I finish, I might go back to hopping among the books, or maybe I'll just circle back to the beginning. I'm around poem #1500 for Dickinson, as since the edition I use contains 1,775 poems, I will finish it this year, at which point I will probably just go back to the beginning & start over. But maybe this time I'll read two or even three poems a day; time is running shorter for all of us. In 2023 I also mentioned reading a few pages of Finnegans Wake each day. After I went through it a few times, I decide to switch things up & moved on to Gertrude Stein: a few pages a day, two to six, usually. Those books will appear on this list, or at least some of them will, the ones I finished.

I'm also doing a simultaneous read of 13 different translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, but I should probably do a separate entry on that. As you can imagine, that takes a while, & it's not something you'd want to slam through anyway.

There will be a lot of Shakespeare on this list, as I re-read his complete works this year. I read him regularly, as I have for decades, but this is the first time I read everything in a row, one thing after another. I came close in a college course, a two-quarter Shakespeare survey (taught by Janet Adelman at Cal) in which we read all the plays (except for the Merry Wives of Windsor, which she, like many lovers of Falstaff, disliked, as in it he is a buffoon & a gull & not the mighty character from the Henry IV plays) so she told us we could read it over the break if we wanted to but she wouldn't discuss it – of course I did read it over the break). But for that course we didn't read the sonnets or the narrative poems. Occasionally I will read all the history plays in a row. But last January I had picked up Macbeth again to read on BART. I always have a separate BART book; for a while, back when I worked in offices & went to many, many live performances, I did most of my reading on BART. But it's gotten increasingly difficult to read on BART, mostly because of device-related noise. People are, as we all know, idiots, & I do not understand why someone would think an entire car on a train should have to listen to whatever nonsense they're listening to (people, headphones exist!). But there it is. (Yes, I use earplugs, but they don't quite get the job done.) So I'm looking for something that fits easily into my satchel & that can be interrupted (I've read the plays so many times, yes I know that makes me sound unbearable, but I can pick them up & put them down at any point & not be lost). So I had Macbeth & thought, sure, let's just keep going. For years I read through the complete works, beginning, as I had the first time around, with Twelfth Night & ending with Hamlet (always smart to keep something excellent in reserve for the end). Eventually I realized / decided that I didn't need to read every play every time; I could read King Lear three times & read Merry Wives maybe once (I don't hate it, but it's not really a favorite). So there were a few I hadn't read in quite a while, until last year. But this year is already passing, so let's get to it:

Macbeth

Shakespeare

Really struck this time by the bird imagery; still working out the way it's used. I think I re-watched Throne of Blood in conjunction with this. I should post movie updates as well.

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

I had started re-reading this a couple of years earlier. I read it slowly, with long gaps, which is a good way to read this book in particular (though it's also increasingly the way I read everything). I had read it in college, for an American literature course. I was fascinated then by the reactions when people saw me carrying it around: ten years earlier it had been a touchstone book, but when I read it (in the late 1970s) every person said, Oh, I had to read that in high school, & I hated it. I could image their idealistic high school English teachers, assigning the significant books of their generation, to an ensuing generation that wasn't having it. Thoreau is always going to be thorny, I think, & controversial; I need to read more of him. A few years ago the New Yorker ran an article attacking him by a woman whose name I can't remember. It seemed to me she missed his point(s) completely. I remember she went on about how he doesn't give the exact depth of some body of water. In that American lit class, we had an entire lecture on how he doesn't give us the exact depth, & what that means. In short, she was a journalist & Thoreau was a poet & philosopher & she just didn't get him.

Timon of Athens

Shakespeare

This one has actually been staged a few times recently, which is interesting. This play, with its heedless millionaire turned misanthrope, seems to hit the current world in a suggestive way (I saw a staging in which Timon was, though I dislike this term, a tech bro – provocative, especially as I'd always pictures Timon as an older man, possibly influenced by the Milton Glaser cover for my Signet Classic Shakespeare edition). When I first read it decades ago, the consensus was that it was unfinished. Recently I looked for more current thinking, &, as collaboration is a big thing now (no more solitary genius expressing his vision!) Timon is presented as a co-written work. But that still doesn't explain some of the loose ends, like why Alcibiades makes a long speech begging for mercy for someone we don't know anything about, or why the amount of money Timon needs keeps changing.

