One book that I have started but never finished through no fault of the book, was a Heritage Club edition (Connecticut Era) of Norman Douglas's South Wind. So I'm remedying that.
Norman Douglas was a twentieth-century writer of satires and travel books. He was born in Austria but raised an Englishman, and he lived much of his life on the Isle of Capri, because he was charged with indecent assault against a minor and skipped bail. Later he would treat this as a persecution for kissing a boy; it's difficult to accept that assessment given that he was reported to the police by the boy himself. But he apparently went no farther than a nonconsensual kiss, so we aren't talking serious sexual violence, either. South Wind is his most famous book. It's a work about a fictional island, called Nepenthe, but is often thought to be loosely based on Douglas's experiences in Capri.
According to The Heritage Club Sandglass, "Douglas was a hedonist and a skeptic," a perspective that threads through the book. It's supposed to be a quite irreverent work, so it will be a change from last week's.
