What I Read in February 2026 – Mouek mouek mouek… Ma-a-a-a… Ma-aa-a… said Saha

I am almost on my way to London.  Some Shakespearian and Not Shakespearian activities are on the schedule.

My reading, before this trip, was again  very British.

 

THE WAR OF THE POETS

Antonio and Mellida (1599?) &

Antonio's Revenge (1600?), John Marston – A remarkable pair of literary objects, discussed here and here.

Poetaster (1601), Ben Jonson – Jonson slags Marston, discussed here.

Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Post forthcoming.

Caelica (1633), Fulke Greville – Sonnets and sestets, fifty years of poems.  So many great poets from this period.  Unlike so many courtier poets, Fulke Greville dodged the executioner and lived to a good old age, although his death was still horrible.  Do not look it up.

Worldly Goods (1996), Lisa Jardine – A diversion into the non-English Renaissance with this superb classic of material history.  To think that this approach, looking at contracts and printers and so on, was once controversial.  I would love to read an England-centered descendant, which I am sure exists.  Recommendations welcome.

 

NOVELS & POETRY

The Ill-Made Knight (1940), T. H. White – We will visit Cornwall, so here is a gesture towards Cornwall, White’s Lancelot novel.  The shift in tone from The Sword in the Stone, from a boy’s book to something with sex and tragedy, is impressive.

The Moving Toyshop (1946), Edmund Crispin – We will visit Oxford, so here is a gesture towards that, although given all of the chase scenes down specific streets I perhaps should have saved it for after.  Among the British mysteries thought of as great classics, this one must be the silliest.

Eighty-Five Poems (1959), Louis MacNeice – A “selected poems” chosen by MacNeice.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

A Abóbada (1839) &

O Alcaide de Santarém (1845), Alexandre Herculano – The Walter Scott of Portugal.  The first story, The Dome  or The Vault, is much much much taught to, I believe, 10th graders.  If you take the bus tour north out of Lisbon you will visit the setting, the spectacular Batalha Monastery.

La chatte (1932), Colette – A couple marries young and gets to know each other, resulting in uncomfortable, realistic friction.  Plus the husband has a cat who he understand better than his wife, who hates the cat.  Almost plotless, but the one thing that happens is a doozy.  That’s the cat, Saha, up there in the title.

La Jalousie (Jealousy, or The Window Blind, 1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet – Talk about plotless.  The precision and repetition and playing around with the narrator is all very much to my tastes, but still I do not understand the brief delusion that this sort of thing would be the future of the novel.  The image is from a 1937 edition of Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré.

Comedias para se Ler na Escola (Comedies to Read in School, 2001), Luis Fernando Verissimo – What a dreary title, but this was a good book, a collection of newspaper shorts, stories and gags, by one of Brazil’s best comic writers.  He appeared on Wuthering Expectations long ago as the author of the entertaining Borges and the Eternal Orangutan.  Some of these crônicas have a light Borgesian touch.