#current reading

Every so often I like to read something that's completely outside my competence zone -- after all, it's the best way to learn something new. With this in mind, I'm reading The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page, originally published in 1962 and brought back into print in 2007 by NYRB Classics. Page (1906-1985) was a world-class garden designer with a career spanning nearly six decades, and in this book, he embarks on a sort of mental tour of the gardens that struck him as particularly lovely and/or well-adapted to their settings. It's beautifully written, with an astonishing eye for detail (Page originally trained as a painter), and above all, it's relaxed -- a word I mean as high praise. So much of life now revolves around a deluge of information, with sensory assaults ever increasing and attention spans ever shortening. To indulge in a book like this one, whose pace is set solely by the rhythms of the natural world, makes for an escape of the very best kind.

Currently reading Transformation and Other Stories by Mary Shelley. A slim volume (it's part of a series called "101 Pages" published in the UK and is, fittingly, 101 pages) that collects three of Shelley's best Gothic tales, "Transformation," "The Mortal Immortal," and "The Evil Eye". The title story echoes some of the themes of Frankenstein -- interior vs. exterior beauty and ugliness, as reflected in "the double"; the dangers of runaway pride; the striking of a Faustian bargain for knowledge or power. Shelley's prose is highly wrought, but appropriately so, given the weighty themes and dramatic situations she portrays. It's understandable that Frankenstein has dominated our understanding of her work -- it is, after all, one of the most influential and frequently adapted novels ever written -- but stories such as these, together with her other novels like The Last Man and Mathilda, remind us that she had perhaps the most fertile literary imagination of her generation.

Reading The Shadow-Line: A Confession by Joseph Conrad, the 1915 autobiographical novel (I suppose now it would be called autofiction) of his first command, the sailing ship Otago, and how he passed the "shadow-line" between youth and maturity. It will never cease to amaze me that Conrad, for whom English was a third language, wrote better prose than 99% of novelists having English as their first language.