Another lockdown month, at home, lots of reading, not a lot of anything else. But thank goodness for books, there were a lot of great ones in March. I read twenty books in a wide variety of genres and modes, with a high concentration of things that made me feel free and among friends, at least while I was reading them.
Sequel to
The Paris Wife, a novel about and from the first person POV of Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s second wife. I didn’t like it as much as the first book, perhaps because I fairly recently read a biography of Gellhorn so it was more familiar. However, McLain is a terrific writer and I read this avidly. It began an interesting theme that ran through my March books of early-twentieth-century men and women trying to find new ways of being partners here mostly very unsuccessfully, though there were moments when the two of them were writing in different rooms at the same time and meeting up at meals to compare progress.
February was another locked down month with a curfew in Quebec, and I was at home going nowhere. It snowed a lot. I saw a total of three other human beings in the whole month. The prevailing mood of this pandemic for many of us is “other people have it worse, but this sure sucks.” I read a perfectly reasonable seventeen books, and many of them were really excellent, which is always cheering.
This is the story of a young man with enough money to live on in London for a year and try to write, who entirely fails to achieve anything. It’s a comedy, though it is very sad, and you can see here the beginnings of the class consciousness which will make so much of Sharp’s later work so excellent. I enjoyed reading it, though I wouldn’t call it good, exactly. It also surprised me that it was 1932; it’s much more a book of the 1920s in feel. For Sharp completists, I suppose. Don’t start here. But I am excited to have so much new to me Sharp available as ebooks.
January was another lockdown month worse than ever, because now we have a curfew at 8 PM and huge fines for breaking it, which means it’s not just illegal but pretty much impossible to see anyone. Isolation is really getting to me. The numbers are going down, though, which is good, and people are starting to be vaccinated, though I am low on the list. In any case, I spent a lot of time in January on pure escapist reading, and I read twenty-eight books in a variety of genres, with a very high rate of excellence.
A delightful romance, recommended by a friend. Two men in London who haven’t been making relationships work pretend to be each other’s boyfriends and of course end up falling in love. Really well written, memorable, and really fun to read. As an attempt to read feel-good romances that are not set in Italy but are actually good, this was really successful.