Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Latest Readings
    Latest Readings
    Latest Readings
    Ebook127 pages2 hours

    Latest Readings

    By Clive James

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    “[A] collection of Clive James’s essays on a variety of literary topics . . . This is sanity, humor and acuity in the face of death” (The Wall Street Journal).
     
    In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that “if you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do,” James moved his library to his Cambridge house, where he would “live, read, and perhaps even write.” James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list. A look at some of James’s old favorites as well as some of his recent discoveries, this book also offers a revealing look at the author himself, sharing his evocative musings on literature and family, and on living and dying.
     
    As thoughtful and erudite as the works of Alberto Manguel, and as moving and inspiring as Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, this valediction to James’s lifelong engagement with the written word is a captivating valentine from one of the great literary minds of our time.
     
    “These essays and poems are death-haunted but radiant with the felt experience of what it means to be alive, even when mortally sick, especially when mortally sick.” —Financial Times
     
    “Latest Readings is a plain demonstration that Mr. James remains as learned and as funny as any critic on earth.” —The New York Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherYale University Press
    Release dateAug 25, 2015
    ISBN9780300216394
    Latest Readings
    Author

    Clive James

    Clive James was the author of more than forty books. As well as essays, he published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus five volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was In June, North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity. As a television performer he appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the Postcard series of travel documentaries. He published several poetry collections, including the Sunday Times bestseller Sentenced to Life, and a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. He holds honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013, an Officer of the Order of Australia. He died in 2019.

    Read more from Clive James

    Related to Latest Readings

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sarah Thankam Mathews

      Dec 18, 2020

      By May I was clenching my teeth so hard when I slept that it eventually cracked a filling. The post A Year in Reading: Sarah Thankam Mathews appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      How the Cicada Screams

      Dec 1, 2020

      How the Cicada Screams
      7 min read

    • Article

      Lost and Pound

      Oct 2, 2017

      Lost and Pound
      4 min read

    • Article

      Letter Boks

      Feb 4, 2021

      I READ that Christopher Columbus was 41 years old when he went to America, and as a consequence everyone celebrates him to this day. I was 25 when I first landed on the East Coast of the USA, and yet not one book has been written about me despite the

      18 min read

    • Article

      All Hail The King

      Jan 12, 2022

      All Hail The King
      5 min read

    • Article

      Should We Still Read Norman Mailer?

      May 9, 2018

      There is a marvelous scene in Dick Fontaine’s underseen 1968 roustabout documentary Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? where we are in a bar watching people watch Norman Mailer on Merv Griffin’s show. He’s ostensibly being interviewed about

      8 min read

    • Article

      Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis

      Aug 24, 2018

      1. As much as I may rack my brain, there are 15 minutes or so in the dark that I can’t account for and that I’ll never get back—15 minutes during which, I have to think, that creep’s hands were touching my body. It’s a weird thing to think about all

      12 min read

    • Article

      William Goldman: The Wit And Wisdom ('Follow The Money') Of A Legendary Chicago-born Screenwriter

      Nov 16, 2018

      In his adventures in the screen trade, which inspired his zingy 1983 Hollywood memoir of the same name, Chicago-born, Highland Park-raised William Goldman won two screenwriting Academy Awards and the hearts of millions who liked the way his wiseacres

      3 min read

    • Article

      No One Gets Sylvia Plath

      Nov 6, 2020

      No One Gets Sylvia Plath
      16 min read

    • Article

      Ulysses: Good or Bad?

      Feb 2, 2018

      Ulysses: Good or Bad?
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Forgotten Movie Star

      Nov 17, 2021

      The Forgotten Movie Star
      6 min read

    • Article

      Chips, With Everything

      Oct 28, 2021

      Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35) Christopher Pincher is Minister of State for Housing DIARIES ARE CAPTIVATING, they tell us so much about so much. They magic up the mood behind the headlines of the t

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Matter Of Park-life And Death

      Nov 17, 2021

      These many months devoted to exploring the ITV daytime schedule with my mother have, perhaps inevitably, had an effect. Unlimited exposure to the faux bonhomie of Phillip Schofield, the winsome banter of Loose Women, and the practised satisfaction of

