It's Monday! What Are You Reading!

 

It's Monday! What are you reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. For this meme, bloggers post what they finished last week, what they're currently reading, and what they plan to start this week.

My comments are not meant to be recaps of the story lines as I include a link to Goodreads for their synopsis of the book. I am merely stating how I felt about the book without giving any spoilers.

My 2013 reading list can be found here (not up to date at the moment).

It is the holiday season, we are in Las Vegas for a couple of weeks and friends joined us on the weekend for a couple of weeks so I don't see getting much reading done, but that's ok!!

ABANDONED:

Synopsis here.

I felt some trepidation when I downloaded this from the library as I had intensely disliked a previous work, The Sea.

I have deliberately not read any of the reviews by experts or ordinary readers so as to not influence my comments.

My recap (admittedly after only a few chapters at which point I hit DELETE):

Old man lying comatose on his death bed lusting after his daughter-in-law. His two insipid grown children languishing morosely around the family home as their narcissistic mother hovers around wringing her hands.

while the "unpaid skivvy" arrives with fresh eggs and a badly plucked chicken scurries around taking care of their needs.

This book is so pretentious and full of over-bearing language that I would have thrown it across the room if I wasn't using an e-reader.

STARTED:


Thanks to a successful interview with a painfully shy E. B. White, a beautiful nineteen-year-old hazel-eyed Midwesterner landed a job as receptionist at The New Yorker. There she stayed for two decades, becoming the general office factotum—watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the eighteenth floor. In addition to taking their messages, Groth watered their plants, walked their dogs, boarded their cats, and sat their children (and houses) when they traveled. And although she dreamed of becoming a writer herself, she never advanced at the magazine.

This memoir of a particular time and place is as much about why that was so as it is about Groth’s fascinating relationships with poet John Berryman (who proposed marriage), essayist Joseph Mitchell (who took her to lunch every Friday), and playwright Muriel Spark (who invited her to Christmas dinner in Tuscany), as well as E. J. Kahn, Calvin Trillin, Renata Adler, Peter Devries, Charles Addams, and many other New Yorkercontributors and bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village in its heyday.

During those single-in-the-city years, Groth tried on many identities—Nice Girl, Sex Pot, Dumb Blonde, World Traveler, Doctoral Candidate—but eventually she would have to leave The New Yorker to find her true self.