Other stops along the line

What I read

Finished Never Had It So Good, and while I am less whelmed than I was on first reading it 50 years ago (aaarrgh), and consider that as panoramic social novel of provincial life, does not quite reach the level of South Riding, yet, that is the comparison one thinks of. I also mark up Mr Jones in contrast to The Angry Young Men who were his contemporaries over a whole range of issues.

Finished Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, which was fascinating, and very readable, but has not somehow inspired me to rush off and do a re-read.

Then thought I should really read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017), for forthcoming in-person book group.

In hopes of a change from that - it's grim - read Marion Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close (Walsh Family, #5) (2012), a recent Kobo deal, which was itself not entirely the most cheerful read.

On the go

Amazon helpfully alerted me to Kindle-only publication of Alexis Hall, Never After, currently in progress, also not really bringing the delicious froth - opium-addicted Victorian rent-boy rescued from homelessness on the streets by clergyman (unexpected and unwanted 3rd son in aristo family, put him into the church) with his own backstory baggage.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review.

Also I had a mad binge on Kobo the other day, mostly Dick Francises which had come down to promotional prices, but I also finally succumbed to the most recent Edward St Aubyn which has been tempting me. The previous one was so much less gruesome than the Melrose sequence that perhaps this will be the change of pace I'm looking for?

Personally I suspect Blake Morrison has either not read terribly deeply in memoirs of the past, because I could probably without too much struggle come up with instances which were not at all about being 'a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers)', but one sees that this is a position he has to take up in order to make his case about Ye Moderne Confeshunal memoiring.

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

(Harriette Wilson would like a word, just saying, for starters.) (We can so imagine dear Harriette on social media, no?)

I'm not sure he's really got an argument there rather than some vague blathering about published memoirs vs social media and blogs, especially given the, er, thinness of his historical grounding (though in some cases past memoirists prudently arranged for the work to published posthumously).

And as for people being somewhat lax with the truthiness of their memoirs, how about this chap: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax:

The book’s author and narrator, Donald Cameron, describes his early life in Blarosnich, a remote hill farm in the Western Highlands in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book presents a Brigadoon-like spectacle of an agrarian community seemingly little touched by modernity, populated by pious women, elderly aristocrats and lusty farm lads.
....
Donald Cameron was, in fact, a pseudonym of Robert Harbinson Bryans, an itinerant bisexual schoolteacher turned travel writer who was born in Belfast in 1928 and died in London in 2005. Also known as Robin Bryans, his name is now largely forgotten apart from among students of plots and conspiratorial claims.