Stendhal was great, I'm glad I took the trouble to realize the old intention to get around to reading Le Rouge et Le Noir. I won't ruin it for you because the introduction did advise it might be best to read the story first. But one issue it now raises outside of its own themes is not whether the C19th novel was better than the C20th, but by how much.
Stuart Maconie's encyclopedic appreciation of pop music was much to be appreciated in his The People's Songs that I noticed begging me to buy it for one pound from a box of secondhand books seen through the window of the local launderette. Being of a similar age and disposition to me - his specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind was C20th British Poetry- I noticed how his assessments of records, and the culture they represented, became more guarded and sceptical at roughly the same point that mine does but he seems very fair and ready to admit that The Beatles, at least in the first place, were just as manufactured as One Direction. But he's a good lad, Maconie. I'm just grateful I don't suffer the same level of affliction of anorak dedication to the subject that he does.
But I was left at a hiatus on a bank holiday weekend with the new McEwan not arrived yet, the extensive New Grub Street waiting to be started and an excellent-looking book on Byron to order. But one can't let three days pass without serious reading intent just because you'd prefer to read the short McEwan and not have to leave George Gissing halfway through some time next week and so I embarked on the big Victorian survey of literary life during some only mildly diverting horse racing this afternoon and I think it's going to be tremendous.
I don't know what else is due this autumn, the season that generally sees more books being published than usual, I have enough to look forward to already but one can't have too much of a good thing.
One project stored up to be featured here, once I get around to finishing the long-delayed My Life in Sport series, is The Best Book in the House in which I'd like to pick favourites in such categories as Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Literary Criticism, Sport, Science and any others and then choose the best book in the house from the resulting shortlist.
With the impending return of The Saturday Nap in October, it's possible I've got more ideas than time to do them justice.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.
