Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion
Archived Chit Chat & All That
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What Are You Reading Now?
Laurie wrote: "Patrick wrote: "One of Ours turned out to be, by a considerable margin, the least satisfactory of Willa Cather’s novels that I’ve read. I had to laugh when I came across one Goodreads review that c..."Sometimes it looks like they've really given it for previous books that missed out, or maybe the body of work, I think. Those are two good examples.
Teri-K wrote: "Laurie wrote: "Patrick wrote: "One of Ours turned out to be, by a considerable margin, the least satisfactory of Willa Cather’s novels that I’ve read. I had to laugh when I came across one Goodread..."Very true. I don’t set much store by prizes, awards, Top Tens, and such. So subjective and political.
In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy offers here one of the most disenchanted and anti-romantic novels predating Modernism – although discussing how is well-nigh impossible without major spoilers.However, one dimension of the anti-romanticism that can be mentioned is the central character Elfride, who is the love focus for four men. Elfride may be pretty, she sure as hell ain’t charming. One reviewer at Goodreads aptly describes her as fickle and vapid, and honestly there can be few characters in all of 19th Century fiction who are THIS annoying.
Hence, although A Pair of Blue Eyes is a fascinating performance, I do have difficulty in seeing WHY all these men are so taken with Elfride. Is prettiness enough? *
* I will admit that as a gay male reader, enchanted love-object descriptions of young women in 19th Century novels often fly right past me unless the women have intelligence and character to match their looks. When they don’t - Elfride here, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Lorna Doone in the eponymous novel - well let’s just say that those passages are not my focus or my road into the story.
I have 3 chapters left in Friends with Monsters by Albany Walker
I am always trying to fill in my gaps of “minor” 19th Century novelists, although I don’t really believe in “minor” - it makes a writer sound dismissible. Two of the books I have going right now by authors I haven’t read before overlap interestingly on the theme of inheritance, which could be a very big deal if a family had a fair amount of money. The Entail, by the Scottish writer and businessman John Galt (1779-1839), shapes up as tragic, with the ghastly character of the monomaniacal Laird, Claud Walkinshaw, dominating the proceedings. Ravenshoe, by Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), is comical / adventurous in tone.Interestingly, both Galt and Kingsley (brother of the more famous Charles) spent time in the colonies, Galt in Canada and Kingsley in Australia (where he set some of his novels). Galt’s son Alexander was one of the key figures in the founding of the Canadian Confederation.
Our local used bookstore was remoeling one day when I stepped in and tried to purchase a couple of very old hardbacks. They didn't know how much to charge me, so they gave them to me for free. The first was Waverley, which I hadn't read in years.I'm now reading The Lighted Heart by Elizabeth Yates. It's a memoir of when she and her husband bought a small farm in rural Massachusetts. He was losing his sight and they wanted to fulfill their life long dream before it was too late. The book is beautifully written and full of nature and rural life.
As a farm girl myself I've always loved books like that. Yates used to be a well-known writer of children's fiction, most notably probably being Amos Fortune, Free Man. This one looks like a keeper and frequent reread for me.
Teri-K wrote: "Our local used bookstore was remoeling one day when I stepped in and tried to purchase a couple of very old hardbacks. They didn't know how much to charge me, so they gave them to me for free. The ..."That was very nice of them! Waverley is a great favorite of mine.
Patrick wrote: "Teri-K wrote: "Our local used bookstore was remoeling one day when I stepped in and tried to purchase a couple of very old hardbacks. They didn't know how much to charge me, so they gave them to me..."I really enjoyed rereading it - it's probably been since the 70s - a long time!
Teri-K wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Teri-K wrote: "Our local used bookstore was remoeling one day when I stepped in and tried to purchase a couple of very old hardbacks. They didn't know how much to charge me, so they..."Yes, I have read it twice too - once at university in the 1970s, and again just a few years ago.
My current Scott title in progress is Guy Mannering (first time). Great book!
Re: A Dance to the Music of Time, an amazingly high percentage of what Nicholas Jenkins reports is discovered by him at parties, especially ones that he wasn’t invited to.Reading Powell underscores my sense of how tight the social scene centered on London was. Everyone knew everyone else, attended the same schools, was related through marriage or distant cousinhood. One practically needed a degree in genealogy in order to converse at those parties.
I will admit that there are moments when I become a little impatient, thinking that some of these social interactions are trivial (well, that’s true) and could not possibly be of interest to anyone outside that immediate circle. The moments pass, but I am still puzzled as to the “big picture”.
C.P. Snow and Simon Raven in their romans fleuves include more thematic material that is obviously NON-trivial and connected with a broader world of social and political developments. Powell up through the fourth volume of Dance only does this glancingly, almost so you might not even notice.
