B List: Fannie Hurst, Back Street......................286/464
C List: Harry Dolan, Very Bad Men..................332/412
My reading pace slowed a little this month because I was not feeling that great in the early part of it and then I went on vacation, after which I have been feeling much better. I hope it lasts. Also I have been sluggish since I don't really love any of these books. Dickens is one of my all time favorites and Chuzzlewit is good in parts, but I find some of the subplots either hard to follow or not commanding my attention in the manner of his better work. The minds of the authors of genre books, at least that they reveal, just aren't interesting enough to me. Yet whenever you make inquiries into being a professional author it seems like that style of writing is what is pushed on you to try to cultivate. I suppose one cannot learn by practice to write like Tolstoy or Proust, but you would think there would be more interest in encouraging people to try to develop in something like that direction, since the endless repetitions of these genre books is so insubstantial.
On my way back from Florida I stopped off, as I always do, in Annapolis and Philadelphia, my long-ago stomping grounds. For the first time in many years I thought how pleasant it might be for me at least to live in these places again, at least in February and March, which are relatively warmer and more lively. If I ever had the time and were still in good enough health to do so, I might like to come down to Annapolis for a few weeks during the winter and attend some of the lectures and concerts they have at the college and go to the library and so on. It might help combat the annual depression and fixation on my children growing old and my own death. Strangely I don't have a lot of sad nostalgia with regard to my college, perhaps because it doesn't seem to have changed that much since I was there, certainly compared with just about everything else. Being back there usually makes me feel happier and more optimistic than is usual with me. I was very happy to be back in Philadelphia as well. Since my mother sold her house a few years back and moved into an apartment we have largely stopped going down as there is nowhere for all of us to stay anymore for more than a single night. It seems a great deal must have changed there but almost all of the people I grew up with are still around, albeit they are getting ever older, though the older people still seem to get on fine. The younger generations, the under 40s, who I don't know as well, seem to have more problems, but that may be a matter of perception and the circumstance that the consequences of anything bad that happens today seem to be so exaggerated. Certainly my 50 and 60 something relatives partook of behaviors in the 1970s that would be considered alarming now to say the least, yet they were permitted to recover and progress in their lives...
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