In the spirit of the season, I’ve cheated like mad. Two books that I’ve been reading for so long that even you’ve gotten sick of them — referred to for weeks now as “Blanning and Pamuk” — have been withdrawn from the pile, because I’ve almost finished reading them. I shall certainly read nothing else until I do finish them. Which means, more or less, that I’ve just taken a snapshot of books that I’m not reading.

Not yet. Not yet officially. (I am well into The Sportswriter.)

I’ve almost finished listening to What Is the What, but there, for some reason, my conscience intervenes. The book stays until the seventeenth disc plays. (Or is at least inserted into the Discman.)

There are four new titles. One of them is a promotion: Maugham’s The Painted Veil. This is the third of three minor novels that I know to have been turned into major motion pictures, and if the other two — Theatre (Being Julia) and Up at the Villa — are any indication, the novel will probably turn out to be a good deal more pallid than the movie. It’s just like cuisine, really; we demand more interest today. It’s almost arresting that Maugham should be providing Hollywood with such fertile armatures.

The other three are Crazy for God, Under a Cruel Star, and Blogging Heroes. More about these titles anon.

As for this weeks Book Review:

¶ A Stranger in Camelot.

Now look: the pile thickened. I plodded on but finished nothing this week. I am about to be done, however, with Jason Sokol’s There Goes My Everything, which I plucked from another pile on Sunday, my big reading day. It’s an important book, and I felt rather ashamed of having taken so long to get through it. (I found it slow going but rewarding.) So that book appears in the pile for the purposes of this photograph only. I’m moving along with Pamuk and Blanning, the former dense and all-encompassing, the latter serious but witty. I will be done with one or both of these books by next week. (Kathleen scolds me for talking about “getting rid” of books I’m reading, as if I didn’t really enjoy them. I do enjoy them! But I hate the piles stacked up behind them!) As a sign of the general unfairness of things, John Fowles Daniel Martin, which I’ve already read at least twice, went straight from the bookseller’s wrapper into the pile: I’ve been keen to re-read it ever since walking through the tall grass in St Croix.

I shall be done with What Is the What soon, too. It is the Odyssey of our times — and maybe even another Odyssey. As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ The Ten Best Books of 2007.

Assiduous readers will notice that two books have disappeared from the pile. That’s because I’ve read them.* I was tempted to replace them with books from the supplemental piles elsewhere, but the shorter stack was so pleasing that I decided to leave it alone. Besides, it’s not my only “what I’m reading” pile. I’ve got another one, comprising six books that I march through for an hour every morning. That’s all I’ll say about the “morning reading” project at this time.

I did slip in Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking (the grey spine third from the bottom). This is not a book to read, but a culinary reference. Why did I buy it? I’ve no idea.  Someone must have been singing its praises. Looking through it, I don’t see very much that I don’t already know, or that isn’t likely to be in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. It’s a perfectly nice book, handsomely laid out and well-written. Maybe you can tell me why I have it. I’ve put it in the pile so that I’ll have to give a thorough once-over in order to remove it from the pile – and hence from my conscience.

Not only did I remove the stack of CDs, shown in last week’s photo, but I filed them all where they belonged. Now I really can’t find them. (Does anyone else out there have Night Song, that super, one-off, Michael Brook-produced CD by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?)

¶ Holiday Books.

* But what does this mean? Bet you didn’t think that there was anything complicated about “reading a book.” Ha! If you don’t want to be branded as a clueless sniveling Anglophone, stay tuned for our account of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read – the title of which, in the original French, is a question.

What am I reading? I haven’t got a clue. I certainly haven’t read anything in the past couple of days, which have been given over to housework and running errands. It was in the process of clearing off a shelf of back issues of Granta that I came across Richard Ford’s 1992 novella, The Womanizer, which I did read the other night, in one sitting, before, fearfully wakeful, going to bed resolved to think about nothing else until I fell asleep (a stunt that, amazingly, worked). I am still plowing through the same old pile: Blanning on Europe, Lilla on God and the West, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, which is indeed, as Maureen Freeley writes in the afterword to her translation, the “cauldron” from which his later work comes.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Sir Noël’s Epistles.

