bookshelves: poetry
These four poems were written by an unknown author at about the same time as the Canterbury Tales and the Vision of Piers Plowman, about 1375, but in a dialect further removed from modern English. They survived as a single manuscript, and are believed to have been written by a single poet. The first three poems are religious, the last and best-known, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is secular.
The book presents the poems in untranslated form with marginal translations of unfamiliar words and footnoted translations of difficult passages. These enable the text to be followed without too much difficulty.
An excellent and concise introduction by the editors describes the provenance of the poems and provides a synopsis of each poem, a discussion of its relationship to other literature of the time, and some critical commentary.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was once described to me as the greatest poem in the English language, but my vote for this goes to Pearl which tells, through the medium of a 'vision poem' of 1212 lines, of the narrator's attempt to deal with the death of a beloved daughter, his 'precious perle wythouten spot', when she 'was full yong and tender of age'. As well as being an intensely personal and moving poem it is almost unbelievably rich and complex in its metrical structure, range of vocabulary and use of imagery.
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Cliff
read and liked
Heather's
review of Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure:
"As far as I could tell, this was supposed to be a true story. The problem started when some of Sarah's anecdotes were just too fantastic, and clearly written in such a way to convince her audience of jaded Westerners that the possibility of magic st...more "
"As far as I could tell, this was supposed to be a true story. The problem started when some of Sarah's anecdotes were just too fantastic, and clearly written in such a way to convince her audience of jaded Westerners that the possibility of magic st...more "
Cliff
read and liked
Denice's
review of Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure:
"If I could give a book negative stars, it would be this one. This girl seemed to complain about everything she was experiencing in India. I think I yelled at the book every chapter, "GO HOME!" I read the whole thing hoping to witness her en...more "
"If I could give a book negative stars, it would be this one. This girl seemed to complain about everything she was experiencing in India. I think I yelled at the book every chapter, "GO HOME!" I read the whole thing hoping to witness her en...more "
Cliff
read and liked
Lori's
review of Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure:
"I enjoy books exploring the different cultures and customs of the world. I enjoy a well-written memoir exploring those discoveries, but I finally put this one aside about 3/4 of the way through it. I tried, I truly tried to finish it, but with so man...more "
"I enjoy books exploring the different cultures and customs of the world. I enjoy a well-written memoir exploring those discoveries, but I finally put this one aside about 3/4 of the way through it. I tried, I truly tried to finish it, but with so man...more "
bookshelves: non-fiction
I read this book shortly before going to Myanmar in 2008. Basically it is a travel diary covering several trips the author made to Myanmar, including to areas currently, or recently, engaged in armed secession movements against the central government.
To give some coherence to the book, the author has attempted to write it in the 'following the path of' travel genre. In this case the path being followed is that of Sir J G Scott, a Scottish journalist and later colonial administrator who lived in Burma for a long period beginning in the 1880s. Scott learnt the language of the predominant ethnic group, the Burmans, and to some extent followed their life-style. He wrote a detailed study of the people and their customs - The Burman: his life and notions - which apparently became very popular in London at the time and subsequently he and his third wife published fiction and non-fiction books based on his time in Burma.
To me, the book read like a fragmentary collection of anecdotes, some about the author's experiences and some taken from Scott's and his wife's writings. The former were heavily laced with diatribe against the Myanmar military government, mostly based on anecdote rather than first hand reporting. The latter tended to read like excerpts from a Boys Own adventure story. There is no doubt Scott was a remarkable man, but concentrating on the most colourful and, one suspects, somewhat exaggerated of his exploits seemed to diminish the man. The influence of Buddhism, which apart from its obvious manifestations in the everyday religious observance of the people and the magnificent art of the temples, plays a significant role in providing education and sustenance for the poorest members of society in Myanmar, rarely gets a mention. I lost interest about half-way through the book and skim-read the rest.
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bookshelves: currently-reading
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bookshelves: novels
Kingsley Amis was a British novelist, literary critic and essayist. This book was published in 1973 and is set in the period after World War One. It is a humorous and sensitive portrait of a sexually ambivalent English schoolboy written in the form of a classical 1930s English detective story. As a logic puzzle the plot is very cleverly constructed, although in common with other novels of this type and period (which of course the author is mimicking as a literary exercise) the solution to the mystery entails some rather improbable events. ]]>
Cliff
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 47 |
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| skipped: | 47 |
| best streak: | 6 |
| questions added: | 0 |
bookshelves: novels
I first read 'Winter - A Berlin Family 1899-1945' not long after it was published in the 1980s and recently re-read it. It combines an historical analysis of the events in Germany that led to WWI, the rise of the Nazis and WWII, with the story of the (fictional) family of a well-to-do German industrialist, as they live through these events.
The non-fiction component provides a convincing and, from my limited knowledge, historically accurate account of how and why events unfolded. This is combined seamlessly with the fictional component. In particular, the way characters respond to, and are changed by, the events they experience is dealt with in a lot of detail. As with other books by Deighton I have read in the past, I found this one virtually impossible to put down.
I found two shortcomings with this book. The first is that the characters are not quite believable. To give just one example, but a very significant one, the principal character is the main source of legal advice for Heinrich Himmler, whose responsibilities included creation and management of the concentration camps. No such person could be unaware of the camps and what went on in them, and must at points have made decisions about whether or not to be party to such crimes. The novel avoids dealing with this aspect of the character's development.
The second is that the ending is unsatisfactory. The book's opening takes place at the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials, and leads us to believe that the main character will have a certain role in those trials. The rest of the story is then told in retrospect in chronological order leading back to the starting point. However at this juncture the reader's expectations are circumvented with a very artificial ending.
In spite of these shortcomings, this is a very ambitious book that is highly readable both as an historical analysis and as a 'family saga' type novel. ]]>