Don't you just hate the way these book buying sites control your clicking finger?
So there I was, Laura had talked me out of reading Kafka...what on earth was I thinking, men waking up as cockroaches...did I need that, perhaps not now...then Joan comes along and says I must read him and it's one of the many wonderful things about asking a question of all of you.
I shall be trying Kafka eventually because I want to be able to say Kafkaesque and I can't until I've read him according to Mike.
Mention of Arthur Ransome and Swallows and Amazons (Erika says no) had thrown up one recent but shabby paperback copy here and I knew it was the book to try for my next Inner Child read but I could only read it in hardback with 'that' cover.
Is everyone this fussy?
Finances permitting, does a book have to be just right?
Off to Amazon 'just to see' and luckily there is a hardback edition in print and available so that was easy.
Then your eye wanders over the screen, and drat and double drat, they've flashed up books relevant to your previous purchases.
They saw me coming a mile away when they pasted Stefan Zweig's autobiography right in my eyeline, I am a marketing tool's dream attachment, no messing, no fixing, no lining up the notches and turning clockwise, I just click immediately into place, or my clicking finger does. 'Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it
was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his
international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the
great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds
the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that
was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the
course of history. Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and
loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky,
Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain
Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.'
How could I resist that?
In fact how could I have even waited this long to discover a book by a writer I admire so profoundly and when The World of Yesterday arrived I was dipping into it immediately, it's readable, seems to be wonderfully insightful and self-deprecating, in fact vintage Stefan Zweig, the man I feel I have come to know through his writing and I'm intrigued to know if this will turn out to be the real man but I've had to force a put-down because...
Not purchased but here thanks to Bloomsbury and I'm already swimming around nicely in The Year of the Flood by my friend Peggy Margaret Atwood. I think this might be the first novel to emerge since I finished that grand Atwood-athon three years ago, just before I started dovegreyreader, in fact it was Margaret Atwood who led me to Margaret Laurence amongst others who made me start writing all this, blame her. My head was so full of everything I'd read, it just had to spill out somewhere or I'd be in trouble.
Just how does Margaret Atwood do it, is a question I am asking myself over and again as I'm reading and if you enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale and more specifically Oryx and Crake, which I did, I suspect you'll love The Year of the Flood too. Oryx and Crake the book which turned me from an occasional Atwoodian into a devoted one and sent me back to tackle The Blind Assassin again after a failure or two. I hate to admit it but I may have reached that point where I am beyond any attempt at objective, reasoning or criticism about Margaret Atwood's writing.
I just fall in and wallow around in the deep end loving it, sorry.
Only a six more sleeps until RevCheryl and I pitch up at The Year of the Flood event at Ely Cathedral, expect fulsome accounts and Marg09 is a blogger now too, check this out.
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