Reading today - Tom Stoppard + Leonard Cohen

Today I'm reading some early Tom Stoppard.  Reading all the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Restoration plays I've been poking at (even in fragments) is starting to make me think that my ugly-novel-lump is supposed to be historical fantasy instead of just fantasy.  As it was this delusion that killed the prior draft of the story, I'm trying to shake up my brain by reading plays by folks, such as Stoppard, who take history as an inspiration for saying really interesting things in the cracks between recorded thoughts, or from perspectives that move in and out of time, or just play around with it in brilliant ways.  Stoppard was one of my favorite writers in high school, during the year that I read tons of plays.  I'd stumbled on 2 collections of plays by Anouilh that summer while stuck in my grandparents apartment after their death, and ended up spending the next year reading Jean Anouilh and Jean Giradoux and Christopher Fry and Tom Stoppard and a couple others.  Along with the usual fantasy novel pileup, of course.  And I think that was the year I was also trying to read the Romance of the Rose (I finished the Guillaume de Lorris bit, but got totally bogged down in the Jean de Meun bit) and The Song of Roland, which I never did quite finish.  I would buy piles of cheap second hand Penguin classics from the 60s.  Though I think I went to one of the old Barnes and Noble stores in New York to buy the Romance of the Rose new.

All by way of saying that I'm trying to smack my brain loose a bit and hope it will work.  And for the 125th anniversary of the library system we have the option of recommending our 5 favorite books, from which somehow a top 125 books will be compiled.  They do have to be books the library owns.  So I'm rereading Leonard Cohen's "Beautiful Losers" to see if it is still one of my top 5 favorite novels of all time. (The list has included Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Richard Meltzer's The Night (Alone), and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers for some time, with the other two spots variable.  The Female Man and Beautiful Losers are the two the library owns, though points should be awarded - they do own several books by Richard Meltzer.  Yay to that!  Lisa Goldstein often floats in and out of the top five when I read a new novel of hers.)