Weekend Reading List

It made for an especially delicious treat for me, because the days have become so oppressively hot, to dash into the library on Victoria Street for an hour or so last week. It's like drinking at an oasis to come off the dusty scorching road, snarled with traffic, to the calm white building sheltered by a shady garden. Through the breezy atrium, inside the glass doors: aircon.
I had a good haul this time. I finally found A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, and read it in one greedy sitting. It's a gossipy memoir and unites two of my favourite subjects - writing (the process, the practitioners) and Paris - I wonder how this book could have escaped me for so long. In it Hemingway described his louche days spent in the Saint Germain area of Paris in the 1920s (the young Hemingway was movie star handsome, click on the picture!), the days when he wrote The Sun Also Rises, recalling the pleasures of the city, and its colourful literary denizens. Many chapters of the book are devoted to Gertrude Stein and her 'wife' Alice B Toklas and their eccentric domestic arrangements (the literary muff-divers are pictured below). Scott Fitzgerald is not spared in a merciless portrait. It's nice to know that Big Daddy was not beyond retailing Truman Capote type gossip. This book makes me miss Paris all the more and the next time I'm there, I shall use it as a tour guide, for all the addresses, the cafes, bars, apartments, gardens and bookstores are still there, almost as it was.

A related book is Monique Truong's debut novel The Book of Salt. It's the story of Binh, the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Ms Toklas, who came to share their lives in the rue de Fleurus apartment in Paris. Quite a salty take on the Lost Generation I must say, and a good bookend to Feast.
I also swooped on a crackling volume of Jane Austen criticism by D A Miller Jane Austen: Or The Secret of Style. It's incisive, close and thought-provoking and makes you see some Austen items in a new light. For this I'm grateful.
For the fun of it, I also borrowed The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town The New Yorker (edited by Lillian Ross who also, incidentally, wrote the bio A Portrait of Hemingway). It's a collection of shortish essays to dip into, carelessly, like flipping through a stack of magazines when it's just too hot to get up to do anything else.PS/ I know some people will be delighted to know that there's a new definitive Herb Ritts book out called Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour: A Photographer's Life and His World by Charles Churchward published by Rizzoli.