Gertrude Stein has entered my life. I read Three Lives in college, and didn't care for it much, and read Ida a few years ago, and liked it better, but lately GS has really made her presence felt. I picked up a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and was reading it slowly during my lunches at work, when there was a big article in The New Yorker about The Making of Americans. Then a book came across my desk, called (I believe) A Primer Toward an Understanding of Gertrude Stein. In the most recent New Yorker there is a restaurant review pinned to an anecdote about Gertrude Stein crashing her car. I wonder if she’s with me for good now. I did not love The Autobiography, but I thought it was interesting. I don’t know if I can find Gertrude Stein lovable. She is often good with titles (I like Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded, Friendship Faded, the title of a collaborative project she worked on with someone she stopped being friends with), and she often writes sentences that seem funny or true. My favorite bit, which I’ve bored my husband by repeating several times is where Gertrude Stein tells Hemingway, “Remarks aren’t literature. ” She obviously thought it was a pretty witty rejoinder, too, because she mentions it more than once in the book.

      I bought the Gertrude Stein Book on a day when I was feeling untempted by fiction. The same day, I bought The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence. I had read an excerpt of the book, about a feast in the desert, in M.F.K. Fisher’s book, Here Let Us Feast, and been intrigued by the sumptuousness of the prose, but so far, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom has proved to be too sumptuous for me right now. The language is so ornate, I haven’t had the concentration to read it yet. I read the first few pages, and was struck by a seeming non sequitur about how Lawrence’s men, turned off by the desert women, turned to homosexuality. Otherwise, I had a hard time getting his gist.

      That day, I also bought the diary of Fanny Burney. Fanny Burney lived from 1752 to 1840, in England, mostly. She was the daughter of a musicologist, and wrote several novels, the most well-known of which is Evelina. She served Queen Charlotte as Mistress of the Robes, for a while, and then in middle age she married a French officer and had a child. I don’t know much about 18th century literature, but I like what I perceive to be the high wit and style of that time. Fanny knew Samuel Johnson and his circle. My favorite part of the diary, though, is the part that concerns her life at court. Apparently, the rules and etiquette were terrifying, especially since Fanny was nearsighted, so that she couldn’t identify whether persons who walked into a room were known to her (and she ought to acknowledge them) or unknown (in which case greeting them might seem terrribly presumptuous). She was there when King George went mad-although she is rather tactful and circumpect about it. She says he’s ill. My very favorite part is when the King recovers his sanity (temporarily, I think) and the royal family and their entourage go on a tour of England. Everywhere, people are out on the streets with flags and bunting, blessing the King’s health. And when the King goes for a swim in a seaside place, some musicians go out into the waves in a bathing machine next to his, and strike up with “God Save the King ”.

      After the Gertrude Stein and the Fanny Burney, I was in the mood again for fiction. I read a good way into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories. It is only in the past year that I have read any Singer (except for a wonderful story called, I think, Zlateh the Goat, which I read in Cricket when I was a kid. It was illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and I have tried a few times, unsuccessfully, to find it in book form). The Collected Stories fill a big book, and I have become temporarily burnt out on them. The stories I like best are the not-very-plotty ones that simply tell what life is like for the characters in them.

      I went to hear Kelly Link read from her new collection of stories, Magic for Beginners, and bought the book. I think it may be even better than her first collection, Stranger Things Happen. She seems so well in command of her material. Her ideas are strange, but she lets them spool out to their logical conclusion, and they feel organic and utterly compelling. I can’t say which story I liked best, because I enjoyed them all so much, but I suppose the one that was least rich was The Cannon. The Cannon is very short, told in the form of a catechism, and doesn’t have the kind of intricate narrative that the other stories do, so it suffers in comparison.

      Most recently, I finished reading Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. I want to say I was aware of this book before Marilynne Robinson got so much attention for her new book, Gilead, but I am not sure if that is true. Anyhow, reading all the reviews of Gilead (I have not read it yet) made me want to read Housekeeping. I am glad I did. It is a very dreamy book. It puts me in mind of my left-over impression from reading Sometimes a Great Notion years ago; I don’t remember the particulars of that book anymore, but I remember the feeling of family strife set amongst huge, cold and mossy trees. In Housekeeping, the cold lake permeates everything.