My reading so far this year:
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink -- Treatments of food and things food-related from the archives of the magazine.
The Importance of Being Ernest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde -- Plays from the man more known for his wit and lifestyle than his body of work. Blistering critique of the manners and mores of the upper classes, but sadly, the work shows its age.
Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Stories by Truman Capote -- BaT is wonderful, but the best of the bunch is
A Christmas Memory. Recommended for anyone who only thinks of Capote as that strange little man with the funny voice on the late-night chat shows back in the 70s.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh -- There's nothing I can say that would be original or contribute what others have already said and written about this book.
The Letters of Noel Coward -- I fell in love with Noel Coward, despite his being both gay and dead. Never wanted this to end and so I read...
Private Lives & Other Plays by Noel Coward -- The situations of
Private Lives and
Blythe Spirit have been borrowed by second-rate television and film writers for so long now that a moratorium should be passed against further recycling, but these are the real deal in their original glory. For both this and the letters
Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse -- It's Wodehouse and I'm a sucker for Wodehouse. Nothing I say would be objective.
Bobbed Hair & Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade -- The lives of Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay through the 1920s. Fascinating and fun, but limited. First, the author tends to want to take the reader inside these ladies' heads without attribution (though there are sources listed in the end notes) which I found unsettling. Also, the book ends with the decade of the 20s, leaving these four compelling stories hanging, along with the reader.
The Portable Dorothy Parker -- Recommended to anyone who doesn't know who Dorothy Parker was or, and most especially, people who only know her as the acid-tongued wit of the Algonquin Round Table.
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester -- See what passes for an Irene Wilde Review in the General Chat section.
A Dance to the Music of Time -- The First Movement by Anthony Powell -- The first three books in Mr. Powell's intricate 12-volume tale of the lives of several people from the early 1920s on to the late 1960s/early 1970s (I'm not sure which, I'm not there yet). The first movement covers the 20s into the depression, focusing on three young men -- Peter Templer, Charles Stringham, and Kenneth Widmerpool -- as seen through the eyes of writer Nick Jenkins.