Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion
Archived Chit Chat & All That
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What Are You Reading Now?
I’ve been meaning to read Ross Lockridge’s Raintree County for years, and now that I’m doing so, I can confidently report that it is a great book. Sort of James Joyce crossed with Americana, but not intimidating. The framework of the 1066 pages is the celebration of July 4, 1892, in a small town in Indiana, but there are numerous flashbacks incorporating the 50 years before that. Lockridge famously committed suicide as the novel was climbing the bestseller charts in 1948; the book really took it all out of him, and beyond that, he was mentally unprepared for fame and notoriety. John Leggett’s joint biography of Lockridge and Thomas Heggen, author of Mister Roberts and another late Forties suicide, Ross And Tom: Two American Tragedies, is one of the most moving books I have ever read
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust My current long-term reading project consists of tackling the complete In Search of Lost Time series. This first volume, Swann's Way, is a re-read for me, but this time around I picked up the Modern Library Paperback translation from Moncrieff & Kilmartin instead of Lydia Davis's wonderful translation which I originally read.
Where the Stress Falls: Essays by Susan Sontag
I finished the historical account of the greatest racehorse of all time
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
Rating: 5 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading the non-fiction account of Graham Greene's travels in rural Mexico in the 1930s (that prompted him to write The Power and the Glory)
The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene
I am reading The Mulatta and Mister Fly by Miguel Ángel Asturiaswhich will appeal to anyone who likes their magic realism turned up to 11
^ Nice description, tells a lot in one sentence.
Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.
Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)
Patrick wrote: "Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It ..."I love Edna. If anyone here is under the age of 30, highly recommend her, especially Giant! I haven't read CAGI yet, it's a chunk, thanks for the reminder.
^ This is the first of hers that I have read, looking forward to more. They certainly are chunky.
Reading this morning in Plutarch’s Lives, the Dryden / Clough translation in the old Modern Library Giant edition. Now that’s as classical as it gets. Long sentences with many clauses, you really have to pay attention. I like this quotation about empire: “And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself.”Along with books such as Plutarch, one might take a look at Moses Hadas’s helpful guide Ancilla to Classical Reading.
Patrick wrote: "Reading this morning in Plutarch’s Lives, the Dryden / Clough translation in the old Modern Library Giant edition. Now that’s as classical as it gets. Long sentences with many claus..."The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature by M.C. Howatson is another guide.
Pharmacdon wrote: "Patrick wrote: "The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature by M.C. Howatson is another guide."All assistance is welcome!
Patrick wrote: "I like this quotation about empire: “And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself.”."It makes me choke ... did anyone ask the thus 'united and incorporated' whether they had any wish to 'advance the greatness' - of any Empire, for that matter?
^ I knew someone would get on me about that. 🙂 Empire is a fact of human history, on all continents. So maybe it is just possible that there were somewhat more enlightened empires. In any case, my understanding of this history is fairly conservative, fairly center-right. Niall Ferguson and I could have a nice drinks session.
Gavin wrote: "Reading Imajica"should take you a while! ;o)
one of my all-time faves, holding a firm slot in my "100 books of the 20th century" list!
I'm reading these ones right nowThe Museum of Unconditional Surrender
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
War and Peace
Today I am focusing onMary Poppins Comes Back by P.L. Travers
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
Hobbit Lessons: A Map for Life's Unexpected Journeys by Devin Brown
Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olson
I am reading:- Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broade
- Darkness Bound (Witch’s Rebels #2) by Sarah Piper
- Court of Thorns & Roses by Sarah J Maas
Arthur van Schendel’s John Company (1932), one of the many fine Dutch novels of the colonial East Indies, is “impersonal” in the sense that the Dutch East India Company of the 17th Century is the true protagonist, and not any individual, although the story of adventurer Jan de Brasser provides a through-line. Van Schendel’s approach is original - he gives a comparatively dry and objective-sounding account of “goings-on” in Dutch Indonesia without any conventional plot as such. John Company is not like other novels, and all the better for it.Among the other novels of this history that I would recommend are Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, and Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things.
