Latest Readings
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Publisher Description
"[A] collection of Clive James's essays on a variety of literary topics . . . This is sanity, humor and acuity in the face of death" (The Wall Street Journal).
In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do," James moved his library to his Cambridge house, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write." James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list. A look at some of James's old favorites as well as some of his recent discoveries, this book also offers a revealing look at the author himself, sharing his evocative musings on literature and family, and on living and dying.
As thoughtful and erudite as the works of Alberto Manguel, and as moving and inspiring as Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture and Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club, this valediction to James's lifelong engagement with the written word is a captivating valentine from one of the great literary minds of our time.
"These essays and poems are death-haunted but radiant with the felt experience of what it means to be alive, even when mortally sick, especially when mortally sick." —Financial Times
"Latest Readings is a plain demonstration that Mr. James remains as learned and as funny as any critic on earth." —The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
James, an Australian-born literary critic and almost legendary London public intellectual, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010. He has since crafted a collection of beautifully thought-out, piquant essays, some only a few pages, that survey what he has been reading with the clock ticking. The results are entirely free of self-pity, and emanate vitality and invention. In a James essay, Anthony Powell and season four of Game of Thrones appear on the same page. He calls V.S. Naipaul the "Kemal Ataturk of the Indian subcontinent," a "modernizing force embattled against his own background" whose "language itself is the imperial inheritance that matters." In one short essay he observes that in regard to 20th-century political history, Joseph Conrad "had underestimated the power of the irrational to organize itself into a state." For American readers, his reflections on Ernest Hemingway will stand out, as he ponders the author's bombast and tragic physical decline. "It was ungallant of him, and it wasn't brave," James writes of Hemingway's suicide. James relishes the limited reading time he has and makes no bones about it, providing sparkling commentary on his old favorites and new discoveries.
