I'm in the middle of exams and frantically busy so here's a quick catch-up list of what I've read recently and I'll try to do a better post a bit later:
The devil wears Prada [28]
Martin Walker's The cold war [29]
Les liaisons dangereuses [30]
Dreams and dilemmas, collected essays and early writings by Sheila Rowbotham [31]
The selected poems of Yehuda Amichai [32]
The certificate, by Isaac Bashevis Singer [33]
Inventing God, by Nicholas Mosley [34]
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swords and dreams
All books are either dreams or swords/You can cut, or you can drug, with words - Amy Lowell
Me and mine on the internet
Currently reading
- A century of women: the history of women in Britain and the United States in the twentieth century - Sheila Rowbotham
- A history of 20th century fashion - Elizabeth Ewing
- Au bonheur des dames - Émile Zola
- La Princesse de Clèves - Madame de la Fayette
- The aesthetics of resistance - Peter Weiss
- The secret agent - Joseph Conrad
- The women's room - Marilyn French
Already read this year - 2009
- 1 - The foundling - Georgette Heyer
- 2 - Philby: the spy who betrayed a generation - Knightley, Page and Leitch
- 3 - Fathers and sons - Ivan Turgenev
- 4 - Tarabas - Joseph Roth
- 5 - The virgin in the garden - A.S. Byatt
- 6 - Streetfighting years - Tariq Ali
- 7 - Shadows of the pomegranate tree - Tariq Ali
- 8 - Women and children first - Cadogan and Craig
- 9 - The tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë
- 10 - Jo Shapcott: her book - Jo Shapcott
- 11 - The book of blood - Vicki Feaver
- 12 - The Thursday kidnapping - Antonia Forest
- 13 - The thuggery affair - Antonia Forest
- 14 - We are now beginning our descent - James Meek
- 15 - The myth of Mars and Venus - Deborah Cameron
- 16 - Still Life - A.S. Byatt
- 17 - L'argent - Émile Zola
- 18 - Russia's path from Gorbachev to Putin - David Kotz
- 19 - Hardcore from the heart - Annie Sprinkle
- 20 - See we have coming to Dover! - Daljit Nagra
The rest of the internet
- Abebooks
- Ben Goldacre's Bad science
- Bibliophil
- Cabbages and Pumpkins
- Camberwell online - blog
- Daniel Barenboim
- Derelict London
- Doonesbury
- Doris Lessing
- Edward Said archive
- Found magazine
- Girl in the green dress
- Good reads
- Guernica magazine
- Gutenberg project
- Jewish Music Institute
- Last.fm
- Leonard Cohen
- Library thing
- London's Royal parks
- Marxists internet archive
- Mslexia magazine
- New Left Review
- Poetry Archive
- Poetry at plagiarist.com
- Poetry Foundation
- Poets.org
- Post Secret - blog
- Poésie française
- So many books
- Stephen Jay Gould archive
- Susan Sontag
- Tariq Ali
- The Camelot project
- Things magazine
- Think denk blog
- Tools are refundable
- Waylaid poetry blog
- Women writers - a zine
- Workspaces - blog
- Znet
4 comments:
What did you think of Les Liaisons Dangereuses? And was the Mosley good?
I loved Liaisons Dangereuses, I thought it was stupendous. Tight, witty, suspenseful, just brilliant. I saw the film with Glenn Close and John Malkovich too, but I think it's difficult to make an epistolary novel work as a film, although I thought Glenn Close was very good as Merteuil.
The Nicholas Mosley I had trouble getting into and didn't really enjoy. I find it difficult to get used to his way of writing dialogue. Like Hopeful Monsters, I think I ought to give it another chance.
Other films of Les Liaisons Dangereuses worth checking out are Cruel Intentions (1999 - with Buffy and Reese Witherspoon), Valmont (1989 - with Colin Firth), but best is Roger Vadim's 1959 version, with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Louis Trintignant and a score by Thelonious Monk, set in a very cool 50's Paris: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053002/
I'd seen Dangerous Liaisons several times before I read the book, so didn't appreciate that in the book the protagonists only meet once. The book is fantastic, not least because the use of letters is entirely internally justified and consistent. But plainly that can't work on screen, so Christopher Hampton (and Frears) did a very good job changing it, but replacing it with a sexual tension in the encounters between the two.
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