Packing for St Croix, I took along a few more books than I could ever read – but only a few. I see now that I might have made do with only three: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, which has at last captured my interest; Sailing From Byzantium, Colin Wells’s robust (not to say vulgar) account of the influence of the Eastern Empire upon the West, upon Islam, and upon the Slavic world; and Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. Because I’m so familiar with the Joan Hickson adaptation of Christie’s chestnut that I don’t have to fret over clues, the book is quite a pleasure to read.

I did bring one of the MacMullen books mentioned last week, but I doubt that I’ll get to it. Ditto, I’m afraid, Tony Attwood’s Asperger’s book.

¶ Woody Talks.

The book pile has undergone meiosis: there are two piles. This happens. It happens often. Eventually, some of the books in each of the current piles get swept back into other, attendant piles. That will not happen this time!

I’m trying hard to finish The Stillborn God (Mark Lilla on religion and politics) by the end of the week, because I want to be done with it before we head off to St Croix. It’s not an easy read by any means, especially because there’s a great deal about Kant, and I have a preliminary problem with Kant that makes reading about his thought very difficult: how can anybody not have figured out that Kant is (a) unwholesome and (b) ridiculous? Much more appealing are two recent books by Ramsay MacMullen that I ordered from a catalogue of Yale books, Voting About God in Early Church Councils and Christians and Pagans in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. These plainspoken titles fail to suggest the vibrancy of Prof MacMullen’s scholarship. But I’m saving both books – they’re quite slim - for St Croix.

Other books that I’ll be taking with me include three Miss Marple mysteries, all of which I know inside and out from the Joan Hickson adaptations (I haven’t yet moved on to the somewhat shorter Geraldine McEwans). I shall leave whatever I read behind at the hotel. I’m also taking Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome.

I thought I’d have read The Abstinence Teacher by now, but it looks like something that I’ll get to after the Thanksgiving break.

As for this week’s Book Review (which has so many bad reviews that I set up a new section just for them.)

¶ The Colossus.

How did that happen? A few new titles hopped into the pile on the bedside table. Three are recommendations from friends. The problem with recommendations from friends is that, if the titles are at all plausible, I feel compelled (and not by the friends) to buy the book right away – lest I forget, I suppose. These new books are: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J Levitin (Nom de Plume), Sailing From Byzantium, by Colin Wells (George), and Tomorrow They Will Kiss, by Eduardo Santiago (1904). Also new is the novel that I’m suddenly in the middle of, Edmund White’s “New York novel,” Hotel de Dream. I haven’t read one of Mr White’s novels since – well, almost since he started writing them (I prefer his memoirs). So far, Hotel de Dream is an entertainment for the erudite – Henry James and Joseph Conrad have made decidedly distinctive appearances; we shall see if there is more to this novel about the dying Stephen Crane and his disinterested recollections of New York’s “painted boys” than that.

During daylight hours, I’m conscientiously enjoying (no oxymoron!) Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory. About the countless ambiguities of his subject (Europe 1648-1815, or, in other words, the ancien régime), Prof Blaning is wonderfully unambiguous.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Tour de France.

What I’m reading now: in addition to Blanning on Europe and Doidge on the Brain, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, I find a few new titles in my bedside pile. There are two books that Miss G brought to me on the eve of my surgery (actually, she brought me the Doidge as well) that happened to be published or authored by a friend, Marissa Walsh. Then there is another brain book, Daniel J Levitan’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, a book about which a friend of mine has waxed extremely enthusiastic; a short book about God and the West, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God; and the new Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher. I wish I didn’t know which one I’ll finish first.

