Summer Reading

It's pathetic how little I read this summer. I was working, but still.

6:17: I see a rainbow over Harlem. Its red band, on the left, should touch down near Yankee Stadium. Now I see its base: it looks like there's been a fire at some chemical plant in the Bronx.

I still remember: the first time I saw Harlem from my apartment, moving in here in Aug. 2005, it reminded me of Florence. It must have been the hodgepodge of tan buildings, around what's probably 128th Street and St. Nicholas Terrace (according to google maps), that reminded me of the Florentine buildings I saw from the far bank of the Arno (the side opposite the Ufizzi). I'm sure it was something I saw, and not just a play on "Renaissance."

The highlight of a generally unlettered summer was my subway reading: Alexander Theroux's The Primary Colors and The Secondary Colors. (Ironically, my commute was probably the worst part of a pleasant summer. I plan to move somewhere--anywhere--that eliminates or substantially reduces the subway ride.) These two books of essays are perfect for a commuter's stop-and-start reading habits. Theroux's prose is like a fireworks finale that just goes on and on. So you can appreciate any paragraph without remembering--without even having read--anything else in the book. I had bought and read parts of both books before moving to New York. I'm glad I thought to take one with me one morning, to take my mind off the misery of riding the subway to work, soaked in sweat.

I took Henry James' The Wings of the Dove with me to Paris. And I read the first chapter, for the second or third time in my life, but got no further. It also took me several tries to read The Ambassadors and The Spoils of Poynton, both of which I read my last time in France. My perseverance especially paid off with The Ambassadors. (I expect The Wings of the Dove to be similar--at least, both are among James' "late novels," I think. So I'm not putting down The Wings for good.) Ditto with Washington Square, though that false start came in high school, which shouldn't really count against me. But I had no problem reading The American, The Europeans, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Aspern Papers, all while I was in Lille. A Turn of the Screw I read for a college class.

The American was the first James novel I read in France, and outside the classroom, and I was surprised at how much it read like popular fiction, in a Victorian Gothic vein. This was the snobbish, mannerly expatriate?

The Portrait of a Lady: approaching it as James' masterpiece, I was a little disappointed. Just get the hell out of there, Isabel Archer! I prefer The Ambassadors.

So much for French reading. But I bought two books in France:
-- Char, dans l'atelier du poete, Rene Char, Quarto Gallimard.
-- Marguerite Duras, Romans, cinema, theatre, Quarto Gallimard.

I did not, however, return with a Pleiade volume, as I'd planned. But I made up for it somewhat by winning an eBay auction when I got back, getting these three Pleiade titles (in 1950s editions):
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Ouevres and
-- Roger Martin du Gard, Ouevres I and II.
And a fourth 1950s Pleiade volume just yesterday: Baudelaire's Oeuvres.

For my trip in August, I bought two used books: Tolstoy's Resurrection and Joinville & Villehardouin's Chronicles of the Crusades. I read 100+ pages of Resurrection on the flight over and marveled again at Tolstoy's mastery. But in a fitting end to my summer, I lost the book somewhere between Seoul and Tokyo.