Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion
Archived Chit Chat & All That
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What Are You Reading Now?
Nothing classic since sometime sadly.. lots of nonfiction and lots of rereads.. and some romances.Have been trying to read
and had started Eugénie Grandet sometimeback .. but..I need to try again .. will start again.
I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him. So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.
* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.
Thomas Hardy shrewdly observes in A Pair of Blue Eyes that a great many friendships are makeshift, emerging because people happen to be around and not because those are the ones you would choose given your druthers. This reality is crucial in Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, the first in her Balkan Trilogy (and the six-volume Fortunes of War), in which we are confronted with the disparate members of the international community in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II.Our focal center is the newly-married Pringles, Guy and Harriet, but we are more privy to Harriet’s perspective. For her this is clearly a case of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”, because she knew very little about Guy when she jumped in, and seems increasingly exasperated by what she discovers. He, a university instructor, is blandly tolerant of whatever goofballs they encounter; she is much more selective, and this inevitably creates a lot of tension.
Guy’s interpersonal approach is better-suited to expatriate life, of course, yet I find myself deeply sympathetic to Harriet (as Manning intends), because I have been there, oh Lord have I been there. There is no doubt that you meet a lot of screwy messed-up people in the international rounds, on the run from something or other (frequently themselves). My strategy has been to be polite but distant, not to invite more contact than necessary. But Guy, perhaps out of a desire to examine “specimens”, gathers such folk in.
I’ll leave off there at the moment, not to give too much away (and I’m not done with the novel yet either).
Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester, plus teaching part-time, so I only managed excerpts. But I promised myself that I would get back to the text, and so I have, now halfway through the Oxford unabridged edition. A complete joy.I will always be grateful that I got an excellent grounding in 17th and 18th Century British literature as an undergrad at Yale, so I have a head start on Boswell because the context and personalities are familiar.
Patrick wrote: "Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester,..."I have this one on my shelf but haven't cracked it open yet. I may need to move it up the queue.
Right now I am reading Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives and rereading Nicholas Nickleby. I'm also about halfway through The Power and the Glory.
Simon Raven’s roman-fleuve is quite long. The first sequence, Alms for Oblivion, is 10 volumes in length, and the follow-up set, The First-Born of Egypt, is seven. The immediate obvious difference between Raven’s novels and those of other roman-fleuvists such as C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell is the gusto with which Raven gets into bodily functions - sex (straight and gay), elimination, side effects of various illnesses, etc. Within pages of the opening of the second novel in story-chron order * , Sound the Retreat, we’re getting graphic descriptions of diarrhea as an inevitable adjustment to arrival in India; and later, a masculine competition narrated with pornographic gusto (I found it quite funny, but your mileage might vary 😏). I love Snow and Powell, but they are Victorian aunts by comparison. Raven (born 1927) was precisely a generation younger than Snow and Powell (both born 1905), and his fiction practically defines the differences that 20 years wrought. Of course, his personality had plenty to do with the obvious pleasure he took in the new freedoms (“known for his louche lifestyle as much as for his literary output”). And it’s not just the provocative stuff that you notice, but the DIRECTNESS - where those earlier authors might hint at a character’s awfulness, Raven simply presents it full-throttle. The parents of Fielding Gray in the novel named for him (first in story-chron) are among the most ghastly in fiction, and one wonders why the book doesn’t turn into a murder story.
* As with a number of other novel sequences, including Snow’s, and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series, publication order and story-chron order are different; the authors backfilled when it suited them.
Timothy M. Aluko’s One Man One Matchet (1964) is a very sharp novel of pre-independence Nigerian village politics. Aluko had been a civil administrator, so he knew whereof he spoke. He also was a trained engineer - not the most usual background for a novelist. Aluko purposefully only reveals the year, 1949, well into the book. So there was 11 years yet to go before independence, which I am sure felt like a LONG time in the living of it. The characters in the novel who are most anxious to throw off the British yoke will not be satisfied anytime soon, and that knowledge really affects one’s reading of the second half of the book.
“Matchet”, by the way, is a variant form of “machete”.
I really like the Heinemann African Writers series, and pick up volumes whenever I can.
Emu wrote: "Just started Anne Bronte : The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"I have that on my bookshelf and haven't read it yet!
Finished
The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise [5/5] review really interesting look at 1830s london life and a high profile murder trial of the time.
