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June 30
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Bob
gave  to:
The Worshipful Lucia (Make Way for Lucia, Part V)
by
E.F. Benson
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"As is only to be expected, as our characters move toward the late 1920s, they begin to be swept up in the wave of financial speculation that led up to the Wall Street crash of 1929.
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Bob
gave to:
Mapp and Lucia (Penguin Modern Classics)
by
E.F. Benson
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"As with the prior books in the series, the references to period-specific (UK 1920s) culture give it some extra amusement and depth - this volume touches on exercise faddism (eurythmics, the first glimmerings of yoga in the West) and the still-controv...more
As with the prior books in the series, the references to period-specific (UK 1920s) culture give it some extra amusement and depth - this volume touches on exercise faddism (eurythmics, the first glimmerings of yoga in the West) and the still-controversial introduction of daylight saving time in the summer.(less)
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Bob
gave to:
Miss Mapp (Paperback)
by
E.F. Benson
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"Third book in the series introduces a whole new set of characters who will meet the main ones in the next volume.
Along with the amusing descriptions of Machiavellian maneuvering in small town social circles are other sources of pleasure, one of...more
Third book in the series introduces a whole new set of characters who will meet the main ones in the next volume.
Along with the amusing descriptions of Machiavellian maneuvering in small town social circles are other sources of pleasure, one of which is that the characters' dialog (or the narration about them) spins an elegant web of allusion and quotation that reinforces the (mythical?) notion that people were once better educated - following the references in this one led me to Shelley, the "Song of Solomon" and a mid-19th century Anglican hymnist whose name I have (regrettably) already forgotten.(less)
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June 24
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Bob
gave to:
Lucia in London (Paperback)
by
E.F. Benson
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"Just found Volume 2 - had all the others but determined to read them in order. In this one, the queen bee of a small southern English country town inherits some money and attempts to take London by storm in a tour de force of overt social climbing th...more
Just found Volume 2 - had all the others but determined to read them in order. In this one, the queen bee of a small southern English country town inherits some money and attempts to take London by storm in a tour de force of overt social climbing that earns her a society of Luciaphils, enthusiastic admirers of her naked audacity. In the course of contrasting city and country life, satirizing popular culture of the 1920s, as well as the encroachment of modernism on traditional aesthetics, a number of topics fly by - the music of "Stravinski" (in which the previously-unknown-to-me adjective "scrannel" gets used), "post-Cubism", Ouija board spiritualism etc - endlessly amusing in its way.
The description of Lucia's embrace of things she once disdained includes this summary of her former views on Stravinsky "...(music)she used to account sheer Bolshevism, producing these scrannel staccato tinklings that had so often made her wince."(less)
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Bob
gave to:
Queen Lucia (Hardcover)
by
E.F. Benson
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my rating:
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read in May, 2008
Bob said:
"The first of half a dozen books in the Lucia series, a gentle (though hardly subtle) satire of English small country town life in the 1920s. The first volume introduces the handful of main characters, their milieu and pretensions - among the most abs...more
The first of half a dozen books in the Lucia series, a gentle (though hardly subtle) satire of English small country town life in the 1920s. The first volume introduces the handful of main characters, their milieu and pretensions - among the most absurdly memorable is the classification of formality of dress into "hightum, tightum and scrub" (fully formal dress, fancy dress for more ordinary occasions and relatively casual), the appropriate designation printed on party invitations on so on.
