Reggie's Bedside Reading

I have exhausted Holiday at Darlington as a subject, so I'm going to shift away from the house for the next several posts.  If I'm boring myself with it then I must be boring you, too, Gentle Reader.  It's time to move on...

Today I post about the books on my bedside table.  These are the ones that I chose to read while at Darlington during my time off from the bank.  I have hardly had the chance to do all that much reading, though, what with all of the time I've spent working on this blog and throwing our party.  These are books I look forward to reading...

Photo by Boy Fenwick

The first in the stack is Iles Brody's The Colony: Portrait of A Restaurant And its Famous Recipes, published in 1946.  Chapter one begins with these entrancing words: "A quarter-century history of the swankiest restaurant in the world.  How an obscure bistro became the cherished second home of the most outstanding men and women of our epoch."  The Colony was a precursor of today's Swifty's and Le Cirque in Manhattan.  Full of gossipy stories, bold-faced names of the era, and noteworthy recipes of this famous spot, this should be a fun read.

Next: Some Favorite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor.  No pretense is made that the Duchess had any hand in writing it, as it is noted simply that it comes with a foreward by the Duchess of Windsor--all of three pages.  This slim tome, published in 1942, includes menus and "nearly" 140 recipes for dishes supposedly chosen by the Duchess herself and "...tested and verified by the Home Institute of the New York Herald Tribune."  Should be amusing anthropology.

Third: The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, was given to me the other day by my freshman-year college roommate. This is a current book, published in England, and written by the biographer of Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann.  I expect it to be a delicious, nasty romp.

Fourth: Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes, the author of the delightful Snobs and the screenplay to Gosford Park, one of my favorite recent films.  I'm only several pages in to it, and enjoying it immensely.  I'll let you know what I think of it when I've finished.

Finally: Too Much Money, Dominick Dunne's posthumously published novel of warfare in the trenches of New York society.  I have devoured all of his previous books, sought out every article he wrote in Vanity Fair, and regularly tuned in to his absorbing show on Court TV.  Boy and I saw him regularly at Swifty's and I would often see him on the street near my office in midtown, where he had an apartment.  I don't care that the reviews have been mixed--I'm looking forward to reading it.