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
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
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| 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
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