Latest Readings, by Clive James
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Latest Readings, by Clive James
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In 2010 Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do", James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write". James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list.
A look at some of James' old favorites as well as some of his recent discoveries, this book also offers a revealing look at the author himself, sharing his evocative musings on literature and family and on living and dying.
As thoughtful and erudite as the works of Alberto Manguel and as moving and inspiring as Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture and Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club, this valediction to James' lifelong engagement with the written word is a captivating valentine from one of the great literary minds of our time.
Latest Readings, by Clive James - Amazon Sales Rank: #50194 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Released on: 2015-10-06
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 191 minutes
Latest Readings, by Clive James
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful. The love of reading, a life of reading By R. M. Peterson Clive James is winding down. Yet he still has the urge to read and to write. So in this book he reports and reflects on his recent reading. LATEST READINGS is a slight book -- 180 pages with generous margins, large type, and blank pages between its many chapters. In truth, it is James Lite. Still, it is a refreshing treat for other inveterate literary readers who enjoy James's distinctive style and wit.The four authors that James discusses the most throughout the book are Joseph Conrad (after re-reading "Nostromo" he realizes that it is "one of the greatest books I have ever read"), Ernest Hemingway, Olivia Manning, and Anthony Powell. He so lauds Manning's two trilogies that I think I will have to read them. There is a chapter on Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey novels; when his daughter gave him the first one to read, "Master and Commander", she "was like a drug dealer handing out a free sample." Some of the books discussed I was not familiar with, but now they are on my radar as items I would like to get to, Insh'allah -- books like "Drayneflete Revealed" by Osbert Lancaster, "Exhibits of the Sun" by Stephen Edgar, and "Florence Nightingale" by Mark Bostridge.Clive James being Clive James, he zings a few people, among them Gore Vidal, V. S. Naipaul, and Yasser Arafat. And James being James, he sings the praises of Philip Larkin. A recurring theme that especially resonated with me is culling books as we down-size and become more realistic about the fact that death will soon o'ertake us with so many books still unread. Occasionally James would limp the half-mile into downtown Cambridge and visit Hugh's bookstall ("one of the great bookstalls on earth"), and browse. He would pick up a book with a frisson of excitement. "The books I already had in the house presumably once generated the same sort of charge when I contemplated buying them. Now there they were, still in their thousands despite the recent winnowing. I roamed slowly among them: old purchases begging to be read again even as the new purchases came in at the rate of one plastic shopping bag full every week. Insanity, insanity. Or, as Johnson might have said, vanity, vanity."
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful. Last Readings? By Charlus This latest book by Clive James does not wear its valedictory atmosphere lightly. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, he was prepared to read nothing longer than a news article until Yale University Press made him an offer he couldn't refuse. So here is a short book made up of very short chapters on his random thoughts about books he has either been reading or re-reading in recent years.As they say, it's not quantity but quality. James is able to squeeze more wit, insight and craft into 4 pages on a book than other writers can accomplish in 30. Here he is on an American publication of Anthony Powell's roman-fleuve:"...the Americans had, in their usual way, overdone the reverence, so that any of the four compilations was too bulky to take on a train, thus defeating one of the chief pleasures that Powell offers: to read, while traveling in a second-class carriage, about the kind of people who used to travel in first."He has a clear preference for books that engage in political or social commentary, both in fiction and nonfiction. Many of the books that earn high praise, such as Olivia Manning's trilogies or Sally Bedell Smith on the Kennedys, reflect his interest in how the real world works. But the poet in him has very kind words for Kipling, Larkin and Richard Howard and succinctly explains why. And he finds delight in writers he has read many years before, some obscure like Osbert Lancaster.I will end by an extended quote of his thoughts concerning this last writer. If this doesn't make you want to pick up this book, nothing I can say will persuade you:"As I read, I can feel it all slipping away into time as I am myself. Probably all this stuff-this last stretch of a privileged social history-will never again come back into favor. Perhaps we loved reading about it out there in the colonies only because we, the colonized, were even more reluctant than the imperialists to let go of a dying empire. John Carey, the cleverest of all critics in a generation of clever critics, has always hated that whole self-consciously arty era, to the point of arguing that it wasn't artistic at all. He thought that all good things were in the grip of a lucky elite, and needed to be prized loose. He was probably right. Certainly the whole cozy shebang is hard to explain to Americans, who live in a proclaimed democracy, and not in a stratified society whose top layer gives up its advantages as slowly as it can. But even Carey was obliged, when picking out his fifty most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, to admit that Waugh's Decline and Fall was one of them. It's one of the good things about the study of literature: taste triumphs prejudice. I feel the same way about Osbert Lancaster's lineup of slim volumes: I ought to disapprove, but I can't leave them alone." (p.71)
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Last Readings? By reading man First, you're unlikely to agree that all the books Clive James includes in LATEST READINGS are what you'd chose if you were in his circumstances (COPD, terminal leukemia). In fact, it's likely that some of his choices wouldn't be yours if you were in the best of health with almost certainly many years of reading time ahead of you.Anthony Powell, for example. I have read almost all of his books over the years, and I'd say A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME is the least impressive of them, unless you're awed by mere length. Perhaps you have to be British to be an admirer of this overlong, overdrawn account of the social adventures of Nick Jenkins, the narrator of all 12 (or is it 13?) volumes and a candidate for the most faceless character in modern fiction, especially given the reader's lengthy acquaintance with him. And the career of Widmerpol, the villain of the piece and the central character after Jenkins, is as one-dimensional and predictable as can be, excepting his highly implausible end in the last volume. Any comparison of Powell with Proust (and this is too often made) is laughable. It's the difference between an artist and a social novelist who aims at depth and at best provides entertainment. But as I said, maybe you have to be British: Ian Rankin chose DANCE as the one book he'd take with him to a desert island (on Desert Island Discs), though I think he'd have more fun with the collected works of John Dickson Carr.Similarly, Olivia Manning is a good novelist, but she doesn't deserve the lavish praise that James heaps on her two trilogies. Perhaps nostalgia for the period about which she writes is the decisive factor for him?On the other hand, to reread Conrad after 50 years and find UNDER WESTERN EYES to be one of the great novels in the language, as James does, testifies to a masterful taste for fiction, since the book is a genuine candidate for anyone's last reading list.More than his individual choices for "readings", James lifelong interest in literature is inspiring to the nth degree. As he approaches nothingness, he makes it clear that reading has been a major matter in his life, that it's made him what he is: a wise chap who understands how important books are in a full and meaningful life. For that he deserves unqualified admiration.
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