I finished the classic suspense thriller
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading
The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes
Of the 19th Century British novelists who figure in the standard histories, Charles Reade (1814-1884), a good friend of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, is one of the least-read today. He is best known for an uncharacteristic production, the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, but essentially he was a contemporary social fiction writer who was all over the hot-button issues of his day, and quite a bit of a muckraker. I greatly admired the first Reade that I read, It is Never Too Late to Mend, which achieves considerable power in its pictures of English prison life and the Australian goldfields. I just started Put Yourself in His Place, an industrial labor novel set in Sheffield (“Hillsborough”).
Currently reading "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
Robert Smith Surtees has been pigeon-holed as a fox-hunting novelist, and perhaps partly because of that, has never "boomed," as the critic Edward Wagenknecht once pointed out. But Wagenkecht also astutely notes that it is easy to enjoy Surtees even if one thoroughly disapproves of hunting, because he excels at comic characterizations.Surtees' slangy language is very dense for us and takes some getting used to; some references will be missed by non-specialists. But he is a joyously high-spirited writer, which is immediately noticeable and sustained me through the early going while I was getting used to the style. By the 100-page mark, I was reveling in the entire performance.
The book I chose for my initiation was Surtees' first, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. The Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of That Renowned Sporting Citizen Mr. John Jorrocks, not a novel but a collection of fictional sketches that first started appearing in the New Sporting Magazine (which Surtees co-founded) in 1831, and that were gathered between hard covers in 1838. (The Pickwick Papers, very obviously influenced by Jorrocks' adventures, had made Charles Dickens' reputation in the meantime.)
John Jorrocks is a rumbustious Cockney grocer whose character develops over a number of Surtees' fictions, but at the beginning he is pretty much a flat-out idiot, though not lacking in a certain crude charm. At his social level, he is clubbable; his friends enjoy him, for his inanities as much as anything else. And every now and then amidst much foolish chatter he comes out with a bit of down-home wisdom: " - so come without any ceremony - us fox-hunters hate ceremony - where there's ceremony there's no friendship."
Only the first few of the 13 sketches in JJ & J are really hunting pieces; after that, Surtees starts to vary the game, so that we get Jorrocks at the seaside, Jorrocks on excursion in France, Jorrocks throwing a dinner party, and so on. Abundance of ingestion is a running theme; the man eats like one of his horses. He also dandies himself up as much as possible, doing his best to be a "man of mode" despite having (to put it mildly) no gentlemanly or intellectual qualifications.
But elan vital, now that he's got. And if Surtees can't help satirizing Jorrocks, he also admires him for the sheer life-force he represents; appetite for hunting, for food, for nice togs translates easily into appetite for life in general.
Like many a vigorous fellow, Jorrocks feels himself hobbled by his wife, which lends a good deal of marital comedy to the book's later passages: " - wish to God I'd never see'd her - took her for better and worser, it's werry true; but she's a d----d deal worser than I took her for."
In short, if you have any winking fondness for vulgarity at all, Jorrocks is your man, and you ought to make his acquaintance.
Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno / Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is not exactly a work you recommend so much as point out, because honestly, one in 500 people is going to care for this level of extreme eccentricity. Melville’s Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Robert Browning’s Sordello are two other productions in this same WTF? class. However, it should go without saying by now that I am very fond of all these and similar demented creations. 😏Sylvie and Bruno uneasily combines a daft fantasy with a realistic late Victorian novel, and ladles on the sentimentality in a way that many now find unappealing. But all that said, it is QUITE an experience. I even find Bruno’s oft-criticized baby talk very funny. ("I never talks to nobody when he isn't here! It isn't good manners. Oo should always wait till he comes, before oo talks to him!")
I finished this story collection which includes the very first Swords & Sorcery story ever written
Kull: Exile of Atlantis by Robert E. Howard
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading the next installment in my Publication-Order reading of the Discworld books
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
Finished
Terraces of Night by Margery Lawrence (1932) [4/5] review pretty solid collection of supernatural tales.
That sound very interesting! Scott Thompson’s Furrowed Middlebrow site has this to say about Lawrence:LAWRENCE, MARGERY (8 Aug 1889 – 13 Nov 1969)
(married name Towle)
1920s – 1970s
Author of more than three dozen volumes of fiction, many featuring supernatural or uncanny themes. These include the collections Nights of the Round Table (1926), The Terraces of Night, Being Further Chronicles of the Club of the Round Table (1932), Strange Caravan (1941), and Number Seven Queer Street (1945). The Madonna of Seven Moons (1931) is a novel dealing with split personality, and The Bridge of Wonder (1939) with spiritualism. The Rent in the Veil (1951) is a timeslip tale, and The Tomorrow of Yesterday (1966) deals with Atlantis. Other fiction includes Red Heels (1924), Fine Feathers (1928), Madame Holle (1934), Emma of Alkistan (1953), Skivvy (1961), The Yellow Triangle (1965), and Autumn Rose (1971).
