Wednesday, June 26, 2019

the last book I ever read (Casey Cep's Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, excerpt eleven)

from Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep:

Capote was writing full-time, and his stories seemed to move effortlessly from his mind to the pages of magazines and the shelves of bookstores. But Nelle was busy earning a living, covering the costs that even the most frugal New York City existence incurs, and she had become distracted by the city itself. Like a lot of small-town bookworms, she was too well-read to be a true country bumpkin, but too country, even after Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, to be anything but mesmerized by Manhattan. She had enough books to read—and movies to see, and museums to visit—to last her several lifetimes. The city overwhelmed and delighted her. In a single letter from those early years, she described falling in love with the Met, even though it was “a mess”; reading a six-volume history of Judaism, because she “just wanted to find out something about the Jews”; and seeing a documentary about Mount Everest that she deemed “sublime.” She was less impressed by a film adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which she improved with her own voice-over, provoking a fit of laughter in a friend and a reprimand by the management.



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