№ 28 reading list | Oh, Vienna ...

Here you have my new reading list. Something about this stack of books delights me immensely. I had trouble deciding which book to start with (I'm trying to break the habit of reading many at once) and in the end, I picked up Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg, the winner of the 1980 National Book Award. This is the biography of perhaps the most important editor of the 20th century, a book about books and the act of writing. Perkins was the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, to name a few. Given that The Great Gatsby has become a classic, it's almost astonishing to read Fitzgerald's letters to Perkins before its publication in 1925, full of doubts, especially about the title. Unfortunately, his concerns were valid because the book sold poorly, compared to his first, This Side of Paradise (1920). If only the dear old sport had known its fate.

№ 28 reading list:

1  Essayism  · Brian Dillon
2  This Little Art  · Kate Briggs
3  Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers  · Janet Malcolm
4  Shuggie Bain  · Douglas Stuart
5  Unquiet  · Linn Ullmann
6  Max Perkins: Editor of Genius  · A. Scott Berg
7  The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million  · Daniel Mendelsohn

Translated by: 5) Unquiet: Thilo Reinhard

The Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Vienna

In my last reading list entry, I told you about the COVID-19 restrictions in post-lockdown Austria: This summer would be different and there would likely be some train-hopping if one could go to cafés and restaurants without planning ahead. Sitting down to enjoy refreshments one needs a negative test, which limits spontaneity. My oldest daughter and her Dutch boyfriend recently came for a visit and we spent a day in Vienna. We went to the Belvedere Museum, greeted Napoleon - or Napi, as we call him - and took our time to admire Klimt's Kiss. We walked all over the city and enjoyed lunch in a public park. Our stroll ended in the Jewish quarter, where the English bookshop Shakespeare & Company is located, in Sterngasse to be exact. I love this district in Vienna, thus I give the members of Ultravox the last word, Oh, Vienna ...

images mine, the 2nd appeared on Instagram 16/07/21

Reading journal: Janet Malcolm

My birthday is in July and people tend to give me books - hardly surprising. Some ask for my wish list and I email a link to my prioritised list, not the one with all the books I want. If I showed people my true book soul they might get the wrong ideas about my mental health. Surely, many friends understand this kind of obsession with books, but I see no reason to flag it. The links in this reading journal entry had been nailed down when two gifts arrived, books by Janet Malcolm and Linn Ullmann, so I updated them; also my next reading list which was ready. Placing these two books on a shelf to read later was unthinkable.

My oldest gave me Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by writer and journalist Janet Malcolm, who mainly wrote for The New Yorker. Malcolm died earlier this summer; she was 86. She was born in Prague in 1934 but five years later, when the Nazi persecution of the Jews had started, her family immigrated to the US. Her writing appeared in various magazines and she also wrote books, e.g. these three that I would like to read: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice.

A dear friend gave me Linn Ullmann's autobiographical novel, Unquiet, translated from Norwegian (De Urolige) by Thilo Reinhard - the cover is in my top image. Ullmann's parents were the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Last year she was a guest at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, streamed online for the first time due to the pandemic. The book was already on my TBR but after watching the event with Ullmann there was no turning back. One day I would buy and read it.

As a present for myself, I bought some books (see e.g. the first two below) that I have already featured in the reading journal, including This Little Art by Kate Briggs and the biography of Elizabeth Hardwick which comes out in November.

Bookmarks & journal notes

Books I recently bought:
✔  Essayism · Brian Dillon
✔  The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million · Daniel Mendelsohn

... added to my wish list:
✔  Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett · James Knowlson
✔  Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop

and Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton

... added to my TBR:
✔  Edge of Irony · Marjorie Perloff
✔  Letters to Camondo · Edmund de Waal

... prioritised on my TBR:
✔  The Snow Lepard · Peter Matthiessen

Janet Malcolm links:

▶  In fun conversation with Ian Frazier at the 2011 New Yorker Festival.
✔  The Art of Nonfiction No. 4, an interview in The Paris Review, spring 2011.
✔  A life in writing: Janet Malcolm, an interview in The Guardian, June 2011.
✔  An excerpt, the title essay of Forty-one False Starts, her profile about painter David Salle for The New Yorker, the July 11th 1994 issue.
▶  Two events: A Brunch Conversation with Janet Malcolm in March 2013, hosted by the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. The evening before she read from Forty-one False Starts.
✔  She was also an artist. Her collages inspired by the poems of Emily Dickinson were her most famous artworks.
✔  Finally, her obituary in The Guardian.

images by me, appeared on Instagram 14/07/21 and 19/07/21