I just love the unrushed fullness of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, so characteristic of fiction of the era both literary and popular, what people would now call “slow” because they’ve been conditioned by film and television. I’m currently well into the second volume, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. The street attitudes and language are absolutely reflective of the time and place depicted, early 20th Century Chicago, which would seem too obvious to even mention EXCEPT that many reviewers come off as shocked, SHOCKED, that books written in the past are OF that past. I used to argue with people about this, now I try to ignore. * The most heinous stuff in Studs Lonigan belongs to the characters rather than Farrell himself, but even if it did belong to him, I could easily deal with that. Being a historicist and all, I prefer my past full-strength. 🙂
* I find that this is delicate territory in almost all online groups. As a Burkean conservative who does not subscribe to the contemporary progressive agenda, I have to tread carefully - every day there are comments I decide against making, because it would look like picking a fight - but on the other hand, I don’t want to completely muzzle myself either. It’s not always the easiest place to be.
I have started Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy and finished the first of the six stories -
An imaginative woman
. It's a sad reflection of unreasonable human behavior and its predictable and unpredictable consequences . ☆☆Beware Spoilers (view spoiler) ☆☆ Looking forward to reading the second story of this master storyteller .
The Canadian Thomas Murtha (1902-1973) never got a collection published during his lifetime, and his best work was buried in old magazines (some quite obscure), one anthology, and in his manuscript papers. His family spearheaded a re-launch of his writing, Short Stories by Thomas Murtha (1980). It’s a terrific book. These stories of quiet desperation in 1920s/1930s Canada make an unusually unified impression, demonstrating that Murtha truly had a voice of his own. The hitherto unpublished stories are every bit as good as the previously published ones. The introduction (by Murtha’s son) is very informative.
There must be many similar story writers who have not received even this much posthumous justice. Novels at least are almost always BOOKS, with a physical dignity and potential findability. A great short story hidden in an old magazine - that is another level of obscurity.
It is possibly too much to hope that any of Murtha's several unpublished novels might see the light of day, but his stories can now form a permanent part of Canadian literary history.
Finished another Dickens novel, Oliver Twist. This will continue my love affair with his novels.
Patrick wrote: "The Canadian Thomas Murtha (1902-1973) never got a collection published during his lifetime, and his best work was buried in old magazines (some quite obscure), one anthology, and in his manuscript..."I am unfamiliar with this author but would have tried his short stories if the book was not so expensive - Rs 1,475 ( ie $ 17.9 ) .
^ It is available as an ebook on Scribd, which I’ll take this chance to hawk since honestly, the $8.99 I spend for my monthly subscription is the best money I spend every month. So often I want to read something, even a little off the beaten track of popularity, and sure enough, it is available at Scribd.
The classic I am currently reading is "Two Heroines of Plumblington & Other Stories" by A. Trollope
^ Now that is the “farther reaches” of the Trollope oeuvre! Excellent! 🙂
Patrick wrote: "^ It is available as an ebook on Scribd, which I’ll take this chance to hawk since honestly, the $8.99 I spend for my monthly subscription is the best money I spend every month. So often I want to ..."Thank you for the information , Patrick !
Patrick wrote: "^ Now that is the “farther reaches” of the Trollope oeuvre! Excellent! 🙂"Definitely liking it so far :-)
I finished Dorothy Hughes's final novel
The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading
The Burglar by David Goodis
I have finished the second story of the book The Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy -
The Three Strangers
. It was a very enjoyable , emotionally stirring read and I liked the ending too . ☆☆Beware Spoilers (view spoiler) ☆☆ The ambience that the author weaves is truly stupendous and reminiscent of his book The Mayor of Casterbridge . One leaves the present surroundings and goes away to another world - a rustic one with beautiful landscapes .
Another 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ read .
Now onto the third story .
Somehow ended up reading two non-fiction works.
Straws and Prayer-Books by James Branch Cabell , about the nature of writing and 
Better to have Loved by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary , an autobiography in part and finished by her granddaughter.
George Crabbe (1754-1832) is famed for bringing a new realism and down-to-earthness to English poetry, and indeed The Borough (1810), which I am reading just now, embodies those characteristics. The rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter give the book an easy readable “swing”. As usual, the sections about the religious controversies of the day are the least penetrable. * The sections pertaining to the village and the seaside are wonderful, and the latter famously provides the basis for Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.* Matthew Arnold’s famed essay sequence Culture and Anarchy offers similarly difficult passages for anyone but a specialized religious historian.
Emu wrote: "Just started Anne Bronte : The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"There is this idea that Anne Brontë slides into literary history on her sisters' frock-ends (as it were). But if she were not a Brontë, we would have re-discovered her by now. She is not a lesser version of her sisters. Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are excellent novels, and the latter in particular is a daring performance.