BOTDs (Born on this Dates) cheer me up. I like thinking about writers and other cultural figures who have made real contributions, it’s a nice thing, and “nice” is a quality that I have come to increasingly value, like a maiden aunt in a Barbara Pym novel. Nice, jolly, pleasant, agreeable, moderate (Aristotle!), those are all good words. Let me break out the tea set in my little cottage while I pat the dog’s head…Anyway, today, October 16, is the shared birthday of three writers whose high status is not at all contested, two of them Nobel laureates: Günter Grass, Eugene O’Neill, and Oscar Wilde. I will think of them today and it will be cheering for sure.
Patrick wrote: "BOTDs (Born on this Dates) cheer me up. I like thinking about writers and other cultural figures who have made real contributions, it’s a nice thing, and “nice” is a quality that I have come to inc..."I find Wilde's plays are especially good when I'm in the mood for "nice" as well as "clever". There's a reason they get pulled off my shelf often! Thanks for sharing.
Teri-K wrote: "Patrick wrote: "BOTDs (Born on this Dates) cheer me up. I like thinking about writers and other cultural figures who have made real contributions, it’s a nice thing, and “nice” is a quality that I ..."I read a volume of all the major plays a few years back, and it was dazzling.
Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering (1924) is a mite difficult to classify. As the subtitle indicates, it is partly about ambling and meandering, both physically through the streets of London, and mentally wherever Machen’s mind takes him. It is sometimes put forward as a pioneering text of psychogeography. It has elements of memoir. It overlaps a little in its approach with two other London books that I like very much - H.V. Morton’s Ghosts of London (1939) (semi-forgotten bits of history tucked away in odd corners) and Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907) (first-hand account of the back-street literary life). It has a proto-post-modernist side, since Machen writes at length about the writing of this very book, and the difficulties involved in deciding what it is going to be, and in executing the plan if there ever is a plan. In any case, it is a short book, only 150 pages, and very much of a fun, refreshing, and unusual read.
Thomas Love Peacock (BOTD 1785-1866) is one of the 19th Century authors that I have been meaning to get to for EONS. I recently finished Nightmare Abbey, which like most of his conversation-novels is quite short, and am almost done with Crotchet Castle. I was immediately reminded of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, which preceded Peacock and, then unpublished, can’t have been an influence. But there is certainly an affinity. The dialogue in such Shaw plays as Heartbreak House has a somewhat Peacockian flavor, too.
Peacock’s writings are an instance where you really need the notes to penetrate a lot of the references. His characters are often barely disguised versions of notable figures such as Coleridge; he has a lot of fun with them.
Re-reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen and also re-reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Rora wrote: "Re-reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen and also re-reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs"Mansfield Park is my favorite Austen, most definitely.
Wayne wrote: "Well it seems like July is unofficially Richard Matheson month! I just read Hell House. Great Haunted Mansion story that has a setup that is almost identical to The Hau..."I read A Head Full of Ghosts and was disappointed. I really expected horror and it read more like a psychological thriller.
Halfway through Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, and I must say, it has really grown on me. The biggest reason I am finding it so companionable is that Edwin Clayhanger is likable, very likable, unlike a LOT of protagonists in a LOT of novels I have been reading lately. One roots for Edwin. His dynamic with his frustrating father Darius is reminiscent of similar situations in other late Victorian / Edwardian novels (The Way of All Flesh) and memoirs (Father and Son). The dominant model of fatherhood at the time was obviously the pits; one wonders how anyone made it to adulthood unscathed. But Edwin, although he doesn’t win every battle, appears to be winning the war, and good for him.
I'm reading short stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russian. My edition (with no photo on GR) Рассказы. Малое собрание сочинений, том 3. has his most most famous novella 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch' and short story 'Matryona's Place'
Finally finished
Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. A thousand pages, not sure who i'd recommend it to but i quite enjoyed it. [4/5]Edit: Reviewt
Wreade1872 wrote: "Finally finished Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. A thousand pages, not sure who i'd recommend it to but i quite enjoyed it. [4/5]"I have been hoping to get to this for a long time. Maybe soon.
Patrick wrote: "Wreade1872 wrote: "Finally finished Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. A thousand pages, not sure who i'd recommend it to but i quite enj..."If you have an ereader the pdf is available free from the toronto library Merril collection https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/advance...
Wreade1872 wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Wreade1872 wrote: "Finally finished Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. A thousand pages, not sure who i'd recommend it to..."Thanks! I’ll take a look.
George Crabbe (1754-1832) is famed for bringing a new realism and down-to-earthness to English poetry, on good display in The Borough (1810). 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.