Within a Budding Grove

Marcel Proust

I re-read Swann's Way at the end of 2024, but I'm being a purist & this list is only 2025. I re-read Proust about every 10 years (it was a bit over that this time). I've been doing this since the series was known by the evocative but less accurate title Remembrance of Things Past. It's one of the central books of my life. But as with stepping into rivers, you never read the same book twice. I was struck this time by how comical much of Proust is, but often in a very awkward way that maybe struck me when I was younger as almost too embarrassing to be funny. And of course one point of the novel is the shifting in perception: characters change throughout the book, & then they change in how we react to them. When I decided to re-read, I briefly considered picking up one of the newer translations, but I decided to stick with the Moncrieff, as revised by Kilmartin & Enright. It is one of the classic translations, & I already had all the volumes,, in lovely hardback Modern Library editions. But there were a few things (Britishisms, phrasing that's a bit outdated) that made me think I should explore some of the other translations, next time around.

Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare

I have to confess that I have increasingly complicated feelings about this play. There's something a bit desperate about the word play between Beatrice & Benedick: have you ever been in a relationship / friendship where you were always supposed to be "on", always "witty"? It can be grating & ultimately exhausting. As Shaw pointed out, much of what B & B say to each other is not particularly clever (in fact, much of it is downright rude); it's the phrasing that makes it magic. Of course breaking out of that endless "wit trap", or trying to, is what the play is about. Claudio is a fine example of one of Shakespeare's young men who is a romantic hero, officially, but not a particularly nice or admirable person. Years ago a friend of mine was understudying the part & he asked me about one of Claudio's lines: why does he ask if Hero is the only child? I pointed out that if Hero is the only child (meaning, there is no male heir), then her husband would inherit her father's estate entirely. Charming fellow! This play is quite popular now. I wonder if it's because of the Branagh film (which I had mixed feelings about), or is it just hitting the zeitgeist in some other way?

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Shakespeare

Fabulous in every sense.

The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare

Another play made more complicated by subsequent history. It's a mark of Shakespeare's genius as a playwright that though Shylock remains basically villainous, you can't help but sympathize with him. He's complicated (contrast that with Marlowe's Barabbas from the Jew of Malta, which will show up later on this list, who wins us over basically because of his zest in doing evil, but who lacks the emotional complications of Shylock – his love for his late wife Leah, not to mention his complicated emotions for his daughter & his ducats – but also his sophisticated justification for revenge in the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech). Of course, Shylock sort of swamps the rest of the play, which has many lovely moments (see Berlioz's borrowing in Les Troyens's Nuit d'ivresse of the Act 5 flirtations between Jessica & Lorenzo). Interesting that the Victorians looked on it as a romantic comedy, & for us it's more of a problem play: but of course we live in a post-Shoah world.

Lucy Church Amiably

Gertrude Stein

So Gertrude Stein is making her first appearance. This book has the lovely subtitle "A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving" & that's pretty much it. I know Stein drives a lot of people crazy. My theory is that if you connect with her rhythms on a deep level (& apparently I do), you will love her. Otherwise, maybe not your cup of tea.

The Guermantes Way

Marcel Proust

Volume 3, in which the narrator explores high society. There are some reminders in these novels (the discussion, for instance, of "servants" who started calling themselves "employees") that this is all taking place in a very different world. The high society here, based on an aristocratic descent that is completely alien to an American, for whom money, inherited or not, is the main dividing line, is interesting exactly because it's so foreign. I can understand the romance of someone descended from Genevieve of Brabant; it's historical poetry, a glowing link to a golden past, though of course the actual people are . . .well, people.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Shakespeare

Quite a charming play, though, as is often noted, overshadowed by the later, greater romantic comedies.

The Wife of Bath: A Biography

Marion Turner

Fascinating & engaging history of the sources & offspring of Chaucer's celebrated Wife of Bath (including the intriguing thought that she was one of the sources for Falstaff).

Julius Caesar

Shakespeare

This used to be taught in American high schools, long ago, to show that "Shaespeare approved of democracy" (!!!!!) (& also the verse is not too knotty); it should have been taught as a perfect example of Shakespeare's technique, because no matter what you think of anyone in this play & his or her actions, the playwright forces you to confront another perspective.

