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Oct. 22nd, 2025
Wednesday is World Wombat(t) Day*
Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:13 pmWhat I read
I managed to plough through The Wheel of Fortune and do not think I will be plunging into a major Susan Howatch re-read binge. O all those angsty men. As for man handing on misery to man, Larkinesque-like, it deepens like the Mariana trench. Plus, the Katherine Swynford-analogue character gets no interiority, and besides being pretty much normal and sensible (unlike pretty much everybody else, no, Anna seems fairly stable) is full of deep mystical working-class Welsh wisdom. Good for her levanting to Canada (can one levant in that direction?). The last section in particular had me muttering about codfish.
O what a thoroughly delightful change to move on to Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. (1977) - you do not need heaving melodrama or even actual plot to be compellingly readable, just saying.
On to Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room (A Dance to the Music of Time, #10) (1971) in anticipation of group discussion at beginning of November. Getting faint frissons of that narrative pattern of that period which was eschewing ominiscient voice but having a first-person narrator who just happens to be in a position to see or hear Events and can reflect upon them.
Latest Literary Review.
Also finished the book for review but have not yet got round to getting any thoughts on it written, this week having been a bit of a week, so far.
On the go
Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (2025).
Also happened to notice Jonathan Rose, Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda (2018) when I was looking for something else - I think this must have been something in return for reading something for a publisher? - I don't think I actually bought it - but looked interesting in the light of recent musings about reading.
Up next
Having discovered that I do, in fact, have a copy of The Making of a Muckraker, maybe a spot of dipping into that?
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*Wombat Awareness Organisation: World Wombat Day!