Patrick wrote: "That sound very interesting! Scott Thompson’s Furrowed Middlebrow site has this to say about Lawrence:LAWRENCE, MARGERY (8 Aug 1889 – 13 Nov 1969)
(married name Towle)
1920s – 1970s
Author of mor..."
Her style is quite good and Terraces was written in her 20's i believe so she may improve even more later.
I know Number Seven Queer Street is a supernatural investigator set, those can be quite fun.
Anyway the list below are all available as free pdf from the Merril Collection, at the toronto public library online, (link in my review).
Bride of darkness (1967)
The floating café : and other stories (1936)
Master of shadows (1959)
Number Seven Queer Street (1945)
Terraces of night (1932)
The tomorrow of yesterday (1966)
Thanks! That is a resource I was unfamiliar with.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese.
Patrick wrote: "Thanks! That is a resource I was unfamiliar with."I also put them all on a shelf for my easy perusal.. took some doing i had to add quite a lot myself as they were so obscure GR hadn't heard of them :P .
Still over 80 never been rated yet. My Merril Collection Shelf
I have accounts both here at Goodreads and at LibraryThing, and generally if it’s not here it’s there (or in one of LibraryThing’s linked libraries), but I do have a list of titles that I haven’t located at EITHER site.
This morning, finished D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which really should be called Men in Love with Each Other). Well, that was quite something. Although I would acknowledge it as a major novel, one dominant impression that I had is that all four main characters are repulsive, and I possibly won’t mind spending any more time with them. That is very rare for me to say. (I didn’t feel that way at the end of The Rainbow, preceding.)Lawrence does not offer a very comforting view of romantic relations. Constant tension, out of which comes an occasional hot tumble, about which Lawrence himself gets mystically (sometimes near-ludicrously) worked up. There are few novels in which the protagonists yammer so much about what their relationships MEAN; one wants to slap them sometimes. And as if to serve them right for being over-analytic…well I shouldn’t say, but without going into spoilers I can point out that one NEVER feels that a “happy ending” is in the offing.
The novel never stops being compelling, though. I wanted to throw it at the wall, yes, but then pick it right up again. 🙂
I hadn’t read much Lawrence before The Rainbow, a few short stories and poems way back when. Now I shall move on to Sons and Lovers.
Patrick wrote: ". I wanted to throw it at the wall, yes, but then pick it right up again. 🙂."how often do you throw books at the wall? rarely - sometimes - often? ;-))
it happened to me only once ... and I never picked it up again, nor any other of that author, Nobel Prize be d***d.
Almost never. I love almost everything that I read.
I finished The Jugger by Richard Stark in my quest to read all of the Parker novels.I also finished Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow.
Mod
how often do you throw books at the wall? rarely - sometimes - often? ;-))
it happened to me only on..."
I once threw out a book into the trash can outside, but I couldn't stand so I dug it out and finished the story.
^ I have done that metaphorically - given up reading a book, felt guilty, and gone back and finished it later.
Oh man. You thought Ulysses was difficult, but I assure you it has NOTHING on Robert Browning’s knotty narrative poem Sordello (1840), about 13th Century Italian politics and troubadouring. I used Arthur J. Whyte’s 1913 annotated edition - very helpful it was and very grateful I was for the help. But still, a tough go, lightened by beautiful lines and passages, but the difficulties always remain in view: Like, what is going on, what IS he talking about? Nonetheless, for true hardcore littérateurs, I unhesitatingly recommend.Browning interrupts his narrative at the mid-point for a 400-line digression discussing whether he will finish it, which is not merely a modern but indeed a post-modern gesture, and has to be considered one of the most striking such oddities in any 19th Century text.
Emu wrote: "Anulekha wrote: "I am reading Persuasion"I love Persuasion! It's my second favourite Austen. Enjoy!"
Definitely enjoying! :)
Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
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The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading the Pulitzer-Prize winner
The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War by Michael Shaara