I am happy of my last reading exploits.
I just finished two collections of short stories and a serious non fiction book.
the short stories are:
A.S. Byatt: Little Black Book of Stories (2003). Beautiful gems in which "realism and naturalism merge with fantasy" (Wikipedia dixit). It has been a great pleasure reading those stories. There is one in which a woman becomes of stone, of stones actually and the world of the stones is revealed to the reader in the most fascinating way. Pure joy. If one wants to encounter a
Fetch, there is that also. Beautiful, dressed in red and the contemplation of her slender legs gives great pleasure but not desire ...
E.M. Forester: The celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911). I found there the same lightness of heart that I enjoyed so much in reading A room with a view in the Book of the month thread.
We have it on MR, BTW.
The serious non fiction is by Rob Riemen: Nobility of Spirit: A forgotten Ideal (2008). I expected more, but I found something of value that will stay with me. For instance a renewed interest in reading classics like Mann and Goethe that I was not reading since the school days. The book was nominated in The Book of the Month but it got only my vote and that of a friend.
I started a serious and wonderful book by
Frances Yates: The Art of Memory (1966)
Spoiler:
THE subject of this book will be unfamiliar to most readers. Few people know that the Greeks, who invented many arts, invented an art of memory which, like their other arts, was passed on to Rome whence it descended in the European tradition. This art seeks to memorise through a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on memory. It has usually been classed as 'mnemotechnics', which in modern times seems a rather unimportant branch of human activity. But in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole. Moreover an art which uses contemporary architecture for its memory places and contemporary imagery for its images will have its classical, Gothic, and Renaissance periods, like the other arts. Though the mnemotechnical side of the art is always present, both in antiquity and thereafter, and forms the factual basis for its investigation, the exploration of it must include more than the history of its techniques. Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the history of the training of this most fundamental and elusive of human powers will plunge us into deep waters.
I came to this book by pure chance and I am seriously pissed at my teachers that obviously did not know about it, or they would have passed this wonderful knowledge along. Darn.
Finally I just started a novel by the Icelandic
Hallgrimur Helgason: Toxic (2008). I am reading it in Italian. It does not exist yet in English. Ah!
I do not remember how or where I got the notion, but I got the impression that he might look like Bukowski??