#current reading

“Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. […] I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art…. Of course, I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. […] You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in YOU. […] I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.”

Basil Hallward, The Picture of Dorian Gray, O. Wilde

Currently reading English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson, ed. John Williams (NYRB Classics). It’s a remarkably wide-ranging anthology that features not only the period’s heavy hitters (Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne) but also lesser-known talents (George Gascoigne, Barnabe Googe, Fulke Greville) and figures famed for reasons other than their verse (Thomas More, Walter Rale[i]gh). Williams’ editorial commentary, though perhaps now somewhat dated (the book was published in 1963), is consistently thoughtful and delightfully well-written. All in all, quite a good little volume.

Currently reading A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. It eschews detailed analysis of musical scores in favor of a focus on the authors’ subjective experience of opera, as filtered both through recordings and through live performances. An unconventional approach, perhaps, but I like it. (Plus, it has pictures!)

Currently reading the classic Western adventure novel Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. The prose style sometimes shows its age – as is perhaps inevitable in a book published the same year the Titanic sank – but for all that, it retains considerable verve and narrative drive. It’s not hard to see why Grey’s book sales made him a millionaire.