Also in the pile is Ian Bradley’s indispensable Oxford Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan. That’s not its official title, which is why I haven’t italicized it; rather, it’s close to what I call the book: “the Oxford G and S.” I’ve had this out because Kathleen and I have been listening to The Mikado a lot. Just now, this feast of absurdity has seemed to make a lot of sense to us. Although I cannot hear Katisha wail, “May not a cheated maiden die?” without actually sympathizing with her romantic disappointment. How ridiculous is that? Why do we need Bradley, you ask, when the insides of our eyelids are less familiar than The Mikado? Because neither of us can ever remember that what sounds like “all of her” is actually “all aver,” as in Pish-Tush’s

She’ll toddle off, as all aver,
With the Lord High Executioner.

It’s not one of Gilbert’s strongest lines. As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Century’s Playlist.

After a few short and piquant fictions (The Uncommon Reader, What’s for Dinner?), I resolved to sink my teeth into something that would keep me for a while, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, as newly translated by Maureen Freely. One does not rush through Mr Pamuk’s rich, semi-Dostoevskyan novels, even when their autobiographical aspects are familiar from other books (Istanbul, for example). I’m also working my way through Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory, which so far is solidly pedestrian (although very well-written). Finally (for the moment), there’s Alice Munro’s collection of old family stories, with the missing bits filled in by the author’s imagination. Meta-nonfiction? Fiction, schmiction. The View from Castle Rock reads like the vintage Munro that it is.

As for this week’s Book Review, there are lots of Yeses, and more Noes than Maybes. Among the Noes is Alice Sebold’s second novel, which, appropriately enough given its plot, is currently being dismembered by a school of barracuda critics who deplored the success of The Lovely Bones. Ms Sebold will be lucky to have her work appear in the fifteenth Library of America collection of crime fiction, when it appears in fifty years.

¶ True Believers.

What I’m reading avidly at the moment, and may even have finished by the time that you read this, is Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A story of Race and Family Secrets. As was widely revealed after his death, former Times book critic Anatole Broyard was an Afro-American man, pure and simple, who managed to pass as white. The “family secrets” angle of the book’s subtitle is especially intriguing, because Ms Broyard and her older brother, Todd, soon discovered that, among people who knew Dad well, it was only his family, or at least his children, who didn’t know. I can stare at the jacket photograph every which way without being able to “make out” Broyard’s “black” features, but they were apparently obvious to other blacks.

Ms Broyard wrestles with a problem the tectonics of which have shifted out of recognition. Once upon a time, despite inheriting many of her mother’s Norwegian features, she would have been deemed black at least by Southern Americans. But as the child of educated (relative) affluence who grew up in one of the tonier precincts of Fairfield County, Ms Broyard’s “blackness” is ruthlessly limited to a genetic inheritance of which she was simply unaware until she was in her mid-twenties.

So far, One Drop has merely convinced me that the idea of race is even more meretricious than I thought it was.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Dangerous Obsession.

Haunting me for the past month has been the 9 September 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review, which I was to have written up on the afternoon of the tenth, after lunch. “After lunch,” however, was spent sprawled on the bedroom floor, struggling over what seemed like hours to stand up, and finding, when I could stand, that my face was pushed into my chest. Ten days later, I was wheeled into an operating room for an eight-hour procedure that – there is no justice in this world – left me better off than I’d been before. This only made the omission of the “Haitian Fathers” issue of the Book Review the more gnawing.

Why bother? Surely not just post-Catholic guilt. No. At least two regular reviewers, Liesl Schillinger and Walter Kirn, appeared in the issue, and I’m quite taken with the ability to search Portico for either of their names and have returned a comprehensive list of the books that they’ve reviewed for the Times over the past several years.

It turned out to be one of the dullest issues in living memory, with more Noes than ever before. You might for that reason find it amusing. My favorite is the one-sentence dismissal of “an opportunistic bar of soap” that got reviewed solely because Alexander Pope is a character. You know, The Jane Austen Book Club effect….

¶ Haitian Fathers.

