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Recent reading
Jan. 3rd, 2023 04:42 pmRead The Latinist by Mark Prins, and move over, hedonistic undergrads with niche majors committing murder, this is the real dark academia: a doctoral student discovers that her dissertation supervisor has written her an unfairly terrible letter of recommendation in an effort to keep her from leaving for a job at another university, because he's obsessed with her. The novel is split between the POV of the student, Tessa, and her supervisor/stalker, Chris, which makes for an interesting combination— Chris' early chapters are especially chilling, since he's so convinced he's in the right and his actions are even more invasive than Tessa knows.
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Finished The Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, the biography of Frank Lloyd Wright that I started almost a year ago— it's been my main reading over winter break, and I AM FINALLY DONE. My overall takeaway from this book? Frank Lloyd Wright was The Worst, his approach to architecture was such a hot mess that it loops back around to being impressive that his buildings are still standing, and the Taliesin Fellowship was definitely a cult. (It was actually Olgivanna Wright who seems to have had a knack for being a cult leader; the last several chapters— about the Fellowship after Wright's death in 1959, as it carried on under his widow's control for another twenty years— were especially grim.) The most entertaining bit was the construction of the Guggenheim museum; Wright finally met a client as stubborn and bonkers as himself in artist, curator, and Theosophist Hilla von Rebay, who apparently proposed commissioning Wright after his book literally fell off a shelf and hit her head. The bleakest chapter was about the high rate of tragedy among the few children who grew up in the Taliesin community. This doesn't begin to cover the wild, car-crash-you-can't-look-away-from-ness of the rest of the narrative that falls between those two emotional points.
( Read more... )
Finished The Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, the biography of Frank Lloyd Wright that I started almost a year ago— it's been my main reading over winter break, and I AM FINALLY DONE. My overall takeaway from this book? Frank Lloyd Wright was The Worst, his approach to architecture was such a hot mess that it loops back around to being impressive that his buildings are still standing, and the Taliesin Fellowship was definitely a cult. (It was actually Olgivanna Wright who seems to have had a knack for being a cult leader; the last several chapters— about the Fellowship after Wright's death in 1959, as it carried on under his widow's control for another twenty years— were especially grim.) The most entertaining bit was the construction of the Guggenheim museum; Wright finally met a client as stubborn and bonkers as himself in artist, curator, and Theosophist Hilla von Rebay, who apparently proposed commissioning Wright after his book literally fell off a shelf and hit her head. The bleakest chapter was about the high rate of tragedy among the few children who grew up in the Taliesin community. This doesn't begin to cover the wild, car-crash-you-can't-look-away-from-ness of the rest of the narrative that falls between those two emotional points.
