Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion
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Which LIST book did you just finish?
I read The Stranger by Albert Camus recently en I really enjoyed it. Can't wait to read his other two List books as well.
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Her depiction of Paris before, during, and after World War I is fascinating and relates to so many of the authors we are reading.
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Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia
and a re-read of Sula by Toni Morrison
Ulysses by James Joyce. I have to say endured rather than enjoyed.
Regeneration by Pat Barker. Well written, but I never really felt very invested in it. Maybe the trilogy needs to be evaluated as a whole
I finished The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark the other day. I would say it was an almost perfect short novel. Very witty, but in an extremely understated way.
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Part one of the trilogy deals with coming of age from the female perspective in quite a lovely fashion. On to part two."
The Country Girls was my favorite of the trilogy (especially the time the girls spent in school). Girl with Green Eyes (aka The Lonely Girl) was OK, but I did not enjoy the third book, Girls in Their Married Bliss.
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Interesting book, but the English title doesn't really reflect the French (Extension du domaine de la lutte -- Extension of the Field of Struggle).
Luís wrote: "Cphe wrote: "Bleak House"I'm reading, at the moment, The Pickwick Papers and I'm loving it."
I love The Pickwick Papers.
Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil HrabalAnother short one completed and I found this quite unexpectedly an amusing read 4/5
Just finished Fanny Hill by John Cleland. Interesting.
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The Kindly Ones
The Burning Plain and Other Stories
Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year
The Garden Party and Other StoriesAgnes Grey
Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life
I loved The Garden Party, I feel that Mansfield was a predecessor to Alice Munro, who is a huge favorite of mine. Agnes Grey was my least favorite Brontë novel that I've read, but even a bad Brontë is pretty darn great! And Love's Work is an odd one - more of a memoir and musing than a novel, but I'm glad I read it.
Just finished the 39 steps. Nice short book, not sure why they needed all the changes in the films though.
Just finished The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Just finished ‘Notes from the Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky...Thanks god it was short as don’t think I would have finished otherwise!
Timbuktu (which effectively cured me of my recent Paul Auster obsession) and The Glass Key.
Bob wrote: "Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. A really good October read."Love that book - and Hitchcock's film of the novel (with certain minor changes required by the censors of the day) is wonderful!
Heather wrote: "Bob wrote: "Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. A really good October read."Love that book - and Hitchcock's film of the novel (with certain minor changes required by th..."
I'll look for the movie.
As a woman, I have to say, from my own reading, in my experience there are men who can write women (Shakespeare, Tolstoy), and there are those who cannot (Dostoevsky). Just as there are women who can write men (Austen) and there are women who cannot (Charlotte Bronte, Joyce Carol Oates- although to be fair, I don't really think Oates can write at all).I don't think it is fair to hold those who cannot against those who can.
Finished Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Text. I thought I had read this back as a teenager, but there was enough that was unfamiliar that I think I never finished. I'm glad I did--this was much deeper of a tale than I had given it credit for. I really liked this edition of it, which brought out some things in the introduction that I probably wouldn't have considered on my own.Rather than it being a horror tale, I thought it was an interesting morality play
Pillsonista wrote: "As a woman, I have to say, from my own reading, in my experience there are men who can write women (Shakespeare, Tolstoy), and there are those who cannot (Dostoevsky). Just as there are women who c..."I think women are generally better at writing men though, because they have more of an example to work with, since most protagonists are men.
Just finished The Woodlanders. Review is up on http://1001everything.blogspot.com. I like Hardy but I'm still not sure he deserves as much space as he is taking up on The List.
Amanda wrote: "I think women are generally better at writing men though, because they have more of an example to work with, since most protagonists are men. "Perhaps, but then again, we're not men so how can we truly be able to judge?
Geneviève wrote: "Just finished Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. I absolutely loved it!"I loved it, too. As I read it I came to realize that I had seen the movie adaptation as a teen in the early to mid 70's. Alfred Hitchcock made the movie. He also made a movie based upon one of DuMaurier's short stories, "The Birds."
Just read these two excellent books: Thérèse Raquin and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. They both got strong reviews from me (I realize they are extremely different from each other, of course!). It was really fun to read two AMAZING list books back to back (or overlapping, as the case may be).P.S. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings may be one of the best books I've ever read. Therese Raquin does not quite rise to that level but it is really well done.
Mercedes wrote: "Pillsonista wrote: "Amanda wrote: "I think women are generally better at writing men though, because they have more of an example to work with, since most protagonists are men. "Perhaps, but then..."
