Today is the last day of The Challenge: reading commences tomorrow. I am relieved to slip back into the homey yet challenging skin of being a reader, and my self-identification as such. I already feel as if I shall want to devour one of everything, please! This will make April as much of a challenge as March. Whittling down my wish-list is going to take a mental chisel of epic proportions--continuing to peruse that Daedalus catalogue is probably not the best use of my idle time. I am, sadly, too deeply engrossed to pull back. Here is Part III of my Reading List, straight out of Daedalus Early Spring 2009. It is probably a good thing that I have not broken the seal of the Bas Bleu catalogue that arrived a few days ago!
1-Love and Louis XIV The Women in the Life of the Sun King by Antonia Fraser (NAN A. TALESE)A soon-to-be notch on my post of biographies read, it is authored by the superb Antonia Fraser, who specializes in chronicling the lives of historical figures. Plus, the re-telling of the Court of the Sun King must read like the trashiest modern tabloid, wrought real.
2-La Dame D'Esprit A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet by Judith P. Zinsser (VIKING)A peek into the life and careers of one of the most accomplished women of the 18th-Century.
3-The Thames: A Cultural History by Mick Sinclair (OXFORD) This is essentially a biography of the iconic English river. This would be a good place to call me a history geek and obsessive Anglophile. Go ahead. I know you want to.
4-Whores of the Devil Witch-Hunts and Witch-Trials by Erik Durschmied (SUTTON) The title is reason enough, don't you think? Persecution of women of power and influence was sadly wide-spread, even in otherwise civilized societies. I find studies of such endemic superstition, fear and greed incredibly fascinating.
5-Mary Magdalene: A Biography by Bruce Chilton (DOUBLEDAY) Rounding out the genre is a telling of the life of the woman who, in unknown and unknowable capacities, walked by the side of Jesus.
6-Letters of EB White Revised Edition EB White Dorothy Lobrano Guth & Martha White, eds. John Updike, forward. (HARPERCOLLINS) The world and insight of the man behind the extraordinary worlds of creatures Charlotte, Wilbur and Stuart is presented through decades of his letters.
7-Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier (DUTTON) She wrote the lovely, evocative and believable 'Girl With a Pearl Earring'. All of her novels create, and re-create, in the most breathtaking capacity imaginable, lost eras and the human, complicated individuals who inhabited them.
8-Emilio's Carnival (Senilita) by Italo Svevo (YALE)His early masterpiece, dating from 1898.
9-Maxfield Parrish and the American Imagists by Laurence S. Cutler & Judy Goffman Cutler (CHARTWELL) Another lush coffee-table art book.
10-Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris by Franck Maubert (ASSOULINE) The life + artwork of the bedazzled, sordid legend.
11-Obsessed with Hollywood Test Your Knowledge of the Silver Screen by Andrew J. Rausch (CHRONICLE) I am, and I will.
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