B-List: Allen--Tony Adverse................................1,074/1,224
C-List: Rushdie--The Ground Beneath Her Feet.......564/575
Not much to report. I have been plowing through the two volumes listed here for several months now, finally approaching end of both. A big recap of the Allen awaits in probably 2-3 weeks. I have spent a lot of time with this book and I feel a good deal of affection for it. When the end comes I will be ready to part with it, because I am pretty sure the themes and characters will be fully exhausted, but I don't mind the riding out to that end.
I couldn't quite finish the Rushdie in time for this month's report. It's one of those books that in the end I don't feel is really particularly great but about which I'm still a little worried about having missed something elementary to any understanding of literary greatness, which is often my experience with modern books. As I have been noting all along, it has a certain amount of virtuosity, but compared even to Anthony Adverse, its scenes and characters, with the exception of the early chapters in Bombay, lack for me any sense of solidity, or heaviness, which is a style of book that I guess I like. It moves all over the world, has major historical events as a backdrop anyway, and features a constantly revolving cast of high-flying eccentrics, but it never quite enters into the belly of these various worlds and theaters of action the way that the classics of this type of literature do.
My relationship with the A-List is kind of a mess right now. The last thing in it I read was Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, which I had difficulty getting into, though usually I am a pretty stout admirer of old Bysshe's poems. My head has not been in it.
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