I thought Tolstoy absolutely nailed it with the women characters in War & Peace. They are complex, interesting, varied, and ring very true. I agree that Anna Karenina is not his best character, the other characters in that novel were richer and more interesting than she was.
Anthony Trollope writes about women with a lot of humor and sympathy. I wonder if he grew up with sisters. So many other 19th century male authors were like madonna or whore, no other options! Whereas you get the sense that Trollope really spent time with women.
Funny, I would not have said that Jane Austen wrote men well. I think she lived in such a gender segregated society, her knowledge of mens' lives was so limited, her male characters are true if you are considering just that sliver of life seen by women in the drawing room, but they are not fully developed characters in the way her women are. Just my opinion.
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Beautiful, thought-provoking memoir by Gillian Rose, a philosopher and sociologist, written as she was dying of cancer.
Mercedes wrote: "Inder wrote: "Mercedes wrote: "Pillsonista wrote: "Amanda wrote: "I think women are generally better at writing men though, because they have more of an example to work with, since most protagonist..."I always think he's such a well kept secret! I love his books and, while I also love Dickens, it is not at all clear to me why Dickens is so much more famous.
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Inder wrote: I always think he's such a well kept secret! I love his books and, while I also love Dickens, it is not at all clear to me why Dickens is so much more famous...."
My thought was, "more people like Dickens books more for whatever reason". I looked at the ratings of their books on goodreads to verify this, and was surprised to see that if you look at each author's four most-read books, the range of avg ratings for Dickens is 3.76 to 4.03. For Trollope it's 3.72 to 4.05. Pretty near identical. Proof that Trollope was as good a writer as Dickens (maybe?).
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George wrote: "Speaking of Anthony Trollope, Inder wrote: I always think he's such a well kept secret! I love his books and, while I also love Dickens, it is not at all clear to me why Dickens is so much more fa..."
I expect more people overall read Dickens (more likely to be on lists like these and more likely to be assigned in school), and he's a love/hate kind of writer. Less people read Trollope, and those people are more likely to be lovers of 19th century fiction who are diving deeper? Just another thought.
Dickens is wonderfully colorful and funny and no one describes London like he does, but getting back to the topic we started with, his women are TERRIBLE, lol!! Madonna/whore all the way! Of course, all of his characters are caricatures, so it could be argued that his men aren't that realistic either.
Mercedes wrote: "Pillsonista wrote: "Amanda wrote: "I think women are generally better at writing men though, because they have more of an example to work with, since most protagonists are men. "Perhaps, but then..."
See I've always thought Anna Karenina was one the great characters (male or female, but naturally especially female) in all of literature.
The fallen heroine maybe considered (erroneously) nothing more than a trope now, but back then, to make a three dimensional female character and then to "allow" them to behave in such a human way was extraordinary (especially considering the aristocratic milieu which was Tolstoy's audience). Plus, there's Kitty and Dolly, and any number of smaller characters, which taken as a whole create an extraordinary tapestry of not only women and their place in Russian society, but their inner lives, made all the more incredible because it all seems so close to real life (and not just the real life of the Russian aristocracy).
After all, Vronsky isn't much more than a typical cad for most of the book (not exactly original, even for back then). And Tolstoy originally intended for Karenin, her husband, to be an almost Christ-like figure of the late nineteenth century Russian aristocracy, whose stoic self-sacrifice was supposed to be diametrically contrasted to his wife's selfish infidelity. But that's actually nothing close to what Tolstoy ended up writing, because nuance was the congenital state of how he wrote, even if his religious beliefs didn't possess an ounce of it. As with the women, his male characters taken as whole characterize a small universe, because each individual part makes its own contribution to a greater whole.
I just think it's very unfair to claim that men ultimately cannot write women because they never experience life as a woman, and then to claim that nothing interferes with how women can write about (or create) men, even though they'll never experience a moment on this earth as a man, either.
Personally, I think George Eliot created one of the worst characters of any major English writer in the language when she came up with Will Ladislaw (who's completely unconvincing and would be, whether a man or woman, but particularly as a man I find him ridiculous). That doesn't mean that elsewhere she didn't create interesting male characters, because she did. But overall I think it's patently obvious that her female characters are head-and-shoulders superior creations than her male characters. That does nothing to diminish Eliot's deserved reputation as one of the great English novelists who's ever picked up a pen. I think men should be given the same credit/consideration in similar circumstances as it regards their female characters.
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Neither was I!
Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
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Fascinating semi-autobiographical novel by the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud of her childhood in Morocco with her mother and sister. Little concerning in places as the mother pursues Sufism with little thought to the welfare of the girls.