I haven't posted here in a while, but I've read several books during that time, just haven't had the energy to post about them.
Having finished
The Fellowship of the Ring I intended to go straight to
The Two Towers, but logistical problems got in the way of accessing my paperback copy. So I decided to finish my uncompleted books on my phone in the meanwhile.
Best Russian Short Stories (English translation) had some good stories.
Dethroned by I.N. Potapenko was a cheery and humorous affair; it's about a battle between Mrs. Zubkin and Mrs. Shaldin (wives of officers quartered in Chmyrsk) to outshine each other in the upcoming annual ball. Poor Abramka the tailor is the target of their machinations, as he tries to secure both their services while running the risk of losing both.
The Darling by Anton P. Chekov I found so-so; a tale of the life and fortunes of the unfortunate and oblivious 'darling', told humourously though the actual story is closer to tragedy. I think I mentioned
The Lover by Maxim Gorky before. Even if I did, I'll do it again, because it's my favourite in the collection, and I can't recommend it enough. A major reason why it's my favourite is how the warmth of human sympathy of this story contrasts with the cold indifference of the majority of the rest.
Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev was very well-written, very strongly and masterfully.
The Outrage - A True Story by Aleksander I. Krupin is another humorous story: an association of gentlemanly thieves outraged at their portrayal by the press and the police. Interestingly, the chairman of the association, while disassociating himself and his comrades from the more violent criminals states with horror that they would even participate in an anti-Jewish pogrom (the violent criminals, not the association of thieves, by the way).
I also finished
The Best American Humorous Short Stories, which I began more than two years ago.
The Angel of the Odd by Edgar Allan Poe is a story of a man beset by some sort of maliciously mischievous demon or imp: it has one of my favourite lines in the collection:
I now considered it high time to die (since fortune had so determined to persecute me)...
Titbottom's Spectacles is fascinating, not least for the awesome name of the possessor of the spectacles. The writing is almost too good (and too earnest) for a humorous story. I'm not even sure why it's included here. Although there is some bit of humour here and there, Titbottom's tale is a tragic one. Also the ultimate tragedy doesn't make sense. Still, the writing is very muscular, I enjoyed reading it. The collection includes
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain, which I had already read before, and which though excellent enough on its own terms, in my opinion has nothing on another short story of Mark Twain's about an unfortunate who travels in a train with the dead body of his friend (admittedly a sordid setting, but Twain's writing is belly-achingly uproarious).
Elder Brown's Backslide by Harry Stillwell Edwards is nice little story of the trials and travails of one Elder Brown, who travels to town for the first time in ages to do a bit of grocery shopping for his wife.
The Duplicity of Hargraves by O. Henry is a delightfully warm and sympathetic story in the classic O. Henry style. O. Henry's affectionate depiction of a misty-eyed Southerner is a lesson in how to perceive and portray racists who aren't racists because they're evil but simply because of ignorance and/or a different perspective (which doesn't mean that perspective isn't wrong, just that they can't be blamed for it). The Major isn't even racist by that time's standards: he is happy to chat with an ex-slave of his and takes a genuine interest in his fortunes, though at the same time he yearns for the time before the war when the Talbot family was prosperous.
My Double; And How He Did Undo Them is another one of my favourites from the collection: an overburdened minister hires a double to represent him while he takes to his passion for studying languages. The story is ripe with subtle comic moments. There is also an extremely amusing and interesting depiction of parish politics.
The Buller-Podington Compact is a story of two close friends who have avoided visiting each other due to their phobia of the other's hobby: Buller sails a cat-boat while Podington is afraid of water, Podington drives a carriage while Buller is deadly afraid of horses. Comedy ensues when the two friends at last decide to visit each other.
Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff is a comedic masterclass by the great Bret Harte. I had read Harte's poems before and enjoyed them immensely; this short story was no disappointment. The old-fashioned and super-gallant Colonel Starbottle finds himself fighting a strange case against his former client at the pleading of an also strange pretty young lady.
I finished
Windsor Castle again. Again, because I thought I hadn't finished but left the last three chapters. Turned out that I was confusing it with
Waverley, which I was just too exhausted to finish once the resolution became clear. Back to
Windsor Castle. It's set in Tudor England during the reign of Henry VIII, who has just been married to Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn. The story mostly focuses on a cast of clichéd characters at Windsor Castle. What really intrigued me about the story is the fearsome Hesse the Horseman, a mystic being who haunts the woods and whose actions lead to the protagonists to set out and save the kidnapped maiden and destroy him. The story is full of real figures from Tudor history. Interestingly, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn also figure in the story, but aren't the main characters. However the narrative does shift the focus on to them for the last chapters.
I also decided to tackle Marcel Proust's
Swann's Way (English translation) again. I remember that I had left it at the riveting part where the protagonist looks into his teacup and sees faces or something. However, I did manage to glean the ghost of a great story in the little I read, and besides I hate being baffled into leaving a book simply because I find it difficult to read, so I decided to give it one more try. Reading from the start again, I can appreciate why people think so highly of this book, but then I run into a passage like:
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
No wonder I didn't finish the book.
