corollary

Entry #125

Listening to:

Schubert, symphony no. 9 in C, D.944 "Great". I don't know where the "Great" comes from, but it's an accurate moniker in my opinion.

Just read:

Granta 17: while waiting for war. The title piece (the eponymous title piece even; hem) is by Graham Greene, and is excerpts from his diary just before WW2. It made for interesting reading, but better still was Heinrich Böll's letter to his sons about how he survived the last year of the war in Germany. It's amazing that the Nazi leadership fought on so hard and for so long; surely it must have been apparent that their country was collapsing around them. I guess they knew that their personal survival was at stake.

It seemed vaguely appropriate to be reading all this "war stuff" on the weekend of Remembrance Sunday. The armistice ending WW1 was signed on 11 November, 1918 at 11:00. Now, 82 years on, Britain has a memorial service on the nearest Sunday to that date. My diary tells me that the US has just had a Veterans' Day public holiday as well, so perhaps this is connected to the same date in a similar way.

I also enjoyed a short story by Alice Monro, a chapter of "An artist of the floating world" by Kazuo Ishiguro, and an account by Patrick Marnham about attempting to interview Idi Amin in Uganda.

To read next:

London: portrait of a city, compiled by Roger Hudson. This is a very pretty, "coffee-table" sort of book from the Folio Society, which I got as a freebie for staying on as a member. It has lots of full colour plates, and I'm hoping that the text accompanying them will be as illuminating.