Why fate doesn't always cooperate

I'm sad right now. I just finished reading Sally Beauman's The Sisters Mortland, on loan from Carolline, and it's one of those books that makes me want to mope around until I something distracts from the fact that life doesn't always finish happily ever after.

That said, it's gorgeous, and haunting - even if sometimes a little too pat. The eponymous sisters are the center of the piece, even though a good half of it involves them as they are seen by others, particularly in the painting of the same name as the novel. Three stunningly beautiful sisters, who have fatal flaws and family secrets; and the young men whose lives intertwine around theirs, during the summer of 1967. And whose lives continue to intersect in increasingly complicated ways even 23 years later.

Beauman employs a writerly trick that I always fall for, and thus tend to resent. We see characters perhaps better than they see themselves, and then root for them to figure out what we've already deduced. Because we, as readers, want the happy ending. Or at least the satisfying one. Life is difficult enough - can't we at least believe in satisfaction, at the end of the day?

too busy to read :(

It's been awhile since I've posted. Why? Well, it all started with Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, an intellectual history of the march to the Russian Revolution (well, the October one anyway). This book was on my list from my grad student days, and I thought it was time to get around to it.

But it's a loooong book, and I had a tendency to fall asleep while reading it. Just thinking about it makes me feel a little sleepy. French thinker after French thinker after... and then some utopian communes in America, and then finally Marx and Engels, and their rivals. And then Lenin. And Trotsky, who comes off as quite the peacock. (The original edition of the book came out in 1940, just before Trotsky was killed in exile.) This is the kind of book that I'm glad is around, but that I wish I could have read in a condensed form. In retrospect, I should have just started with Marx.

I digress. I wanted to get to the excuses for not writing. I was slogging through Wilson, and thus not blogging. And then I finally get through it, right in time for work to become INSANE. So there hasn't been time for reading, for writing, for checking e-mail, etc. (On the other hand, somehow I found time on Wednesday night to read a truly ridiculous chick lit novel - Some Nerve, by Jane Heller - about a journalist for a celebrity mag who loses her job when she can't get an interview with a superhot but elusive actor. She goes back home to the Midwest, and lo and behold finds the perfect opportunity to prove her journalistic chops. Unless love gets in the way. Oh, and she battles panic attacks, which are intermittently believable.)

I think that after tomorrow, work will calm down some. And then maybe I'll get to catch up on New Yorker's, and books, and posting. And springtime, damn it!