Archives for March 30, 2015

Three years ago I posted an almanac entry drawn from an essay by L.E. Sissman called “The Constant Rereader’s Five-Foot Shelf”:

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.

A reader of this blog has now invited me to draw up my own five-foot shelf of books that I like to reread. As I doubt I need to remind you, I turn to the novels of Raymond Chandler, William Haggard, Elmore Leonard, Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald E. Westlake, and P.G. Wodehouse when I feel the urgent need to relax. Here is a shortish and by no means comprehensive list of other, more variously ambitious books to which I have also returned with fair regularity in recent years:

• Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20 and The Russian Girl

• Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking

• Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor and Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

• James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed, Guard of Honor, and The Just and the Unjust

• Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

• The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson

• Carl Flesch, Memoirs

• Gielgud’s Letters: John Gielgud in His Own Words

• Moss Hart, Act One

• Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

• All of the novels of John P. Marquand

• Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, The Narrow Margin, and The Razor’s Edge

• Edwin O’Connor, All in the Family and The Edge of Sadness

• The Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor volume (very much including the letters)

• Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King and A Time to Be Born

• All of the novels of Barbara Pym, but especially Excellent Women

• The Library of America’s Reporting World War II

• David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

• Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

• Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

• Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

• Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

I make no claim, by the way, that all of these books are “classic,” or that I think they’re better than other books that I reread less often (or not at all). They are nothing more—or less—than books that I like to reread fairly often for reasons that are in some cases not entirely clear to me. Make of that what you will.

New York City Ballet performs George Balanchine’s Symphony in C in 1973. The soloists are Karin von Aroldingen and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous in the first movement, Allegra Kent and Conrad Ludlow in the second movement, Sara Leland and John Clifford in the third movement, and Marnee Morris in the finale. The score is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C, composed shortly after Bizet turned seventeen:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“‘The point is,’ cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, ‘a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,’ shaking his skinny old fist, ‘there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part of La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!’”

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (courtesy of Tim Page)