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This book seemed so promising when I happened across it. She writes about Nabokov, Simone Weil, John Reed and Louise Bryant, MLK and the civil right movement, Byron's marriage, the Tolstoy marriage, and Bartleby the Scrivener. It's hard to imagine an intelligent person writing uninteresting essays on these topics, but EH manages to be pretty unremittingly tedious. She's an absolute snob, she's sure she knows more than you do (she probably does), and she's sure that her personal taste (which runs...
She is an amazing writer who makes me want to read or re-read the books she talks abouts.
Ms. Hardwick is a very good writer who provides astutue observations on a myriad of topics ranging from civil rights in the 1960s, literary fiction in the 1970s, and cultural/literary figures like Thomas Mann and Simone Weil. Soemtimes dated; never boring.
lately I've become a bit too ambitious re: my reading. I check out more books than I can reasonably read/finish before they are due back at the library, even when I renew them once, sometimes twice if the librarians allow me! (the Kensington Library women rock in that respect.)Ergo, most of the books I mark as 'to be read' are books I checked out, but had to return to the library and concentrate on just one at a time.