Instead of reciting the titles of the three or four book that I am “reading” at the moment, here’s a summary of the pile-up on the dining table, where all the unread and unshelved books in the apartment have finally been gathered. (When Kathleen and I want to eat at the table, I move two of the piles to a TV table, and we dine in the canyon of books.

Fiction (two piles): 36 books. Should I just get rid of The Raw Shark Texts as a mistake? Or is it a mistake?

Current Events/History/General Interest: 12. This number would be a lot higher if I were a bit more rigorous about the “Miscellaneous” piles; see below.

Poetry and Criticism: 9 books. Ditto.

Biography: 10 books, including Francis Bacon’s Life of Henry VII. How precious is that?

Miscellaneous (two piles): 34 books, including Jane Eyre, which even before the midpoint strikes me as age-and gender-inappropriate, and The Upanishads.

Hopeless, isn’t it?

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Social Historian.

No sooner do I discover the comfort of writing my Book Review review with the wireless laptop in my cozy bedroom chair than I discover that wireless works better at some times than at others. I don’t understand why, not really, but I expect that it has something to do with a lot of network demand. At least, that’s why I hope it is. I can go for hours without signal interruption most of the time, but early in the evening (to name one egregious time of day) I can hardly hold onto a signal for thirty seconds. Also, I haven’t yet downloaded an HTML text editor onto the laptop. So life remains hard, and I’m sure that you feel very sorry for me.

PS: Late at night, when traffic drops off precipitously, is a great time for reeading everyone else’s blogs. Lookinat photographs, reading longer entries, following comment threads – all stuff that I can hardly bear to do when I’m preoccupied by churning out my own content during the daylight hours.

¶ Stanley, I Presume?

Working my head off, I’m catching up faster than I expected to. It must be the fact that my body is as dry as Moore County. Here’s my review of this week’s Book Review. That leaves just one issue to deal with – the one that I ought to have spent the afternoon writing up, instead of going out on a tout and coming home so that I could break my neck.

¶ Meet the Supremes.

While my neck was broken and then under repair, I read a great deal, although my reading comprehension was occasionally impaired by Dilaudid. The stack of books to write up gets higher every day. Like every book that I’ve read since Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India, Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer:The Secret History of the End of an Empire presents a territory in which massive inertia inevitably thunders calamitous slippages, and the bloodletting of the summer of 1947 makes celebrated disasters such as the Mutiny of 1857 look like backwoods honor-feuds. Ms von Tunzelmann definitely belongs to the historiographic tradition that holds that different players would probably have yielded different outcomes. Hers is not a book for Gandhi venerators.

I’ve started in on Tim Blanning’s huge The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815. Despite its title, this is a book fond of facts and figures, but it’s readable in moderate doses. I expect it to tell the story of how Europe managed during those two-and-a-half centuries to put itself in the way of the Industrial Revolution. The period also saw the birth of that most noxious of modern inventions, nationalism. (It’s interesting to note, reading Indian Summer, that India “caught” nationalism from the British. What had been benign and constructive on England’s island turned fratricidal in the Subcontinent.

Ms G, who together with Ryan was a perfect angel about visiting me the night before my surgery and packing a bag of very handy items, brought me her copy of a book that she had enthused about at dinner recently: Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. At the frontiers of brain science, the principal activity seems to be the demolition of long-established but probably erroneous assumptions about how the brain is set up. For all the “stories of personal triumph,” this is not a flightly or sensational book. Now that my drugs and venue are back to normal, I’m getting back into the book, some of which is familiar from other sources and all of which is fascinating.

As for fiction, I’m just in the right mood for Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.

And as for the Book Review that I wrote over a week ago, with a broken neck,

¶ Lust for Numbers.

Having finished Rites of Peace, I’ve lurched back into fiction, and am well into both Sacred Games, by Vikram Seth, and Chang & Eng, by Darin Strauss. But I’m still working on David Gilmour’s informative but entertaining look at the Raj, The Ruling Caste. Every now and then, I look into Aline S Taylor’s Isabel of Burgundy: The Duchess Who Played Politics in the Age of Joan of Arc 1397-1471. I can’t help comparing it with Helen Maurer’s Margaret of Anjou, a completely different kind of history book.