I loved Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I am halfway through No More Parades, the second novel in the Parade’s End tetralogy, and of course am not in a position to make any full assessment. It is a landmark and I am happy to be reading it. However, I do have some interim comments that may come off as negative.As a High Modernist, Ford may be compared to Dorothy Richardson. Their writing lacks the surface appeal of a Joyce or Woolf, who seem practically glittering and pop-cultural by comparison. Ford and Richardson can also frustrate the casual reader by spending 25 pages on a seeming triviality and then have something obviously major occur between chapters, to emerge only through glancing references later.
Those who are expecting Parade’s End to be a “melodramatic war novel”: Not. You’ll have to get your war novel elsewhere. The war is just context here.
I may be in a minority, but I do not think that Christopher Tietjens (“the last Tory”) is an attractive protagonist, what with his excessively high self-regard and his inability to get out of his own head. He lacks empathy for others and his judgments of them are meaningless. He has no sense of humor whatsoever. (Olivia Manning’s Guy Pringle is his temperamental successor, although their politics differ.)
Tietjens’ ghastly wife Sylvia is much worse even. What brought this couple together in the first place is not immediately apparent to say the least. 🤔
So I’m making it sound pretty bad, but really this series is for the committed “literary” reader, and once that is accepted, it can start to yield what it has to yield. * At the 37.5% mark, I am very interested to see where Ford takes things.
* Parade’s End had the mixed benefit, like Manning’s Fortunes of War and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, of becoming a BBC mini-series. I will wager that 75% or more of those who bought the Ford and Scott books as a result of their viewing didn’t get very far. Manning undoubtedly fared better because her novels are very readable and direct in their approach.
I have been meaning to read Maria Edgeworth for years now, and really don’t know what took me so long, since Castle Rackrent (1800) is quite short and you can knock it off in a few hours. Anyway, I finally did read it and was quite entertained; I especially liked the fact that it is NOT about a romance, but about a family and a house, and how they run out of money, which is a theme that 19th Century writers became uncomfortable with and tended to avoid. Now on to the unfortunately titled Ennui, also included in the Penguin volume I picked up.
Ennui - that sounds like a fascinating story! lolI just started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. I've not read this one before, but I've loved his Robin Hood since I was young, and have read some of his other works.
His fake "medieval" language won't be to everyone's taste, but I'm enjoying the story of a young boy raised in a monastery and then taken back to live with his robber baron father. How will Otto cope with this change? I'll find out soon as it's not a long book.
Teri-K wrote: "Ennui - that sounds like a fascinating story! lolI just started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. I've not read this one before, but I've loved his Robin Hood since I was young, and have re..."
I haven’t read Pyle since I was a kid, and I should. 🙂
Compton Mackenzie’s huge Bildungsroman Sinister Street (1913-14) is often compared to his good friend Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), and indeed, the two authors were working on their tomes in the same time-frame; I wonder if they compared notes? The two novels share the qualities of absolute vividness and unhurriedness; if you become impatient easily, I would suggest you look elsewhere. Young Michael and Stella Fane grow so slowly, you might as well be marking the inches on your own door-frame. They are the illegitimate children of a society lady, although they aren’t informed of their birth circumstances for a long while.I am just arriving at Michael’s Oxford years now. It is striking how many intellectual enthusiasms he passes through during his teen years - superficially, to be sure, but at least he HAS them; his mind is developing richly.
As long as this book is (800+ pages in my old Penguin edition), when you get to the end, you are not done; there are three sequels! The entire series is in the 2,000-page range.
Patrick wrote: "Teri-K wrote: "Ennui - that sounds like a fascinating story! lolI just started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. I've not read this one before, but I've loved his Robin Hood since I was you..."
I'm one of those readers who enjoys going back to childhood favorites. I reread a lot, anyway. And a new book by an old favorite writer can be a lot of fun.
Teri-K wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Teri-K wrote: "Ennui - that sounds like a fascinating story! lolI just started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. I've not read this one before, but I've loved his Robin Hood..."
The same here. I’m currently reading Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo.
Fear the Flames by Olivia Rose Darling. I am loving it. I'm about halfway through and I'm excited to see what happens.
Just started the 1980 fantasy/ sci-fi Lord Valentine's Castle
by Robert Silverberg. I'm enjoying it so far.
Continuing with A Cidade de Deus, Vol III: Livros XVI a XXII.I've already finished with Entrevistas 1958-1978.
Cape Cod displays Thoreau in a genial mode, quite down-to-earth, less windy-philosophical than, say, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The fact that he was writing at least some of the chapters for magazine publication possibly reined in his more high-flown tendencies; in any case, this is a really charming and companionable account of Thoreau’s walking tour on the Cape.[I’m a little under the weather with a mild flu, hence my reduced posting today. Not that anyone probably minds! 🙂 ]
Franky wrote: "Just started the 1980 fantasy/ sci-fi Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg. I'm enjoying it so far."I enjoyed reading that one too Franky
Patrick wrote: "I’m a little under the weather with a mild flu, hence my reduced posting today. Not that anyone probably minds! 🙂 ]."
