13 November 2010

Weekend Reading List

New territory: I've not been travelling - at least not the way I used to - for two years already and feel rather left out when I hear friends making plans for trips. But never enough, I must say, to want to make a trip myself. Instead I read travel literature. I didn't know, did you, that Evelyn Waugh wrote many travel books? I picked up Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing with an introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare. It's quite thick as it contains seven book-length travel pieces including Labels, which is a Mediterranean journal to A Tourist in Africa. In these pieces, you can glimpse some of Waugh's experiences that colour his novels, and this is fascinating for me. Studying Antonio's People, by Paul Caranicas, is like being transported to New York City in the 1980s (Antonio Lopez died in 1987, age 44). Not only is this book full of Mr Lopez's amazing drawings (accomplished, witty and sensual), they are placed side by side with photos of his models - many are Hispanic, a few are Japanese, including a pair of beautiful brothers, who are both. It's really a good book to own. I'm also reading The Paris Review Interviews, a collection of interviews with Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, T S Elliot, amongst august others. Writers are a different continent altogther, don't you think?I'm happy to discover an Agatha Christie I don't remember the plot of, althought I must have read it at some point. Sad Cypress, a Hercule Poirot story, couldn't have escaped me - I spent a couple of teenage years obsessively reading all Dame Christie's books. Now reading them late at night, I'm transported back to those days of Ribena and Cadbury chocolates. What innocent, simple joy I enjoyed!

7 comments:

  1. Is there a reason why you stopped traveling DG ?

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  2. Ah! Eager to read that Borges interview. Also, the ITV/Poirot version of 'Sad Cypress': a wonderful, moving adaptation - worth a watch on DVD. Let me know if you can't find it? Uncle C.

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  3. Dear Anon: I suspect it's age.
    Dear cf: Ahhh uncle! So nice to hear from you again... I was in London in June,and I kept thinking if I would see you. Ok, I'll look out for the DVD! Thanks for the heads up. X

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  4. Waugh was good friends with another travel writer of sorts, Christopher Sykes, who became Waugh's biographer. Sykes featured pretty prominently in that cult travel classic: The Road to Oxiana. have you read it?

    also: Christopher was grandpapa to all the contemporary trendy Sykes: Plum, Lucy and Tom. writing seems encoded in their genes.

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  5. Dear Erudite Anon: I've not read this book but it sounds fascinating. Have you read this book? As for the young and trendy sykes - i can't say i'm familiar enough to comment on their writing - rather more trendy/glossy than good i should say.

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  6. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron? yes I've read it. it's really sui generis, as i've never come across anything like it b4.

    it's part journal entry, part Islamic architectural history, part novella, part reportage, part pensée, part comic sketch, and almost all delivered in shimmering, highly polished prose. it's really rather eccentric in that mad pre-World War II brit upper-class manner. i'm rather sure you'd enjoy it.

    as for the grand-kiddies of Sykes, i've only read the debut novel, Bergdorf Blondes by Plum the Anna protégé. it's certainly wittier than The Devil Wears Prada which, i guess, is not really saying much. brother Tom's prose I find a bit trying, and trying too hard.

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  7. Dear Erudite Anon: Sounds exactly my cup of tea. The sykes kiddies are really just pretty young things - posh the way anna likes them. I don't think Plum is ever going to exceed 'wittier than TDWP'. She's too busy touching up her roots.

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