AB does a spectacularly convincing job of narrating half of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from the male perspective of Gilbert Markham. This is one of the best cross-gender voicings in all of literature. (Side note: I’m very much in favor of “appropriation”. 🙂 )
Patrick wrote: "AB does a spectacularly convincing job of narrating half of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from the male perspective of Gilbert Markham."She certainly does a much better job with Markham than most of the male authors of her time do with their female characters.
The 'Tenant' is also extraordinary as the most merciless 'Condition of Women' novel of the period.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson one is struck by the fact that he simply could not stay in one place for long. He was constantly on the move at a time when travel was far more arduous than it is today. Some of that travel was to generate material for books, but a lot of it was intended for recuperation (spa towns, places with better weather, and so on).It is hardly a deep insight to suggest that his chances of improving health would have been far better if he had just stayed somewhere, anywhere, instead of frenziedly pursuing well-being like a chimera. Yet this elementary point seems to have been ignored / resisted by both RLS and the people around him. Stevenson was obviously intelligent, a great writer, and heroic in his summoning of what little energy he had; but the need for novelty functioned in him self-destructively, like a substance abuse problem. One waits in the letters for a glimmer of realization: “Maybe I should just calm down.” It doesn’t come.
Patrick wrote: "Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson one is st..."Interesting ! I should get down to reading some of his books - I've not yet read any of his works 😒 .
^ Treasure Island and Kidnapped are both very entertaining books to start with. And of course, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!
Patrick wrote: "^ Treasure Island and Kidnapped are both very entertaining books to start with. And of course, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!"Oh yes , I have read and enjoyed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but didn't remember that it is by RLS . I will definitely try out Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but only in November because I have got some buddy reads lined before that ( Rebecca , Blue Castle and Run Rabbit Run ) . Will be commenting on RLS in this thread .
Thank you, Patrick, for your recommendations .
^ Happy to assist! Treasure Island and Kidnapped are irresistible adventure novels. I read the first as a kid and again since then, was hooked immediately.
Patrick wrote: "Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson one is st..."I did not know he had died so young. I have enjoyed his books.
^ He left Weir of Hermiston unfinished, said to be his most mature work and one that I need to read.
Chris wrote: "Finished another Dickens novel, Oliver Twist. This will continue my love affair with his novels."I am listening to an audio book I bought at a thrift store, Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva. Not sure how much is true but I am enjoying the book. You can find Charles Dickens movies and audio books on the You Tube channel (no charge).
Not all of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires are science-fictional in nature; many are straight adventures, such as The Archipelago on Fire aka Islands on Fire, about the Greek War of Independence, which I am reading in the excellent new translation by Chris Amies. As always with Verne, there is a lot of factuality, specifically geography, and I am really brushing up on my Greek islands, let me tell you. Quiz me on the Cyclades versus the Sporades, I’m ready. Recent decades have been good ones for English-reading Verne fans, with many untranslated works appearing for the first time, and new authoritative translations of the more famous works replacing older abridged, expurgated, or inaccurate ones. There are some of the novels, though, that you have to dig up in the old 19th Century versions because that is still all that exists. But Verne was prolific, we are lucky to now have just about everything in English, one way or another.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea was the first adult novel I ever read, in the summer between second and third grades. I became such a Verne fanatic that my mom special-ordered I.O. Evans’ Jules Verne and His Work for me, since our town library didn’t have it.
Midway through Emilia Pardo Bazán’s brilliant 1886 novel The House of Ulloa, a member of the decayed Galician landed gentry and his new bride visit an even grander and more decrepit family and mansion, and when the bride is offered seating in the alarming-looking drawing room, the worm- and insect-eaten ceremonial chair crumbles to dust beneath her. Now this is the power of fiction in a nutshell. You should have heard my intake of breath. I might add that Spanish fiction of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, so neglected in the English-speaking world, abounds in moments of such force.
I have a bit of a problem now, though. Pardo Bazán wrote a sequel to this novel, Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza), which was translated and published by Bucknell University Press in 2010. There is no paperback or ebook. The list price of the hardcover is $114.00. Amazon has it new for $85.65; the cheapest price in the used book market appears to be $71.70.
Now I ask you, is this kind of punitive pricing any way to treat lovers of literature? I could see Bucknell slapping a $35.00 or even $45.00 price on the hardcover, with a paperback at 2/3 of that, but $114.00 is just ridiculous.
I am eager to read the sequel, but at these prices I simply don’t have access to it, and living outside the US, inter-library loan is not an option. I wish my reading in Spanish were up to tackling the original text, which I could have at a reasonable price, but I’m not quite that advanced.
Ah well, I guess the book just goes on my long “Challenges to Obtain” list.
