Books and More Books
Tue., January 13, 12:45 PM
I said yesterday that I was going to discuss my current reading. It all seems to be going so slowly; I used to read a couple of books a week. I think it’s partly having to coordinate my eyes and my glasses as well as the inability to sit in one place for too long. If there was to be one compensation for getting old, it should have been the chance to sit and read. Don’t tell me; I know life isn’t always fair. Well, some things do go faster than others.
I finished From These Ashes, the Frederic Brown collection, which turned out not to be a dippin’ book after all, because I just had to read the whole thing. It took a long time because there’s a lot in it: more than one hundred stories from 1940 to 1965. One thing that surprised me was that I had read so many of them; they are so good that they have been chosen over an over for anthologies. Even if I didn’t recognize the titles, I often knew the story after the first page or so. Some of the stories had bits I didn’t remember; I imagine these had been edited down, in the days when magazines paid by the word.
Yeah, they were dated. They were very male chauvinist. In many cases science has outdistanced imagination. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed them, and I will be dipping back into this book from time to time.
Meanwhile – I usually have more than one book going – I have been wading through Mr. Timothy, by Louis Bayard. This book takes place in London around 1860. It is the same time frame of Anne Perry’s William Monk, but the characters – at least those I’ve encountered so far – are those who would be almost invisible in Perry’s stories. Street urchins. Madams. Corpse scavengers.
Timothy is Timothy Cratchit from “A Christmas Carol,” now grown up and earning his keep by teaching reading and similar pursuits. He receives some money from his “Uncle N,” a philanthropist whom we reconize is Ebenezer Scrooge. I don’t know where this book is going; the language takes extra thought, the lifestyles are hard to envision, and I’m still not sure who the main characters are. I’ll let you know.
There was an article on the business page this morning about Adecco and its financial woes. Adecco is the temporary agency I’ve been working through for the last eight years or so. I’ll tell you about that one tomorrow.
