I was determined to make some progress in my own reading over the weekend, despite the marking piling up, and I'm happy to say that I've moved forward in Ken Follett's World Without End - easily done, hooked as I am at the straightforward levels of plot and sympathetic characters - and my Collected Lowell - much tougher since I'd been stalled at the opening of the longish Mills of the Kavanaughs and just couldn't get into it.
Now I come to think of it, it would be tricky to think of two writers presenting a greater contrast: Follett the supreme popularist, striving for an easy transparency of style such that nothing stands between the reader and the tale well told, yet also genuinely informative about the world of medieval England; Lowell the supreme patrician, creating gloriously obscure baroque structures that seem to go beyond the limited notion of simple meaning to enact thumpingly expressive experiences of the ineffable somewhere and seemingly all times in New England. (Sorry about the exaggerations, but getting through his second major book entails being temporarily infected by his style.)
The funny thing is, they go so well together. Breaking off from one to read a poem or a chapter by the other is curiously refreshing. And a lot better than marking.
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