Patrick, it seems books harder to find and more expensive. I am not sure you would find inter-library a solution. I was looking for any Brazilian classic and couldn't find one in English. My library is getting Boys in the Sand and I ordered a used copy of The Slum. Are there any you recommend since you seem to be familiar with this type of literature? Currently I have a grandson playing ball in Brazil so I need to read something. Currently I am slogging through some Greek tragedies. Just finished The Persians, really liked it. Might read Suppliant Maiden's or the Oresteia next.
^ Absolutely, for inter-library loan to be possible, another library must possess the book, and $114.00 pricing is punitive for them, too. University libraries, the most likely owners, are often restrictive with respect to inter-library loans to public libraries. Brazilian literature is under-rated in the English-reading world, I think, even though there have been many translations. For out-of-copyright older translations, I go to the Internet Archive or HathiTrust; for purchasing hard copies, I scan the listings at Bookfinder.
I am currently reading Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro.
That is wonderful that you have that family connection to Brazil!
I need to get back to the Greek tragedies. If you have never seen the film version of The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Papas, and Geneviève Bujold, I recommend it,
Patrick wrote: "^ Happy to assist! Treasure Island and Kidnapped are irresistible adventure novels. I read the first as a kid and again since then, was hooked immediately."Wow ! Looking forward to good reads in November and December .
Probably by now, anyone who reads my posts will have discerned that I have a soft spot for many books, obscurities and older classics, that probably not many people are drawn to nowadays (and that is putting it mildly). No matter, they have an enthusiast in me. The historian James Bryce (1838-1922) first published his history of the Holy Roman Empire in 1864, and revised it several times over the coming decades. When I taught World History, of course I could not resist using Voltaire’s quip (“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”); it is the sort of thing that students remember. But there is a lot more to the story, and although this Bryce treatment is demanding, it is not at all musty. Catch this tart comment:
“Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. Not only did it not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed; they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text.”
When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern! The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North...
“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”
Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.
* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.
The Beat Generation is one of my “things”. I just love reading about them. But between the Lucien Carr manslaughter situation, and William S. Burroughs killing Joan Vollmer, and Bill Cannastra getting himself decapitated, and Neal Cassady being Neal Cassady, I am thinking that JUST MAYBE it wouldn’t have been such a great idea to hang out with these people. Reading John Clellon Holmes’ Beat roman à clef Go: A Novel just now, really entertaining - from a distance.Holmes was the cautious guy, the observer in the group. Probably for every thousand people who have read Kerouac’s On the Road, one has looked at Go - but in its way it is just as good, and it came out a good five years earlier.
Anyone with a serious interest in literature and literary history should get a total kick out of Richard Altick’s 1950 study The Scholar Adventurers. Immensely informative and entertaining look at the byways of literary scholarship.One of the delights of the Altick volume is a 13-page section of Bibliographic Notes. Any non-fiction book that contains especially good (end or foot)notes, (preferably annotated) bibliography, bibliographic notes or essay, etc, has my everlasting gratitude, because I really will comb through those for other materials I want to follow up on. Books are findable most of the time; journal articles are a bear (American colloquial for “difficult situation”). Fortunately I have JSTOR access through being a Yale alumni, that helps with some articles. I would like to collect old scholarly journals and such, but my financial resources are not unlimited. 😏
I am certain that I will order at least a dozen books mentioned in the Altick notes, not all immediately but eventually. Two other books I have recently found a wealth of follow-up in are Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (which has an impressive annotated Bibliography) and Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West 1848-1880 (killer endnotes).
I finished the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel about the Civil War battle of Gettysburg
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
Rating: 4 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and I started reading my first by James
Washington Square by Henry James
Reading today in The Decameron, Third Day, in the excellent Penguin edition. Man, no one told us in high school how sexual certain classics were - Chaucer, Boccaccio, many Ancient Greek and Latin authors, and that’s not even getting into Asian texts. Decorous literature is very much a 19th Century thing; it’s not characteristic of literary history in general.
I have finished the third tale by Thomas Hardy The withered arm . It's written in an interesting manner , but it evokes a rather morbid interest . There's an unexpected twist towards the end , but the end itself is placid and tame , rather morose . The story is good read , certainly 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ . Progressing to the fourth tale with heightened expectations - what else can you expect from a great story teller like Thomas Hardy ?
I am about half way through David Copperfield. I like how Dickens values good, honest people acting with principles. And the many humourous eccentrics.Just finished Washington Square by Henry James. A definite 5 star for me. It has stayed with me for days.
And now to Lady Windemere's Fan, by Oscar Wilde, by audio book. Performed by a full cast, which should be good.
Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
Books mentioned in this topic
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I love Persuasion! I plan to reread it this Fall. :)