Recent Reading

Haven’t been doing too much reading lately but here you go:

Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway on Writing. Excerpts from The Nick Adams Stories (short stories); Death in the Afternoon (nonfiction); A Moveable Feast (nonfiction); Green Hills of Africa (novel); By Line: Ernest Hemingway (journalism); Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters. (Letters) 1984.

Anthony Beevor: The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. (Nonfiction) 1982.

Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française. (Combination of two novels - Storm in June and Dolce) 1942/2004.

Sad Holocaust story - novelized autobiography of German-occupied Vichy France. The author was murdered at Auschwitz. Originally written in 1942. Lost for sixty years, then found in a trunk, transcribed by her daughter and published to great acclaim.

Oddly enough the Jewish author was a passionate anti-Communist refugee from Russia who was a fierce Jewish self-critic to the point where Jews called her a self-hating Jew. But she got murdered anyway.

Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood. (novel) 1952. More Southern Gothic a la Faulkner, early Capote, etc. from the master of the grotesque.

It’s odd but these books were published 40, 42, 72, and 82 years ago, but they could have been written yesterday. I don’t know about you but I find that odd. I’m starting to think it doesn’t really matter when a book was written, you know?

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