What I’ve been reading

1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life.  The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially.  It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.

2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran.  A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith.  Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.

3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir.  Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it.  But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.

4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent.  A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Frances Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl.  Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more.  This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.

5. Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann.  An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom.  It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.