OK, that's Part 1.

Do you see that straw? That's a straw.

– There's the man, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. There he is sitting there The man that got away James Stephens. The champion of all Ireland at putting the sixteen pound shot. What was your best throw, citizen?

– Na bacleis, says the citizen, letting on to be modest. There was a time I was as good as the next fellow anyhow.

– Put it there, citizen, says Joe. You were and a bloody sight better.

– Is that really a fact? says Alf.

– Yes, says Bloom. That's well known. Do you not know that?

So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of the lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all of that. And of course Bloom had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That's a straw. Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.

A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of Brian O'Ciarnain's in Sraid na Bretaine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race. The venerable president of this noble order was in the chair and the attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed, a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of the ancient games and sports of our ancient panceltic forefathers. . . .

Once again, happy Bloomsday to my mountain flowers.

humid nightblue fruit

    What did each do at the door of egress?

    Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.

    For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

    For a cat.

    

     What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

    The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

    With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

    Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) to lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably, remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

    Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

    Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Once again, Happy Bloomsday to my mountain flowers.

What I Read in 2023

This is New Year's Day, for what that's worth, & I've seen several posted lists of what people read last year, so I thought I would write one too. I have for decades kept a list of books I've read, which is the closest thing to a diary I've ever been able to maintain; reviewing a list from years ago & seeing the names of what I was reading then brings back to me time & place & circumstances in a way little else does.

The list is books I've finished, cover to cover, within the calendar year. I really mean cover to cover; just as I'm one of those people who watch movie credits to the very end, until the lights go back up, or the disc returns to its main menu, I read introductory materials to footnotes, all the way through. I will admit to skimming some of the less essential adjuncts, & more & more I'm skipping introductions, or looking at them once I've finished the book. You have to be careful with these things – apparently we're not supposed to be interested in plot twists, which are freely given away in intros & footnotes. I was extremely annoyed years ago when reading George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical, not a work whose storyline is a cultural commonplace, that a footnote blithely revealed a family relationship that Eliot didn't want us to realize until much later.

I mention cover-to-cover because I start the day with reading that won't be on the list, as I didn't "finish" those volumes in the year. First I read a chapter of the King James translation of the Bible. I started doing this years ago, when a more pious friend posted something on Facebook about reading the Gospel of Luke in December: it has 24 chapters, so if you start on 1 December & read a chapter a day, by Christmas Eve you will know "the reason for the season". I already knew but decided to do this anyway. & after that I kept on, hopping from book to book, until last year I decided to start with Genesis 1:1, In the beginning. . . . So I can tell you that if you read a chapter a day, at the end of a year you will be near the end of the First Book of Chronicles, which to me is possibly the most tedious book of the Bible, combining as it does the long lists of genealogies / censuses with smatterings of Jehovah the interior decorator (the divinity is extremely fussy about how his dwellings are ornamented). But I persist, as the more poetical books are within sight.

Then I read one poem by Emily Dickinson. The problem I've always had reading her is that her rhythm is so strong that I would gulp down a dozen or so of her poems & then realize I had almost no idea of what she was saying. So I started reading one poem a day. Just one, & I read it over a couple of times, slowly & quickly & again slowly. I use the Thomas Johnson edition, because although there have been others published since then this is the one I have. I started a Dickinson a Day over two years ago, & I'm about halfway through the poems. Then I read anywhere from one to six pages in Finnegans Wake, though I should probably write a separate entry on that.

So on to what I read in 2023:

A Tale of a Tub by Ben Jonson Reading through all of Jonson's plays is, like many of my reading plans, something I've been meaning to do for years. As they say, so many books, so little time. So I finally started this year; first of course I had to find a ore or less usable edition of the complete plays, & Tale of a Tub was the first play in the one I found, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press over forty years ago. The annotations are a bit spotty, which is not a big problem for me as I've read enough poetic drama of the period to get the tone & vocabulary, but what's really annoying is the abbreviation of the speech prefixes. As with baroque opera, the often convoluted & sometimes fantastical actions are clear enough when you see them on stage, but if you're not great with names to start with, as you read the hiccupping succession of Tur., D. Tur., Pup., Lad., &c, will require numerous looks back at the list of characters (that's Turf, Dame Turf, Puppy, & Lady Tub, & how much do you save in printing costs by not spelling out such things?).

