Francis Bass

Reading

I finished writing the novel I’ve been working on for the past year, and immediately wanted to read nothing to do with architecture or urbanism or fantasy or any of the things I’ve been reading and writing about so much, so I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie.

Imagine that two trucks heading in opposite directions on the BQE have collided and let loose their contents all over the road. One contained livejournal posts about being a trans woman, the other contained chapters of an NYC chicklit novel. A biker has come by and scooped the spilled merchandise indiscriminately into her backpack. That’s Nevada. At least, the first two thirds. The book is a romp, and was exactly the kind of palate cleanser I needed.

Now I have begun working through a reading list of 19th-century British novelists, starting with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The scenes of dialogue are quite good, if skeletal. The rest is pretty dry summary, and often reads like a facebook feed of rich english people—x married y, y went to z‘s party, a is now friends with b, c died, boo-hoo. We’ll see.

This is the full reading list I’ve put together, btw: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen * Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen * Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë * David Copperfield by Charles Dickens * Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë * Middle March by George Eliot * Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy * The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope * Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy