B List: Gertrude Atherton--Black Oxen...……………………………..329/346
C List: David Mitchell--Cloud Atlas...………………………………..250/509
Not quite able to finish the Atherton ahead of the monthly reporting.
The Once and Future King, which I had never read, is a rare book in that the glowing testimonials from well-known writers that adorn the cover emphasize their love for it above critical respect, awe at the author's talent, or other considerations. Ursula K. Le Guin writes "I have laughed at (White's) great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life." Lev Grossman says "I have read this book more times than any other in my library." About fifty pages in, I have not yet found it to be quite this engrossing, though I am willing to give it some time to pick up, as there have been flashes of interesting writing. One of the blurbs described White as "a fierce and damaged man" who wrote about "fierce and damaged people", and I can see something of that. I had not imagined it was a long of a book as it is. The (paperback) edition of I got is practically a cube. I will probably be on it for a while.
Once I began Black Oxen I kind of got away from Mitchell. The "C" list book is ideally something informative or entertaining but rather light than I can read in the evening when I am tired, but Cloud Atlas is not really light. Also, while I really liked the first four sections, the fifth, set in an oppressive futuristic China (is the future ever not oppressive to artistic types?), I found harder going. Now I am in a sixth different story, which is set among what would formerly have been called primitive or untutored people in Hawaii. In this section I often lose the thread of what is going on for a page or two at a time though eventually it dawns on me and I can go back and see what was being said. I will get back on this book during the week or two interval when I am doing my report for the B list.
I've been in pretty good spirits all winter, which considering that I've had a heart attack, I don't have any time to do anything I like, I'm not allowed to eat 75% of the food I want, I don't have any money and my oldest kid is supposed to be going to college next year, and the cultural environment I grew up in is increasingly vilified or ceasing to exist, is kind of hard to explain given my usual temperament. However I went through a big depression two winters ago, when I went through the realization that I had kind of passed through the "prime" years of my life without having made much of them, when my oldest children had clearly moved past childhood into teenager-dom, that the time left me to do certain things I had always wanted to do might be running fairly short. I still have all of the same issues now, but the impact and overwhelming sense of loss has not been the same as it was then.
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