Bibliography, October 2009

Books bought (0)

Books read (10)
BOTM: B. Bryson, A Walk in the woods

I. Asimov, The Caves of Steel
I. Asimov, The Naked Sun
I. Asimov, Robots of Dawn
B. Chatwin, What am I doing here?
T. Heald, Village Cricket
S. Leys, The wreck of the Batavia
L. MacNiece, The Strings are false
Malammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel
Virgil, The Aeneid

Some real rubbish this month - Malammed's study tedious, Heald's cricket memoir facile and devoid of charm. And I spent a long day rereading whole string of SF that while nostalgic and imaginative, cannot claim literary merit.

However, MacNiece's unfinished autobiography was a flawed masterpiece. Reading it, one is constantly drawn back to that world which has gone. It's beautifully written, but suffers from its lack of editing and finishing, as well some mid century absurd intellectual pretension. The contrast with Bryson, who takes BOTM this time, is striking. Here, we have a writer who really has polished every seemingly throwaway sentence. And it's a better book for it.