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens I had finished 2022 by re-reading The Old Curiosity Shop, a wild prose poem of a book that I love more each time I read it. Yes, I am well aware of Wilde's little quip about needing a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. How naughty Wilde could be! & mocking the sentiment of a previous generation is a surefire way to épater les bourgeois. But I will point out that even at his most theatrically emotional Dickens never wrote anything as utterly shameless as The Selfish Giant. Anyway, I was in the mood for more Dickens, & decided to re-read Drood. Dickens, of course, died before completing it, or indicating what direction it would go in. I had forgotten how much opium use it had, & there are some interesting moments concerning racial difference in Victorian England, so reading it is as fascinating as it is frustrating.

Morgante by Luigi Pulci, translated by Joseph Tusiani This is an extremely long narrative poem from the early Italian Renaissance, about a giant, Morgante, who gets involved with various Christian knights in the Crusades. I had started it in 2022. It's comical & entertaining & endearing, with a bit of a Rabelaisian satirical edge to it. Interestingly, at the end of this year I started re-reading Eliot's Romola, which will not be on this list as I haven't finished it yet, & Pulci gets quoted by several of the characters, as a sharp-viewed satirist.

Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith This one, which I had been looking forward to for several years, was disappointing. It is based on the life of an actual English woman of a preceding generation, though as is usually the case under those circumstances, Meredith adapts the life as he will. It ends with an entirely undeserved happy ending for the protagonist (she marries the man who has loved her all along, & who, in the meantime, has become quite wealthy), after she betrays another man she has been seeing (she sells to the press a political secret he told her in confidence). If you're curious about Meredith, let me recommend instead The Egoist, which reads like Jane Austen retold by late period Henry James.

The Civil War by Lucan, translated by Susan Braund Another one I've been intending to read for years. An interesting epic, with baroquely Seneca-like moments & an intriguing, almost contemporary view of the ever-fascinating Cleopatra.

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizake, translated by Seidensticker I had read this many years ago, & 2023 seemed to be my year for re-reading such things. A wonderfully rich & subtle novel about Japanese life in the middle of the last century, involving four sisters, who range from traditional to rebelliously "modern". After finishing it I rewatched Ishikawa's film, which I also had not seen in years, & . . . it's fine, & often lovely to look at, but much slighter than the novel. Some of that is inevitable, given the length of the book & the wide-ranging freedoms of the novelist. But my Criterion edition oddly described the film in a note as extremely faithful & then a paragraph later points out a major change from the novel (involving, spoiler alert I guess, though it's not in the novel, a brother-in-law having romantic feelings for one of the other sisters).

Pericles, Prince of Tyre by Shakespeare & an unidentified collaborator I re-read Shakespeare's plays over & over. This is one of the strange & beautiful final romances.

Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson Reading a biography of Lorca had been on my Intended list for years, so I finally read one. This is a solid & honest life. I will admit that as the end neared I read more & more slowly, as I couldn't bear his looming murder by Franco's fascist thugs.

The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel This is volume 2 of Civilization & Capitalism, Braudel's look at the underlying structures that shape the world. Starting this trilogy was one of my pandemic projects, though I paused it at some point to read Henry Adams's Histories of the Administrations of Jefferson & Madison as my history books. The Braudel had more economics than I was expecting (numbers in general are not my strength) so it was a bit of a stretch for me but I found it worth reading.

The Thebaid by Statius, translated by Charles Stanley Ross Like Lucan's Civil Wars, another interesting epic that is not as well known as it once was; this one is about the struggle between the sons of Oedipus for control of Thebes.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë Again, a re-read of something I'd read so long ago it's almost as if I hadn't read them (though it's odd what bits stick in the memory). The Tenant has a male narrator & an elaborately structured disclosure of the participants' lives & a manuscript within the novel in which the female protagonist tells her own story, which has been hidden from the people around Wildfell Hall, where she has found a somewhat fallible refuge. It is a grim tale of youthful idealism falling in love with someone who turns out to be what we would now call a substance abuser. As with many Victorian novels, you have to wonder why sensible divorce laws were not adopted sooner. Anne is not as well known as her sisters perhaps but if you like their work you'd like hers. Agnes Grey is a slimmer, slighter work than Tenant; it involves a young woman who is forced by financial reality to go out as a governess, & while being quite virtuous & high-minded herself, she manages to describe her employers & pupils in a way that is both straightforward & hilariously cutting. Re-reading these two was going to be part of re-reading all the Brontë novels, but Emily & Charlotte will have to wait until (possibly) this year.

