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deborahmarkus7

deborahmarkus7

Currently reading

Saints in Art
Thomas Michael Hartmann, Stefano Zuffi, Rosa Giorgi
The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems
Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe
Selected Poems
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Cynthia Griffin Wolff
Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

Smut

Smut - Alan Bennett Just a few days after starting this book, I heard a caller on a podcast introduce himself as someone who has the same job as one of Bennett's main characters: someone who pretends to be a patient for doctors to practice on. A few days *before* starting this book, I'd never even heard of such work; in fact, when I started "Smut," I wondered whether Bennett had made the whole idea up.

So far the writing is funny and the story is engagingly bizarre. Interested to see where things go from here.

--Just finished. It's two novellas, both brilliant. I was worried that the second would be unpleasant, one of those works where the author seems to take pleasure in telling the story of entirely unlikable people. Not the case at all. The characters *should* be unlikable; instead, they're endearing (at least I found them so). And Bennett's use of the language is reliably wonderful. "She wasn't wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that unfatuated her a bit." I will never be less than infatuated with this book.