Skip to main content

The Sunday Salon


A good chunk of this weekend was spent visiting a good friend, who lives in Virginia. It was mostly good: we went to see a concert of a favorite band of ours, and then on Saturday we went to the Richmond Museum of Art to see the traveling Picasso exhibition, which was fantastic. The only thing that really married the weekend was the fact that my friend had to deal with a family emergency, necessitating him leaving at 2:30 am. But otherwise, I had a lot of fun.

I’m a little too exhausted, and lazy, to really do a Sunday Salon post, so I’m taking this meme from Simon:

1. The book I’m currently reading:

The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer. Set in 1930s Paris, this is the story of a young Jewish Hungarian man who comes to Paris to study architecture—and falls in love with an older woman. About halfway through right now, and it gets to WWII, the book promises to get much darker.

2. The last book I finished:

The Diary of a Provincial Lady, by EM Delafield. This is the Virago Omnibus edition, and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s a mix of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, and Henrietta’s War. The book had me laughing out loud in many, many places, and I loved how the Provincial Lady is a reader, too.

3. The next book I want to read:

I’ve got a bunch of Persephones on my to be read shelves that are begging to be read: how about There Were No Windows? Or Flush? Or The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow? Or Consequences (also an EM Delafield)? Or The Winds of Heaven?

4. The last book I bought:

The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer, bought at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia right before I boarded the train to go down to Virginia on Friday.

5. The last book I was given:

Technically, The Winds of Heaven, which is a part of the Persephone subscription I received for Christmas from my mom.

Comments

StuckInABook said…
Thanks for joining in! How lovely to read Provincial Lady for the first time. I think DE Stevenson must have been familiar with it when she wrote Mrs. Tim, as it is so similar - but Delafield is even better :) Consequences is very, very different - but good. Very sad.
Simon

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars...

Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee

The Piano Teacher is a complicated novel. On the surface, it’s about a love affair between two British ex-patriots in Hong Kong in 1952-3. Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong with her husband Martin at a time when the world is still recovering from WWII; Claire takes up work as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, where she meets Will Truesdale, the Chens’ enigmatic chauffeur. The book jumps back in time between the 1950s and the beginning of WWII, when Will is interned in Stanley, a Hong Kong camp for enemies of Japan. On “the outside” is Tudy Liang, Will’s beautiful Eurasian lover. There’s no doubt that Lee’s writing is beautiful. But there’s something lacking in this short, terse novel that I can’t quite put my finger on. First, I think it’s the tenses she uses when taking about each story: that which is set in the 1950s is in the past tense, while the war scenes are talked about in the present tense (confusing, no?) The interpersonal relationships of the m...