FolioDeux Blog

FD recently finished reading Margaret Drabble’s latest work, The Pattern in the Carpet. FD, unlike the New York Times saw little in it to remind her of Henry James.  Drabble hoped to write about jigsaw puzzles, and a loved aunt, and her own life.  She wanders around all of these subjects, and sometimes says interesting things, but she seems not completely comfortable with memoir (an “almost memoir” a reviewer in Britain’s Telegraph called it), and not up for the amount of research she’d need to do to expand on the current studies of the jigsaw puzzle, and not really interested in doing a biography of her aunt, who lived a quiet, if long, life.

Drabble write most movingly about aging and death, and at times this volumue reminded FD of the books Doris Lessing wrote under the name Jane Somers, The Diary of a Good Neighbor and  If the Old Could. (There are two Jane Somers on Twitter, but neither appears to be an homage).

Anyway, FD has been having a great time doing a jigsaw puzzle, but is not moved to write about that!

It’s halfway through poetry month.  Not that we’ve seen much attention to it.  Thankfully, the truly ugly Academy of American Poets poster for National Poetry Month   (see for yourself,  here) has not appeared anywhere we frequent.

On the positive side, our local independent bookstore is offering a poetry month sale on poetry books.  But FD is really trying not to buy new books of any kind — must work on the reading backlog!

And FD is trying to insert poetry into daily life whenever possible.  For example, when visiting the emergency room recently (it was a case of posterior vitreous detachment), FD was able to almost quote a bit of Romeo and Juliet to try to explain the symptoms that were being experienced.  Oddly, the doctors did not seem to be totally appreciative.

FD reads a lot of reviews, and book store catalogs, and blogs etc, places where one might read about an author or a book.  FD has a little notebook into which the names of authors and books to read in the future are put.   Then, in a bookstore or the library, the book can be consulted and a book or an author discovered.

Sometimes a book or an author sits in the notebook for years, and FD just does not get around to investigating the reference.  Every time FD is thinking “what to read next” and leafing through the idea notebook, there’s the suggestion that Zola’s Nana would probably amuse.  Or perhaps Kristin Lavransdotter (but only, says a note in the notebook, in the Nunnally translation).  So far, though, the classics keep getting pushed to the side.

Recently, FD decided it was time to read something by Laurie Colwin.  Only 36,000 hits on google and 25,000 on bing, but probably every single one of them is positive.  At least FD has never seen a mention of Colwin that was not super-enthusiastic.  The “literature map” at Gnooks (a very cool site) indicates that those who read Colwin also read MFK Fisher (an FD fave) and Hilary Mantel, and lots of other authors FD approves of.  So, off to the library and home with Happy All the Time (13,400 google hits; 9,860 bing hits).

Alas, FD appears to be immune to Colwin’s charm.  Finished the novel completely baffled by the enthusiasm not just of the blurbers on the back but the happy bloggers and others who got LC into FD’s book&author notebook in the first place.   Colwin also did some food writing, and so perhaps FD will try one of those collections; it is puzzling to not be able to see why so many readers have so high an opinion of a writer that FD found tepid and uninteresting.