Some books and some books is eight

[radiantfracture]

I made a slightly better dinner for myself tonight than usual because I imagined narrating my habitual meal to a reality show dietician, and I started faking it to impress them.

I pretty much live on goat cheese quesadillas which, I realized only today, is more or less like subsisting on thin-crust pizza. At least this one has broccoli in it.

I slept very badly, and work was long and weird, and I have just enough energy to look at my new library books before I lie down and wait for the sacred darkness to consume me.

Books coming up in the stack:

• The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Millicent Patrick by Mallory O'Meara, Hanover Square Press (2019) *V. excited about this one


• The Matchmaker's List by Sonya Lalli, Penguin Random House (2017)


• Versailles: A Novel by Kathryn Davis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2002)


• Duplex: also A Novel and also by Kathryn Davis, Graywolf Press (2013)


• Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection, Jia Jiang, Harmony Books (2015)

Rejection Proof was recommended by batwrangler, for which much thanks. I am obviously very nervous to begin reading it.

I will have become excited about each of these books via podcast, but I can only remember which podcast for some of them. Kathryn Davis just published a new novel, The Silk Road, so that's probably how I ended up with her back catalogue. That might have been on the New York Times Book Review podcast. The Lady from the Black Lagoon would certainly be Literary Disco, but also other sources, I think.

Current book:

• The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff, Random House (2008, before the merger)

I'm enjoying this short double biography. My only issue is that I am almost finished, yet I do not seem to have reached the bit where the author explains how Orwell and Waugh are anything other than vaguely similar.

Literary biography seems to be something of a departure for David Lebedoff, whose other books disconcertingly include The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying our Democracy, which seems like a book I would not enjoy at all.

Strange encounters occur in library catalogues.

I was looking for material on Waugh because I am vaguely researching Oxford novels, with an even blurrier notion of writing an Oxford novel about a disastrous conference I once attended. Even at the time, it was clear to me that what was happening, while ghastly, also had the unmistakable contours of a really nasty British comic novel such as Waugh or Kingsley Amis might have written.

Because it was the only other book about Waugh's writing in my public library, I'm also pootling about in a soothingly dull book of literary criticism:

• Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed, by Robert Murray Davis, Twayne's Masterwork Studies No, 59, Twayne Publishing (1990, but I would've guessed 1959)

The author follows the happy old-fashioned custom of refraining from venturing anything so gauchely assertive as a thesis about the novel, at least in the first thirty-three pages. When anything else at all is just too painful to read, I can read this:

The real critical question for this or any novel written in first person is the degree of distance--intellectual, moral, social, and in this case religious--not only between the novelist and his creation but also between the "I" as narrator and the "I" as actor.

Nothing in there to injure myself upon. It's a bit like having someone explain the difference between uncommon (but not too rare) heirloom apple tree varietals to you on a sunny evening.

Did you say "Adams' Pearmain is an excellent 19th century English apple with a nutty flavour and good keeping qualities"? Go on. It's "also known as the Norfolk Pippin"? Say more. I'll just lie here listening as the sun goes down.

Welcome darkness.

{rf}

The Adams' Pearmain definition is taken from The Saltspring Apple Company, and it really does sound very nice.