The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare Again, one of the weird & wonderful final romances. This play is frequently described as "the one in which a statue comes to life" but that's not really what happens: what happens is that a woman who is falsely accused of adultery by her husband the king has to live in hiding for sixteen years & then is brought out, poses as a statue for fifteen minutes, & then is allowed to rejoin the world.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare It had been a while & this play is always lovely to revisit.

Chéri and The Last of Chéri by Colette, translated by Roger Senhouse Again, a writer I had been intending to get to for years; in 2022 I finally did, & I continued in 2023 with these two novels, both part of an omnibus volume titled 7 by Colette that I bought used years ago. It has an introduction by Janet Flanner, another name that should mean more today than perhaps it does. (How nostalgic one gets as the years change!) This is a fascinating look at a male beauty in the louche & liminal world between the independently wealthy & the bohemians; how he ages, how the older woman he loves ages, & what happens as youth goes & the world changes around him. There is a newer translation, published by New York Review Books, that I would like to read, but I'm trying to learn not to buy books unless I have actual plans to read them soon.

Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu, edited by Lisa Rodensky This Penguin anthology was also something I started during the pandemic. It doesn't do to rush through any book of lyrics, particularly ones as ripe as those by the decadents of the late nineteenth century. As with Wilde's remarks referenced above about Little Nell's death, a previous generation's decadence, like its sentimental sorrows, can seem a bit risible to a succeeding generation. But if you find some truth & beauty in the pallor of sin & mocking coral lips & vine-wreathed curls, & of course in sexual ambiguity & complexity, then let me recommend this compilation.

Yerma by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Michael Dewell & Carmen Zapata Not my favorite Lorca play, but I re-read it before seeing The Shotgun Players' production, which turned out to be a disaster (I didn't write it up at the time but might at some point as a review of their on-going season).

The Palliser Novels: Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, & The Duke's Children (expanded edition) by Anthony Trollope Once again, novels I had read years & years ago that I re-read this year. I had started when PBS showed its dramatization, The Pallisers (when I picture Lady Glencora I still see Susan Hampshire) & I read the novels one by one over the years. This time I read all six in succession. I was a little concerned that this might be Too Much, but it works very well & I recommend it. Since I last read the novels, some heroic editors have recreated Trollope's initial version of The Duke's Children, which he was forced to cut severely before publication, so the more complete version is what I read. (& let me add I am grateful that Silverbridge was spared from marriage to the tediously self-pitying & entitled Lady Mabel Grex in favor of a sparkling American girl.) Some fascinating things about the re-read: people talk ad nauseum about how Victorian women "had to marry for money" (without exploring the class assumptions in that statement),  but Trollope is a useful corrective, as many of the young men he describes also have to marry for money: being a member of Parliament or a young barrister didn't really give you enough income to advance in The World. Trollope is also sensitive in ways I hadn't remembered to how important their beauty can be to men: Phineas Finn is one, but not the only one, of his male characters whose lives are influenced in subtle but major ways by their good looks. Again, a useful corrective to the usual gendered view. I had re-read The Eustace Diamonds a few years ago, separately from the series, & considered skipping it this time but I'm glad I didn't. It's a more acid take on society than in the other novels in the series, & as such appeals to me.

The Perspective of the World by Fernand Braudel The third & final volume of Civilization & Capitalism.

The Case Is Altered by Ben Jonson The second play in the collection. I also have the Cambridge Ben Jonson & will probably pick up the series using that set, which spells out the speaker's names.

Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare I've always had a soft spot for this play, even when it was routinely described as Shakespeare's worst. Its reputation has been rehabilitated to some extent; seeing it on stage is no longer the rarity (or impossibility) it once was. It's actually quite a magnificent play in many regards, anticipating King Lear & other later plays. Of course it's not at the level of Lear; what else is? The wild & relentless violence can remind a modern audience of films by Tarantino, aside, of course, from its roots in the classical tradition of Ovid & Seneca. I re-read the play thinking I might go to the Oakland Theater Project's performances of Taylor Mac's Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, but for various reasons (including their lack of will-call tickets) I ended up not going. I did rewatch the excellent Julie Taymor film at some point.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens I had been intending to re-read this one for years (yes, I do keep saying that!). I mentioned to a friend that I was re-reading it & it turned out she had recently done the same thing, & found the novel a bit thinner than some of the other, much longer, Dickens novels. I wouldn't really disagree, but obviously it's still compelling & haunting. &, once again, there were whole episodes I had forgotten, but moments (Joe sending the message "such larks" or Herbert Pocket cheerfully slipping in that Pip shouldn't eat peas with his knife) that stuck with me. I had also remembered a passage in which Pip, who had been somewhat embarrassed by his blacksmithing biceps (the fashion in male bodies then was very slim, idealizing the build of aristocrats who didn't need to labor), found them useful when he had to attempt rowing Magwitch to safety, but I'm not sure that passage is actually in there. Speaking of memory, it's probably time for me to re-read In Search of Lost Time.

Ibsen: A Biography by Michael Meyer As with the biography of Lorca, I'd been intending for years to read this hefty volume. An insightful & thorough view of the man who created modern drama.

Against Venice by Régis Debray This slim volume is part of a lovely boxed set of works on Venice issued by Pushkin Press, which I have been slowly working my way through. I was in Venice once, over twenty years ago, for a day & a half, & found the city as magical as reputation & cliché insisted: as I wandered & wondered through the narrow foggy streets, it looked exactly as I had expected, based on photos & films & paintings, but it was still entrancing. I don't know if I even want to go back there, given how unexpectedly powerful the experience was. I read this book in one evening, when I had COVID. I had been looking forward to spending that night hearing Ian Bostridge singing Schubert's Winterreise, one of my favorite pieces of music, but instead I was isolated in my house, exhausted & a bit feverish, while my annoying idiot neighbors were having a very loud party. Reading this attack on the image of Venice as kitsch became for me part of my memory of that whole situation.

Othello by Shakespeare It had been a while since I'd read this one.

Shaw & Ibsen: The Quintessence of Ibsenism & Related Writings, by Shaw edited by J L Wisenthal Part of my on-going Ibsen (& Shaw) thing. I think Ibsen is a weirder, more poetico-mythic playwright than he is sometimes given credit for being, so I was interested to see that although Shaw emphasized the social aspects of his plays, he was well aware of the other, stranger & more inwardly psychological currents. This was an excellent collection, as it contains not only Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism, which, as Shaw himself states, was intended as a Fabian Society polemic, but also his other writings on Ibsen, including reflections in personal letters & stage reviews.

The Lady from the Sea by Ibsen, translated by Eva Le Gallienne Part of my on-going Ibsen thing. Le Gallienne was a major theatrical figure, & her translations were designed for the stage (she is also the daughter of the poet Richard Le Gallienne, who appears in the Anthology of Decadent Poets mentioned above).

A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe A few years ago at beloved Moe's Books in Berkeley I found a set of Radcliffe's complete novels, issued years ago by the Folio Society (they have since pivoted more to modern genre fiction). I had read one of her novels in college & didn't much like it – that was The Italian, which I re-read a few years ago & liked much better. I think I had to accustom myself to a less realistic & psychologically inward type of novel before I could appreciate Radcliffe's stylized romances, with their exquisite depictions of nature & their refined chills, along with their almost commedia-like cast: the lower classes are comical supporting characters, the young lovers are noble, the evil people are unscrupulously evil. You have to get into her mood, but once you're there, Radcliffe is quite compelling in her weird combination of poetry & horror.

The Best Picture by Aldous Huxley & The Piero della Francesca Trail by John Pope- Hennessy Two short works about the great painter, published in one slim volume. They were written when della Francesca was perhaps not the art history demi-god he is now (or is he still? these things change so quickly!), but instead a pearl prized by connoisseurs. The last time I was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, one of my favorite places on earth, I, excited by travel & the Samuel Adams beer I'd had in their charming café, ended up ordering a print of the della Francesca Hercules that hangs in the museum. It's in the room regarding me as I type this. There's something about the pearly light & dignified stillness of Francesa's paintings that works its way into the hearts of the susceptible.

