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Sun Jul 10th, 2016
 | 09:02 pm
Hot weather reading needs to be chosen very carefully because what would be merely meh in rational weather quite often becomes bleh. Like peaches, going rotten before you know it. I realized half a chapter in that Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet would depress (like White Teeth, grimy grotty London from an immigrant pov.) Suspected that Barbara Vine's The Chimney Sweeper's Boy might fantod but the first one I read didn't, so... She's lovely and easy to read- not brainless but painless. But with this one, gradually the oogey feelings started up, source unknown, and so- figured the gimmick, skimmed the last bit, put it aside. There still seems one unaccounted-for corpse there, but weather-brain couldn't keep track of all the changing names and changing families and thus couldn't be arsed to go back and figure who's were who.
I did like one goodreader's comment that Gerald Candless probably wrote Iris Murdoch-type novels and that the characters in the book are Murdoch characters. Only half-true, I fancy: the various male love interests were mostly too decent and nice (sometimes unbelievably so). Once a romance writer, always a romance writer, and we must end up coupled two by two. But Gerald and his daughters, yes, certainly.
So now, suicidally, I want to read more Vine. Have started A Natural History of Dragons instead, and find it dull.
But also pulled from the 'bought in the 70s' shelf A Celtic Miscellany- extracts from this and that- and console myself with the epigrams (short poems, not witty satire: there's another section for that, as there should be.)
The Storm
Cold is the night in the Great Moor,the rain pours down, no trifle; a roar in which the clean wind rejoices howls over the sheltering wood.
The Snowfall
White flour, earth-flesh, a cold fleece on the mountain, small snow of the chill black day; snow like a platter, bitter cold plumage, a softness sent to entrammel me.
White snow on the cold hill above has blinded me and soaked my clothes. By the blessed God! I had no hope I should ever get to my house
The End of the Day
With the night the house grows dark. with the night comes candle-light, with the night comes the end of play, and with the night comes Daddy home.
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