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Latest Readings

    4/5

    40 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Clive James, a leading Australian writer, muses on books he has read or reread as his time is running out. This is his last chance to share his views on these books and it is well worth checking out these reviews some of which are very short. None of which are long. This is a rewarding book that can be consumed in a small amount of time. It is worth a detour.
    • 4/5
      If the reading part of your life has been on hiatus, this book will help get it restarted.
    • 4/5
      James has always been able to make me laugh out loud, and he still can... the final third of the book here feels thin and not quite 'him' - is his strength as a writer finally leaving him as his physical state deteriorates? Nevertheless, James at 80% is still more of a pleasure than just about anyone else at the peak of their powers. A wonderful dash read.
    • 4/5
      A delightful slim volume of essays, so full of life and the love of art, made poignant by our knowledge of the author’s mortality. There is much to enjoy and learn from these very short essays , many revisiting the writer’s favourite authors, such as the novel sequences of Powell or Waugh, but also with new discoveries, such as Olivia Manning, or at a lighter level, O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey novels. As ever with literary essays, part of the pleasure is from affirmation that books that you have enjoyed are praised and part from the promise of new books you should enjoy, as your taste in books is similar (although nowhere near as erudite). There are short essays on Hollywood books, political biographies and the physical shelving problem arising from always needing to buy books (to which one can relate!).There are also two series of essays scattered through the collection about the books & life of Hemingway and the books of Conrad which share the frustration with or appreciation of those works with us:Conrad was the writer who reached political adulthood before any of the other writers of his time, and when they did, they only reached to his knee.The author’s illness and adult family are mentioned, mainly in passing, throughout the book. This might be off-putting for those who have never read the author before, but works for me as someone who grew up listening to his BBC film reviews. I can hear the authorial voice too.There is much to appreciate and so little time. This book is worth the time, sharing his appreciation to guide you on to make time for those works which are satisfying and enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      Here’s a book, a slim volume of a book that hooked me right from the start. Oh how I wish they all did! What our Clive James doesn’t know about literature, reading and writing is probably not worth the bother. At times I was a little out of my depth but Clive managed to go easy with this novice and reeled me back in when I got lost, gently taught me new words and delighted me with many a perfectly structured turn of phrase. Mr. James spoke to me as an interested friend and amazed me with a commanding yet easy eloquence. For the first time ever in my reading life I’ve come across a book that I could happily re-read, immediately, and gain more for the doing of it…..I think I will.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed his light hearted openness about his bad health and how he is coping in his last days.
      I appreciated his frank assessment on the books he's reading. I feel his assessments are much more believable than the advertising hype we often read with book promotions.
      There are so many good books for me still to read I need all the help I can get to steer me to worthwhile authors.
    • 2/5
      Oh dear. There was a stab of disappointment early. Where was the parsing of ideas, so evident in Cultural Amnesia? Well, from the first page James notes that he's on his way out, dying from leukemia and myriad respiratory degradations. Finding his remaining time limited, he elected to reread some lifelong favorites and gauge any changes.

      What results is a softened survey which belongs in a popular magazine. This precipitous decline left me unsettled. I struggle to imagine any aspect which I could recommend.

    Book preview

    Latest Readings - Clive James

    Latest Readings

    Clive James

    Latest Readings

    Copyright © 2015 by Clive James.

    All rights reserved.

    This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

    Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

    Designed by Sonia L. Shannon

    Set in Fournier type by Integrated Publishing Solutions,

    Grand Rapids, Michigan.

    Printed in the United States of America.

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958943

    ISBN 978-0-300-21319-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    To my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK

    cras mihi

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Hemingway in the Beginning

    Revisiting Conrad

    Novels in Sequence

    Patrick O’Brian and His Salty Hero

    War Leader

    Sebald and the Battle in the Air

    Phantom Flying Saucer

    Under Western Eyes

    Anthony Powell, Time Lord

    Treasuring Osbert Lancaster

    American Power

    Kipling and the Widow-maker

    Speer in Spandau

    Shakespeare and Johnson

    Naipaul’s Nastiness

    Movie Books

    Women in Hollywood

    Extra Shelves

    Always Philip Larkin

    Villa America

    Angles on Hitler

    Stephen Edgar, Australian Ace

    John Howard Extends His Reign

    Hemingway at the End

    On Wit

    Richard Wilbur’s Precept

    When Creation Is Perverse

    Conrad’s Greatest Victory

    Coda

    Acknowledgments

    MY THANKS TO Prue Shaw, David Free, Claerwen James, and Deirdre Serjeantson for reading the manuscript. The last two I hold responsible for getting me hooked on Patrick O’Brian. Thinking I already knew something, I was always reminded that there was more to know when I conversed with Michael Tanner over coffee after one of our many chance encounters at Hugh’s bookstall in the Market Square of Cambridge. Finally I should thank Hugh himself, a quiet man who patiently listened when I extolled the virtues of Flann O’Brien. Meanwhile, Hugh was quietly assessing whether I had enough strength to take a vast book of Modigliani’s drawings home by taxi, or whether he should deliver it himself at the end of the day.

