I got them both at Perfect Books — in Ottawa, where I accompanied my wife on a business trip. While she did the pro thing, I shuffled around town and bumped through establishment doorways like this one.
I knew I was going to polish off the Barnes novel — if E.L. Doctorow is the most partially-read author on my shelves, Julian Barnes qualifies as among the most fully-read. I've never had trouble finishing a book by him. The “lesser” stuff, the highbrow stuff — it all grabs and sustains my interest. The Only Story concerns a young man who falls for a woman old enough to be his mother, in '60s suburban England — lovely review by Michael Czobit over here. So yes: easily devoured. Now to Grayling and Wittgenstein.
I last wrestled with Ludwig Wittgenstein some 25 years ago. And what I call “wrestling” is nothing any self-respecting academic would deign to recognize — one or two long walks after reading, some notes tentatively scratched into my journal. But then it was time to chase down the next paying gig.
Throw in a visit to Haus Wittgenstein, and we're done. |
Lovely photo, Jordana! |
“Yes, I'm sorry,” said my book-steward, when I asked about Kerr. “He died a couple of months ago. There's apparently one more Bernie Gunther novel in the pipeline, due to be published soon.”
I returned home and retrieved the Gunther novels I'd started but hadn't finished — Kerr was closing in on Doctorow, frankly. His stand-alone novels usually left me cool — with one exception — while the later Gunther novels had lost the fever-dream of the original trilogy and showed occasional signs of writer-weariness.
To wit. |
Now I am finishing those novels, and wishing Kerr was still around to write more. Alas.
Anyway, the stand-alone that really stuck to my ribs is The Second Angel, which readers seem to have limited use for. Hopefully I'll revisit it and do a little excavating here.
6 comments:
Just getting to your September posts, here. (What a month!) Several thoughts, but for the moment only want to mention that the fellow I was hanging out with on a fine Chicago afternoon a few weeks ago — pretty close to date of your Ottawa visit apparently — is author of one of the titles in that Very Short Introduction series, and if you’d just turned your phone a very little to the left, we’d know now whether he was among the scholars you were passing over in your apparent preference for heralds of the end of the modern over heralds of its beginning (or something).
Excuse me, if Jordana had just turned her phone a bit!
Sheesh. Excuse me again, as my Chicago visit was obviously nowhere close to the date of yours to Ottawa. Not processing things very cleanly in my haste today, it seems.
Making up for lost time. Or something like that. ☺
"Very Short Intro To Cal" - sheesh, did your friend make it to the second vowel in TULIP??
Hey, man
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