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What are you reading? June 6, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-06
The Bostonians by Henry James - So I now have about 70 pages of this novel to read; I’ve been playing catch-up ever since the class/reading group began.
And while I like the novel, I agree with Tara the Antisocial Social Worker’s comment last week to this extent: I think that while most of James’ characters have the psychological depth that I expect in a James novel, one of the novel’s main characters, Olive “I am a thousand years old“ Chancellor is so much of a cartoonish clownish character and I don’t know what James was thinking when he drew this particular almost cartoonish-like character. He draws sufficiently complex portraits of the other suffragists like Miss Birdseye so...maybe he wanted to show a range of characters with the suffragists moment. But he did not need to do that to Miss Chancellor.
I’ve read James’ own notes about this book in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James as well as A.S. Byatt’s endnotes to this Modern Library edition...this is a mystery and a problem that I need to work on a bit.
The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day by Dorothy Day -
Genet: A Biography by Edmund White-
Yes, I have read a few obits about the death of Edmund White this past Tuesday at the age of 85.
Edmund White, who mined his own life story, including his vast and varied catalog of sexual experiences, in more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of articles and essays, becoming a grandee of the New York literary world for more than half a century, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85. His death was confirmed by his husband, Michael Carroll, who said Mr. White had collapsed while weakened by “a vicious stomach bug.” The precise cause of death is unknown. Mr. White had been H.I.V. positive since the 1980s and survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014. Mr. White’s output was almost equally divided between fiction and nonfiction. Many of his books were critical successes, and several were best-sellers. The Chicago Tribune labeled him “the godfather of queer lit.”
I can’t really write much about Mr. White’s work simply because I don’t know it that well, although I have long known that he was HIV positive.
The only fiction of White’s that I’ve read was A Boy’s Own Story and that was in the late 80’s/early 90’s. I had read a number of his non-fiction essays at that time. He fell off of my radar other than the Genet bio which I am making a second attempt at reading. I knew that White wrote a lot and unashamedly about sex and I am familiar with some, although not most of that work.
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