Stalled Books: The Raw Shark Texts; There Goes My Everything; The Label.

I did read, practically in one sitting, Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy As They Do.

As for the Book Review:

¶ The Revelator.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to read a book about the Congress of Vienna, but the only one that I’ve ever found is Guglielmo Ferrero’s Talleyrand au Congrès de Vienne (1940), which, notwithstanding its considerable virtues, is not an introductory text. (I’ve just had a peek, and seen quite clearly why I haven’t got through it.) My delight, therefore, was extreme the other day, when, at Barnes & Noble, looking for something else, I came across Rites of Peace: the Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, by Adam Zamoyski (HarperCollins, 2007). A glance at the book suggested that it was worth buying, and that judgment has only been confirmed by the text, which is lucid, engaging, and even a bit suspenseful.

I’ve been guilty, I confess, of the vulgar error of thinking that the principal item of business before the Congress was the disposition of France. But France had been dealt with, in Paris, earlier in 1814. The big headaches at Vienna were Poland – or, as the political correctness of the day had it, the Duchy of Warsaw – and Saxony. The major headache was Tsar Alexander I, a mystical man who could reconcile liberal outlook with autocratic behavior. Alexander, wildly popular at first, is a fine example of why hereditary monarchy of the unconstitutional kind is not a good idea. In any case, I broke down and cheated, checking the index to find out what happened to Poland.

I’m about halfway through, but the Congress only began a few chapters ago. Mr Zamoyski is careful (but never fussy) about beginning at the beginning, and his narrative starts with Napoleon’s return to Paris in December 1812, the disaster of his Russian campaign behind him. The complicated maneuverings of the following year, which ended with Castlereagh’s departure from London, were all news to me. I’ve reached the fall of 1814, and, if I was wrong about the Congress’s agenda, I was well-informed about its effervescence: when asked how the debates were going, a visitor was told, “Le Congrès ne marche pas; il danse.” This lovely pun on marcher (both “to walk” and “to work”) conveys the carnival atmosphere in which the Austrian capital was saturated.

About to start: Darin Strauss’s Chang & Eng. And Clublife, by Rob Fitzgerald, a/k/a Rob the Bouncer, which is also new from HarperCollins. Perhaps you’ve seen the blog? I meant to go to the signing two weeks ago, but didn’t write down the date. The book seems even saltier than the blog, but it’s also more coherent. The blog read like random notes. Well, here’s the book. What about a movie?

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Family Blessings.

This week, I’m reading Indian. History: David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. It’s extraordinarily well-written and full of answers to questions that you didn’t know you had. I had never heard of Haileybury, for example. That was the training school that the East India Company set up in 1806; it ran for about fifty years, before the merit system was introduced. Fiction: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This lively novel, centtered on a policeman in Mumbai, Sartaj Singh, is studded with local dialect; happily, there is a glossary. I haven’t got very far. Backround: Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide, India. It’s very fat, but then the usual DK guide covers a single city, not a massive subcontinent. I’ve also got a map of Mumbai, largely to help me navigate what I can see at Google Maps.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ On the Road Again.

What am I reading? That depends on which pile you look at. My official pile, on the bedside table, hasn’t been touched in weeks, except to be dusted. I’ve got issues with every book in it. That’s why they’re still there, and that’s why I’ve gone on to other things, such as Christian Jungersen’s The Exception and Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom – both great reads. At the moment, I’m not committed to anything (excepting, of course, the difficult books on my bedside table). So I’ve plucked a couple of books from other piles around the house. As long as it’s 15 August, I may as well read about India. Now is the time to get through Vikram Chandra’s very thick Sacred Games. It’s about a gangster in Mumbai, I believe. Or perhaps it’s about a policeman. The other book is what might be called High Gossip: history at its most social. The book in question is David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj.

As for the this weeks Book Review:

¶ The Boy Who Lived.