A few gems I've discovered this summer

When my exam schedule clears somewhat next week, I can return to blogging proper. For now, I thought I'd list some of the things I'd read this summer that I liked especially.

The Old Bachelor is William Congreve's first play, written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three. It is flawed and immature in many ways, but it also a relentlessly funny and engaging work (that I'd like to dedicate a full-length post to later) and I haven't enjoyed anything else as much this summer. A more sombre but even more impressive book is Raymond Carver's collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver is a master of expressing loneliness and despair in the sparsest prose you will find. Balzac's Old Goriot was my favourite novel this summer, a wonderfully intricate and detailed portrait of the lives of early nineteenth-century Parisians, including a working-clas Lear (the title character) and the protagonist, the young social climber Rastignac. Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a surprisingly breezy read, but also a fine novel, often simultaneously tragic and comic (although ultimately more tragic) as well as continuously interesting, with the exception of part six, "The Grand March", which was full of a far-too-weary postmodern cynicism.

I wholeheartedly recommend Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of Crime and Punishment, which enabled me to fully appreciate a great book that I'd almost been turned off by in an earlier Constance Garnett incarnation.

After the exams have started, there is unsurprisingly no time to read novels. But I'm sustained by the joys, both familiar and new, of Larkin, Yeats, Bukowski, Heaney, Hardy, Auden, Stevie Smith and other poets, as well as the timeless essays of George Orwell.