Books Read in January

This post is a steal from my brother's blog, but that doesn't make it any the less fun as an exercise.

1. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
2. Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie (1959)
3. Raymond Carr, ed., Spain: A History (2000)
4. Paloma Gay y Blasco, Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender and the Performance of Identity (1999)
5. Eric S. Rump, ed., The Comedies of William Congreve (1985)
6. Feliks Roziner, A Certain Finkelmayer (1981, trans. Michael Henry Heym 1991)
7. Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (1995)

These were all enjoyable, although Congreve got a bit samey after a while, which is a shame, because if I'd read the plays in reverse order, I'd have started with the best (The Way of the World) and worked my way down. A Certain Finkelmayer, originally Некто Финкельмайер, is a samizdat classic: it's about a Jewish poet in the Soviet Union who finds that the only way he can get published is to pretend to be a representative of an interesting Siberian tribe and publish his work as if it were in translation. It's good, as samizdat classics go. Cold Comfort Farm I hadn't read before; Marian had to tell me to stop laughing.