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Jo's Favorite Reading:
      I read everything. Everything. That includes a large range of non-fiction (history, biography, general science), genre fiction (romance, mystery, science fiction), and literary fiction, including the classics of Western literature. I am not a snob about reading. I think that reading is good and that the point is that one reads, not necessarily what one reads. Which brings me back to my first sentence: I read everything.
      Here is what I'm reading now, what I've read recently, and some of what I have enjoyed reading in the past. I'll post more titles from time to time.
      I'm enjoying the biography of a fascinating woman, the more-or-less contemporary of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, the subject of my biography, My Lady Scandalous. The Hamilton biography, Beloved Emma, is by Flora Fraser; it's quite detailed and makes for a slow but enthralling read. The romance between Britain's foremost naval hero and the notorious Emma, Lady Hamilton, is well told. A fascinating and quick read for me was Claire Tomalin's biography of another of Grace Elliott's contemporaries, the actress Dora Jordan. That book, Mrs. Jordan's Profession, is the very model of what a good biography should be. Jordan was a consummate actress—arguably the most popular and talented comedic performer of her day, but she had bad luck with men. She hooked up with the younger brother of King George IV, supported him with her earnings, had 10 children with him, and was dumped when he had to make a dynastic marriage, George IV having produced no viable heirs. It's a tragic tale and extremely well written.
      One of my favorite reads of all time is prize-winning author Connie Willis's commanding Doomsday Book (1992). I bought it for my daughter, an art conservator whose specialty is the 12th century, and she insisted that I read it, too. I'm glad I did. Set in the near future, when graduate students in various disciplines at elite universities are allowed to time-travel, a young woman lands by accident in a slightly different time and place, owing to the disorientation of the technician who is handling the arrangements. As she goes through the black death in England, the Oxford she's left also comes under a deadly modern plague. Will she be able to return home? It's harrowing, heart-breaking, and a page-turner par excellence.
      I love all of Willis's work and find it unfortunate she's classed as a science fiction author. Without denigrating science fiction, she is a lot more than that, and deserves a much wider audience. In 1996 Willis penned Belwether, more novella than novel, in which scientists studying chaos theory and the origin of trends and fads find the answer is simpler than anyone imagined. It's hilarious! I like the way the heroine "rescues" library books that would otherwise be weeded from the shelves by taking out batches each week so that the library powers-that-be are fooled into thinking someone's reading all of them.
      Impossible Things, a 1993 short story collection, features the brilliant "Even the Queen," which is indescribable. It's a cousin to Margaret Atwood's grisly and satisfying revenge tale, "Hairball" (in the collection, Wilderness Tips, 1991), and should be assigned reading for any female over the age of 13. To say more about either short story would be to spoil it for the reader.
      Willis's Edwardian time-travel, To Say Nothing of the Dog (1999), inspired by Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 classic, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), is screwball comedy and much, much more. Ned Henry, assigned to save the very fabric of history, comes from the 21st century with such intense time-lag (think jet-lag to the nth degree) that he's not quite sure what he's doing, only that the future depends on what he does, including the retrieval of the hideous but pivotal artifact, the Bishop's bird stump. In the same vein as Belwether, but even funnier.
      The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), by Mark Haddon, is one of those books you'll never forget reading, because it's a good bet it's like nothing you've ever read before. (The allusion in the title is to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.) Christopher, the 15-year-old narrator is autistic, and the reader's soon drawn slowly into his unique world. Just before I read it (it had been urged upon me by a friend at ABC and by both my son, my son-in-law, and my husband), I'd had the unusual experience of sitting through dinner at a reception next to an autistic, middle-aged mathematician. He was like no one I'd ever met before: brilliant, thoroughly self-involved—though not in any way obnoxious—with little in the way of social skills. A fragile personality, I learned afterward that he'd been institutionalized several times by his family. I sat through his whistled version of passages from Beethoven's 9th Symphony—he claimed a huge (whistled) repertory of classic music—and wondered at how different our minds were, and our approach to life and other people…the Dog in the Night-Time's narrator is also a math savant, a genius at numbers but not at life. A fascinating reading experience.
      I like romance, the more bittersweet the better. Although not strictly classed as romance, I found The French Lieutenant's Woman (by John Fowles, 1981) to be intensely romantic. It was also open-ended, another element that I prize in story-telling. The film of this book was actually not bad; neither was the film of another British novel I admire, Far From the Madding Crowd, written by Thomas Hardy in 1874. Hardy is a genius; though far from popular, he is well worth reading. His characters—Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak—stay with you, and this novel of a headstrong young woman and the three men whose lives she impacts is one of his best. Read The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and The Return of the Native (1878), too. His Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896) are, though I greatly admire them, tough, sad reads. On one of my English trips I visited the cottage in Dorset where Hardy was born. Such a tiny place to have been the birthplace of such a towering figure in English literature; a humbling experience.
      "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Ah, the mysteries of the heart and the looming weight, the heaviness, of the past….This quote is from the uber-bittersweet love story, The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley, another one of my favorite novels. And what a coincidence that the two stars of Far From The Madding Crowd, the exquisite Julie Christie and the incomparable Alan Bates, should also have been the stars of the film version of the Hartley book. (Screenplay by Harold Pinter; directed by Joseph Losey.) Not to be missed—neither the book nor the film.
      Headstrong young women, always a good fiction staple. Although I don't claim to be an expert in the oeuvre of Jane Austen, I hold her writing in the highest esteem. My favorite of all her books? A toss-up, but I love the headstrong Emma, of the novel of the same name. Elizabeth Bennet, of Pride & Prejudice, is an outstanding heroine, and I also like the gentle Anne Eliot of Persuasion. Anne, though, could have used some headstrong.
      Can we do plays? Do read the brilliant Arcadia, by the equally brilliant Tom Stoppard. And talk about bittersweet! This Regency-set play ostensibly about a mystery in the life of Lord Byron fills my bittersweet love story specs and goes over the top into unbearable sadness. Thomasina Coverly, the sweetly appealing math genius and Septimus Hodge, her young, Byronic tutor, should have eloped, but Septimus is too honorable a man. The tragedy that ensues from his sense of honor is ironic, indeed. Rufus Sewell originated the role of Septimus in the London production; Billy Crudup in the first American production at Lincoln Center. I was privileged to have seen both. (Still waiting for the film version, though!)

More, later!

(posted 10/05)

Reading Update - 4.25.06

I finally got around to reading the first book—A Conspiracy of Paper—in David Liss's saga of the Lienzo family, Portuguese Jews/Conversos who emigrate first to Amsterdam and from there to London, where they engage in the beginnings of the stock exchange, become involved with the South Sea Bubble, and Whig-Tory politics. The protagonist of ACOP is Benjamin Lienzo, an ex-boxer become enforcer and part-time investigator who is loosely based on the great Georgian boxer Daniel Mendoza. The narratives take place in the late 17th/early to mid-18th centuries in Europe and in England. There was a prominent Sephardic Jewish community in Georgian England that stayed intact for generations; some married into Anglican aristocracy—like the grandmother of the current Marquess of Cholmondeley, who was both a Sassoon and a Rothschild. These Jews were actually treated a good deal better than Roman Catholics; they had the freedom to practice their religion. The second book by Liss explores the Amsterdam connection. It's called The Coffee Trader and concerns the adventures of Miguel Lienzo, the grandfather of Benjamin, who, as a Converso, was particularly skilled in deception and intrigue and who sets out to corner the new commodity, coffee.

The third book, A Spectacle of Corruption, is about the English political process post-Jacobite rebellion. Benjamin Lienzo is drawn into another conspiracy involving labor and political corruption.The marriage of his cousin's widow—whom he loves—to a Tory aristocrat is examined. She's converted to Anglicanism and is now shunned by other Jews, except for Benjamin, whose friendship she rebuffs. Liss's books are fast—but not easy—reads. The author has the skill to make the reader care—care deeply—about his protagonists, which propels the narrative.

Liss's latest book is, alas, a contemporary. One hopes he gets back to the Lienzo family and Georgian England very soon. Another series whose second book I am awaiting is Bernard Cornwell's follow-up to The Gallows Thief, which was such an excellent read. Set in the Regency period, the hero is an ex-Army officer who, after Waterloo, must come home to settle his family's affairs after his debt-ridden father commits suicide. It's a wonderful detective story—and more—just like the Liss books. (A Conspiracy of Paper won an Edgar!) Highly recommended.