    Latest Readings

    Introduction

    WHEN I EMERGED from hospital in early 2010 with a certificate to say that I had a case of leukemia to go with my wrecked lungs, I could hear the clock ticking, and I wondered whether it was worth reading anything both new and substantial, or even rereading something substantial that I already knew about. Poetry, yes: I was putting the finishing touches to my Poetry Notebook, and there were still some more notes demanding to be added. But even the slightest book of prose looked like a big thing that I might not have time to get through. The cure for that attitude was Boswell’s Life of Johnson. After reading the whole masterpiece with delight—I had read bits of it before, but I could now see that it needs to be taken complete—I resolved to get back to Johnson himself later.

    In view of the fact that I was once again on my feet, instead of flat on my back, the concept of later suddenly seemed less quixotic than realistic. If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do. My family’s plans for my remaining years of existence included extracting me from my place of work in London and installing my library in a house of its own in Cambridge. In this house I would live, read, and perhaps even write. The move took what seemed like years. About half my books had to be sold off just to create some breathing space. What was left filled the specially built shelves to the limit. I made a vow to myself and all concerned that my book-buying days were over. But with the renewed urge to read, I found, came a renewed urge to buy. In recent years the number of secondhand bookshops in Cambridge has been drastically reduced. Most of the trade has moved online. But the Oxfam shops, somehow free from the killingly high levels of rent, were still worth visiting on those occasions when I could summon the strength to limp the half-mile into town. And always, in the Market Square, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, there was Hugh’s bookstall, known to its devotees both literary and academic as one of the great bookstalls on earth.

    As the laid-out stock is sold off during the day, the gaps are filled with yet more books from Hugh’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of substantial hardbacks and paperbacks. Hugh doesn’t say much, but those in the know tell me that he scores all this mouthwatering stuff at car boot sales. I suppose that the original owners of the books have died off, and their families have put the books back into the economy in the simplest way possible. As I was scheduled to die off myself, even if I did not precisely know when, it was madness to start making small piles of books on Hugh’s stall that I wanted to take home. But the madness was divine. Even if I already had the book, he might have a handier edition; and often they were titles that I had once owned but lost along the way; and most often of all they were books that I had never owned before but now realized I ought to possess. Somewhere in there was an itching sense of duty. The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

    But these and similar philosophical principles will be treated from time to time throughout this volume. Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. You can practically sense that power when you pick the book up. The books I already had in the house presumably once generated the same sort of charge when I contemplated buying them. Now there they were, still in their thousands despite the recent winnowing. I roamed slowly among them: old purchases begging to be read again even as the new purchases came in at the rate of one plastic shopping bag full every week. Insanity, insanity. Or, as Johnson might have said, vanity, vanity.

    Johnson, who often convicted himself of indolence, might possibly have approved my plan for the organization of this volume: there isn’t one. It just sort of happened, and for several years I had been occupied with what might well have been my last readings before Yale kindly got the idea of asking me to compose a little book about whatever books I had been reading lately. Even after the request came, I went on reading in no particular order, mixing books of obvious seriousness with books of seeming triviality; as I always have, in the belief that culture is a matter not of credentials, but only of intensity, and sometimes you will find things out from fans and buffs that you won’t from a tenured professor. Thus there were heavy books about Washington that taught me about American politics, but also featherweight books about Hollywood that taught me about American cultural imperialism: which is, after all, the branch of American global dominance that actually works, however much the rest of us might fret.

    I also mixed books I had read before with books I ought not to have neglected. The second category, I found, tended to absorb the first; because if I had first read a book long enough ago, it seemed brand new when I came to it again. I suppose the big find, among those books truly new to me, was Olivia Manning’s set of two trilogies; and the shock of pleasure that her writings delivered to me is recorded here with due prominence. But it was almost as much of a revelation, after more than fifty years, to rediscover Joseph Conrad. My reconquista of his works is spread throughout this book because that was the way it happened: I didn’t revisit his major novels in a bunch, I tried to space them out, mainly because I was trying to stop. Time felt precious and I would have preferred to spend less of it with him, but he wouldn’t let me go.

    I might say the same of Ernest Hemingway; and at this point I really did have a dramatic order in mind while I wrote my text; I wanted him young and infinitely promising in my overture, and disintegrating in my finale. It seemed fair. Much of the damage that led to his terrible end he had inflicted on himself. And he seemed such a conspicuous example of how the gift of life, and the gift of talent, can be abused. Perhaps I was becoming Puritanical in my old age—dotards often do—but I disapproved of his recklessness, while attempting to register the undoubted fact that I would not have disapproved so much if he had not been such a mighty figure. He haunts this book, as Dr. Johnson does. But so do they all, the writers. Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1