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm Another re-read, & as I re-read, I was struck by how many epigrams had stayed with me in the decades since I first read it. It's a bit disjointed, more so than I had remembered, & though it's frequently described as a satire on Oxford – a very specialized topic, of perhaps limited interest to those outside its orbit – it struck me more as a satire on romance in general. A slippery & comic novel.

Shy by Mary Rodgers & Jesse Green This is the autobiography (as told to & annotated by Green) of the late composer & writer, daughter of Richard Rodgers. Her life, which might look glamorous to an outsider, was quite complicated & often sad in many ways, & she describes it in a straightforward yet thoughtful way. Her parents were both very difficult, but she looks back on them with an understanding & forgiveness that is complex & considered. She talks about some of the closeted homosexuals she knew (including her first husband, who was physically abusive) in a way that is understanding of what life was like for them, at a time when psychologists considered them disordered & "fixable". Her life of seeming privilege was one of stress & difficulty & uncertain attempts at re-inventing oneself. You really get a sense of what she must have been like, & admire her for her attempts to keep moving forward.

When We Dead Awaken by Ibsen, translated by Eva Le Gallienne His last play, his weird final testament to the world. I did actually see it staged once, but it was a Robert Wilson production, & so more of an adaptation. All I can remember of the performance is that at one point the four main characters were front of the stage doing a little soft-shoe number & chanting When – We – Dead – Awaken over & over.

My Mother's House by Colette, translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge & Enid McLeod Another one, this time a sort of autobiographical look back, from the Colette omnibus mentioned above.

Henrik Ibsen & the Birth of Modernism by Toril Moi Part of my Ibsen thing. A fascinating look at Ibsen in the context of the development of Modernism in the arts, with particular emphasis on the role of Idealism in the nineteenth century & Ibsen's examination of that now often forgotten philosophy of life.

The Wild Duck by Ibsen, translated by Eva Le Gallienne It had been a while since I'd read Ibsen's plays, so I'm making up for lost time this year. This one is so painful to revisit, though, if you know what happens to the daughter.

The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun, translations by Charles Dahlberg & by Charles Dunn Dahlberg's translation is prose & Dunn's poetry; I read the two translations side by side. The work is the sort of abstracted & systematic allegory that was more popular in its time than it is now, & perhaps more ironically intended than current readings out of context might suggest. It's a certain height of medieval romance, though not as rich as Chaucer (but what is?). Anyway, this is another work I had wanted to read for years, & I finally got to it (twice!).

Edmund Spenser: A Life by Andrew Hadfield There is surprisingly little biographical information available about Spenser, as Hadfield acknowledges; the book is a model of describing the world & influences & political realities of someone whose life is more interesting to us than it was to his contemporaries. His asperities towards my Irish ancestors are something to grapple with. Yes, reading this was a prelude to starting a re-read of The Faerie Queene.

Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means by P G Wodehouse These are early works by Wodehouse, & honestly not as much fun as I had hoped. Worth reading if you like him, as I do, but not near the level of his more celebrated works. But sometimes such lesser works have their period charms (if you're willing to overlook some period racism as well).

The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox Another re-read. I didn't remember much about it besides being a bit disappointed by the first reading; when I decided to give it another go, I couldn't find the edition I had (probably I had sold it at some point to a used book store), which ended up being a good thing, as I used the Oxford World's Classics edition, which is superior in annotation & introduction to the one I had (which possibly had neither notes nor forward). The novel is still a bit uneven, & I found myself often exasperated with the delusional heroine, but you can also see the complex appeal of the romances that have entranced her: they portray a world in which women like her (beautiful, accomplished, & of high station) have considerable, though frankly unrealistic, power. There are funny satiric scenes of 18th century life, which also make clear why the isolated heiress Arabella would prefer the world of her romances. It ends a bit abruptly. But it's well worth reading if you enjoy 18th century novels.

Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, translated by W S Merwin I ended the year revisiting this weird & wonderful work, though this time in Merwin's translation, which I hadn't read before. Quite seasonally appropriate, as it takes place over Christmas / New Year's.

& so on into a new year, with several books already in progress. . . .