A Reading List

The following is a partial list of some of the books I have read since last summer.

• Leidler, Emily. Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, 2003. [Interesting biography of Rudolph Valentino.]
  
• Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century , 2004. [Queer history]
  
• Wise, Sarah. The Italian Boy : A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London, 2004. [Who knew that the Body Snatching of the 1830s could be this interesting? When they run out of bodies, they begin zeroing in on the living and killing them.]
  
• Moore, Terry. Strangers in Paradise : Treasury Edition, 2004. [If you don't know the graphic novels of Terry Moore, you should.]
  
• Charyn, Jerome. Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway, 2003. [A history of Old New York City.
  
• Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2001. [Sijie tells a fascinating story of the modern China of Chairman Mao, where two teenaged city boys are sent to be reindoctrinated by farmers.
  
• Staggs, Sam. When Blanche Met Brando : The Scandalous Story of "A Streetcar Named Desire," 2005. [The saga of Tennesse Williams' play, complete with Brando, Tandy, Leigh, and Kazan.]
  
• McCall Smith, Alexander. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency ,1998. [A friend recommended this series set in modern Botswana, and I became one of Precious Ramotswe's devotees.]
  
• --Tears of the Giraffe. 2000.
  
• --Morality for Beautiful Girls. 2001.
  
• --The Kalahari Typing School for Men, 2002.
  
• --The Full Cupboard of Life, 2003.
  
• --In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, 2004.
  
• Tripp, C.A. The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, 2005. [So Lincoln shared a bed with another male for several years and seemed fixated on a soldier during the Civil War...I'm not sure I'm convinced.]
  
• Cocteau, Jean. Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries, Vol. 2, 1985. [Cocteau created La Belle et la Bete in 1946, one of the more accessible surrealist works of that period.]
  
• Sprigge, Elizabeth & Jean-Jacques Kihm. Jean Cocteau: The Man & The Mirror, 1968. [After reading his diary, I wanted to know more about the rest of Cocteau's life.]
  
• Finney, Jack. Time and Again, 1970. [I had this book for many years before I discovered it on my bookshelf and read it. A great ride back to the 1880s New York City.]
  
• Pearl, Matthew. The Dante Club: A Novel, 2003. [People are getting murdered according to punishments in Dante's Inferno. It takes Oliver W. Holmes, Henry W. Longfellow, James R. Lowell, and J.T. Fields to solve the mystery. A good mystery read.]
  
• Sijie, Dai. Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, 2005. [Sijie again with Dr. Muo who returns to modern China to get his girlfriend out of prison. It is a whole different world.]
  
• Carr, Caleb. The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes, 2005. [Having read Sherlock Holmes and been to Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh, I thought this would be a good read. However, if you're going to read Carr for the first time, don't start here, start with my favorite, The Alienist or The Angel of Darkness. Ultimately, copying Doyle's style made for an uninteresting mystery.]
  
• McCall Smith, Alexander. The Sunday Philosophy Club: An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery , 2004. [McCall Smith has a new heroine, Isabel Dalhousie, who is as charming as Precious, but lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. A good read.]
  
• --Friends, Lovers, Chocolate: The Sunday Philosophy Club, 2005. [The second in the Dalhousie series.]
  
• McCann, Richard. Mother of Sorrows, 2005. [A collection of short stories dealing with a man, his mother, his brother, and AIDS.]
  
• Proulx, Annie. Close Range: Wyoming Stories , 2000. [The collection includes the original story of "Brokeback Mountain," one of the most moving short stories I've read about two cowboys who can't/won't allow themselves to live the lives they need. As Ennis says, "If you can't fix it, you have to stand it." The other stories in the collection are also unforgetable... especially "The Half-Skinned Steer." Proulx creates characters who fit their environment... an environment which killed Matthew Shepherd.]
  
• Hofler, Robert. The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson, 2005. [Having been raised on 1950s and 1960s Hollywood dreamfactory stories, I found this tell-all does just that. Hofler pulls no punches and let's you know who did whom--and sometimes how.]
  
• Tippins, Sherill. February House, 2005. [Imagine a house in New York City where W.H.Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee all lived together during WWII. It boggles the mind.]
  
• Laurents, Arthur. Original Story by Arthur Laurents : A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, 2001. [Laurents, who helped create West Side Story, Gypsy, Time of the Cuckoo, Invitation to a March, writes about his Broadway and Hollywood experiences from the 1940s through the 1980s. His description of the McCarthy era is fascinating.]
  
• Townsend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma : The American Portraits Series, 2004. [Boy, did Disney and "The New World" rewrite history!]
  
• McCrea, Barry. The First Verse, 2005. [A self-centered Irish college student--who isn't?--becomes involved with two mystic students involved in synchronicities--asking questions and turning randomly to books to find the answers. Soon he finds himself immersed in a world which threatens to destroy his real life.]
  
• Smith, Dominic. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. 2006. [Louis Daguerre has been poisoned by his use of mercury to fix the images of his daguerreotypes. He believes the world is coming to an end and makes a list of 10 things he wants to photograph before it happens. Among them is the woman he lost in youth but has spent a life-time loving. He sets out to find her before his life is ended. This is one of the first books in years I actually cried reading.]