Booknotes 4.22

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, published 1925, fiction. I had bounced off this book several times before (including at 41% a year ago!) but now was ready for it and rather liked it, especially the stream of consciousness (which is much harder to write than I realized) and the characterization. Also, thanks to Proust and Woolf and older lit in general, I now look forward to long sentences and paragraphs, ribbons of meaning and thought unfurling with delight in my brain.

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, by Virginia Postrel, published 2020, nonfiction. (Two Virginias in a row was a happy accident, by the way.) I loved this book. So good. Early genetic modification of flax and cotton by early humans, the mathematics of weaving, the Tyrian purple dye snails, the polyethylene textiles, all of it. Reading this really made me want to get into knitting or crochet or cross-stitch — and a few days ago I made the first step, spending an hour learning how to cast on and do a knit stitch. Knitted a handful of messy rows and had a blast doing it.

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker, published 1991, fiction. A short, dark, amusing novel about a girl in an old gothic mansion in Scotland and her dreadful life. Earthy bits aside, I liked it. It came alive for me after I slowed down enough to taste and enjoy the prose.

In Search of Lost Time volume 6: The Sweet Cheat Gone, by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), published 1925 (translation published 1930), fiction. More obsession, more unhealthy relationships, more meditations on grief and death. (Today, by the way, happens to mark three years since my dad disappeared and discorporated himself.) This also had, atypically for Proust and to my surprise, a small handful of honest-to-goodness plot twists. Only one more volume to go!