07:00 – Okey Dokey. After a dose of the ‘man sniffles’ I’m well and truly back in the reading game. I began with progressing another step through my Trevor vs. Moore Reading Challenge, with a short read from each writer over breakfast.
The Trevor short, taken from the tome used exclusively for this challenge – The Collected Stories (Penguin), entitled The Penthouse Apartment, was another sublime reading experience. The story concerns Miss Winton and an invite by an Italian maid to the prestigious apartment of the Runca’s, who on that day are expecting a magazine to do a photo shoot around the apartment. Miss Winton lives in the same apartment block, but in a much less prestigious ground-floor abode, and when she arrives with Cairn terrier in tow, she doesn’t expect the presence of the apartment block maintenance man, Mr. Morgan. Let the ‘fun’ begin.
My brief synopsis on The Penthouse Apartment suggests it’s a tale of sin and debauchery, but it’s actually nothing of the sort. Instead it’s yet another delightful tale from Trevor, in which he manages once again to perfectly marry together a number of disparate characters. Is there any end to this man’s talents? I think not. Score 4.5/5
The Moore short (also taken from the ‘official’ tome for this challenge – Lorrie Moore: The Collected Shorts (Faber), was indeed short, a story entitled The Kid’s Guide to Divorce. In this story Moore uses a similar instructional technique to the one she employed for How to Be An Other Woman, to tell the story; one which is centred around a son spending an evening in front of the TV with his mother. All in all not a bad tale from Moore, and it’s one which could certainly be deemed ‘tender’. Score 3.5/5.
12:00 – Out with the dog today so I had the opportunity for a spot of ‘walk reading’ (check out today’s Daily Bookshot). Wanting to make a start on my Totally Knut reading project today, I had planned to set things off by making a start on Ingar Sletten Kolloen’s newly published Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter (Yale University Press). However, having found an older biography on Knut Hamsun from Hanna Astrup Larsen yesterday (published in 1922), I wanted to start with that, before moving on to compare and contrast with Kolloen’s modern-day effort.
First impressions on Larsen’s1922 biography? Good, really good. Although I’m only part of the way through it there seems to be a lot of good, original thought-provoking content (she likes to suggest early influences that have shaped later creations). Larsen also includes the revelation that she met Hamsun in 1896, after which she goes on to describe him:
As I think of him at this distance of years..[...]…I remember him as a man of distinguished presence, still in the flush of young manhood. He was distinctly of the fair, virile type met in the eastern mountain districts where he was born, tall broad-shouldered, with a particularly fine profile and well-shaped head which he carried in a regal manner.
How cool is that? Although I’m thinking that Larsen was a bit smitten with Hamsun’s charming looks. Don’t you think? 
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23:00 – OK that’s all from me for the night as I really need to push on with Richard Holloway’s Between the Monster and the Saint (Canongate Books). As I didn’t really get off to a good start with it a couple of weeks ago, I’ve decided to roll back and start from the beginning again. That’s the least I can do after temporarily side-stepping it so unprofessionally.
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