Though I was fairly certain the author had invented this preposterous terminology, a little Googling suggests the terms may actually have been in use in late Victorian England http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/r...(less)
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June 22
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Bob
gave  to:
Zeno's Conscience: A Novel (Paperback)
by
Italo Svevo
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"Édouard Roditi's introduction to the Penguin edition which I read comes quickly to the conclusion I had already reached on my own (clever chap that I am), that Svevo, writing in Italian in Trieste in the early 1920s, is best seen in the tradition of...more
Édouard Roditi's introduction to the Penguin edition which I read comes quickly to the conclusion I had already reached on my own (clever chap that I am), that Svevo, writing in Italian in Trieste in the early 1920s, is best seen in the tradition of the Austrian Empire novelists, notably Musil. Though Svevo was good friends with, and championed by, James Joyce, Roditi's analysis devotes more time to comparisons with Flaubert and Proust than Joycean modernism. The innovations of Freud and psychoanalytic theory hang heavy but in an almost farcical way - Zeno is reminiscent of Woody Allen at times.(less)
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June 21
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Bob
gave to:
What Maisie Knew (Paperback)
by
Henry James
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my rating:
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read in December, 2008
Bob said:
"An only child of divorced parents is passed around among half a dozen adults of varying relationships to her (nannies, parents' new lovers, second spouses), all of whom are unfailingly selfish and incapable of framing her well-being in any terms othe...more
An only child of divorced parents is passed around among half a dozen adults of varying relationships to her (nannies, parents' new lovers, second spouses), all of whom are unfailingly selfish and incapable of framing her well-being in any terms other than what suits them. Admittedly anyone in the world who claims to be acting in a purely disinterested manner on any occasion is probably not telling the truth but this presents a notably pessimistic view of human nature. Written in 1897, close to James' legendary difficult late period of 1902-4, the prose is not as challenging as The Golden Bowl et al - elegant and lightly ironic.(less)
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Bob
gave  to:
Einstein's Dreams (Paperback)
by
Alan Lightman
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"A nice complement to my recent reading on physics but ultimately a little lightweight. A dozen or so fanciful descriptions of what the world would be like if time followed a different set of rules than it appears to, all set in Switzerland in 1905.
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June 17
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Bob
gave to:
Novel on Yellow Paper, Or, Work It Out for Yourself (Revived Modern Classic)
by
Stevie Smith
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"Wonderfully idiosyncratic writing in the vein of the Joyce/Eliot-influenced modernism of the 1930s - even more reminiscent of Djuna Barnes but that may just be lumping all eccentric women of that period together. Impossible to say what it is about, b...more
Wonderfully idiosyncratic writing in the vein of the Joyce/Eliot-influenced modernism of the 1930s - even more reminiscent of Djuna Barnes but that may just be lumping all eccentric women of that period together. Impossible to say what it is about, but the narrative voice becomes increasingly funny and endearing, a breathless falling-over-itself colloquial tone that the writer said is intended to evoke everyday speech rather than high literary style, but you don't know anyone that talks like this unless you hang around with upper middle-class young British women who have somehow become displaced in time by 3/4s of a century or so. I may not be doing it justice but I am rushing to get back to it.
Next day: finished. Really "startlingly original" though that sounds like lazy book review boilerplate (not as a bad as "finely observed first novel"). I am also somehow extra fascinated with people who lived just outside my range of experience, or barely overlapped - had I somehow met Stevie Smith in London in 1970 when I was ten years old, would it have made any impression and would I remember? Nonetheless, the possibility is intriguing.(less)
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June 15
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Bob
gave to:
The Seven Sisters (Paperback)
by
Margaret Drabble
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Bob said:
"After some months abroad in far-flung literary landscapes, I tend to return to Margaret Drabble as a sort of literary comfort food, though since this may be the 17th of her 18 novels I have read, it may soon become time to look elsewhere.
By con...more
After some months abroad in far-flung literary landscapes, I tend to return to Margaret Drabble as a sort of literary comfort food, though since this may be the 17th of her 18 novels I have read, it may soon become time to look elsewhere.
By contrast to what I think of as the "writer's workshop" sort of writers who take on the personae of people entirely alien to their actual experience, I rather like the fact that the protagonist of any given Drabble novel is almost always a cultivated middle-class Englishwoman within a few years of whatever age she happens to be. This 2002 book has a 60-ish woman, divorced late in life and on her own for the first time, having, to everyone's surprise, moved from the country to the Ladbroke Grove area of London.
Most of Drabble's novels pick a classical or mythological theme which intertwines and resonates with the events of the story - this time it is The Aeneid, a fine choice. Her narrator is timid but also perspicacious and funny - another example (comparable to Iain Banks' Dead Air) of the author using the main character to voice all of her asides and aperçus about contemporary life.(less)
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