Hope you feel better soon Patrick
Rora wrote: "Patrick wrote: "I’m a little under the weather with a mild flu, hence my reduced posting today. Not that anyone probably minds! 🙂 ]."
Hope you feel better soon Patrick"
Thank you! Probably a couple days more.
Steven Purvis / Jeff Hulbert, Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone - One key takeaway here is that if hadn’t been Burgess et al, it could easily have been others, because everything in Britain was based on the old boys’ / Oxbridge network, with minimal background checking, and this made the entire system very porous indeed. This despite the fact in Burgess’s case that he obviously carried on in a “quite extraordinarily dissolute and indiscreet” manner, dropping red flags in his path like confetti.
Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil interested me as a political novel, but like the other of his that I have read (his first, Vivian Gray, quite entertaining), it seems uncertain what it wants to be; the political, satirical, religious, gritty-realistic, and uplifting elements mix very uneasily. Supposedly they are all linked through the thesis of “The Two Nations”, the rich and the poor, but not too effectively in my view.Certainly however there is plenty of fascinating material for those well-versed in the era, and I do recommend the novel on that basis to readers of that type. My bigger problem is actually the titular heroine, who never seemed real or interesting to me. I try to be careful not to back-impose our gender politics on a different time, but drippy is drippy. I have the same problem with Lorna Doone, a novel that I like very much except for Lorna herself, oy vey. Too pretty and “perfect”. With Sybil, the descriptive word that seems to come up is “angelic”, a type of characterization that I dislike, but from the point of view of technique she is just way too obviously symbolic (purity, ennobled poverty, etc).
I won’t get into the novel’s resolution except to say that it is frightfully convenient and represents Disraeli trying to have his situation (things are horrible out there, true enough) and deny it too (but look at my happy ending!). Dickens was better at this.
A mixed bag altogether.
I started reading Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure recently.
Previously I was only familiar with a few film adaptations of Hardy's books, but since this one of my boyfriend's favorite authors and books I thought it was time I finally read it.I haven't gotten too far yet but I did read a few spoilers (due to being a teacher and trying to decide how much to share about the book with my students) and I got the picture that that the story is going to become quite dark and dire.
I just saw that there is a new miniseries for One Hundred Years of Solitude out, and since I only read a few chapters of that years ago, I am hoping that if I keep moving through Jude I can then move on 100 Years next.
I'm hoping there is enough humor and magical realism to make a nice change.I also finished reading Paradise Lost
recently. I didn't write a review because I think parts of my reading experience were very personal, as I was raised in and practiced fervently Evangelical Christianity for the first 25-ish years of my life, and then decided I was more at peace after putting that belief system on the shelf. The first half of the book was mostly interesting, though of course full of allusions and language that I had to wade through, but I enjoyed the imagery and concept of establishing a cosmic stage for the characters and events. I appreciated the flair and caprice given to Satan's character, and some humorous moments showing his less than stately side. Another interesting and humorous part is when Adam and Eve host Raphael for tea, and Adam asks him to explain some of the physical aspects of living as an angel. When and after the fall itself was described, I couldn't turn off my critical thinking or maybe just complaints about how the consequences did not seem fair or make sense, and did not "justify the ways of God to man." I think after reading I have a lot of the same questions I had before reading: Did Milton have qualms about taking a story from a sacred text and embellishing it or adding to it? Was he mainly trying to tell a good story with an epic sense of drama, or was he also trying to focus on a particular theological perspective or idea? Or was he more interested in reinforcing themes related to the political climate of his day?
And how did people receive this text at the time he wrote it, especially devout Christians? At some point, I will look for some resources on those subject areas. I don't think I am currently interested in reading the sequel, but I do think I would like to read Dante's Inferno soon.
Very interesting comments about Paradise Lost! I try to read texts like Paradise Lost, and The Divine Comedy, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, as if they did NOT connect to anything in my childhood, as if they were the Iliad or the Ramayana, embodying a completely foreign and unfamiliar belief system. I need that critical distance. In fact, I would go so far as to say that since I don’t respond positively to ANY religious belief system, including supposedly benign ones such as Buddhism and indigenous religions, I have some problem with belief system literature overall. The magnitude of the problem varies with the work, of course.
The Inferno is an interesting case. I agree with the received view that it is the strongest, most vivid section of The Divine Comedy, but that is partly because the theology is so decidedly unattractive - the glee that Dante takes in devising suitably baroque punishments for sinners and people he dislikes is off-putting. I took it as a sort of Seventies horror movie.
Purgatorio and Paradiso are more uplifting, of course, but the theology becomes so increasingly convoluted that I was spending most of my time in the OUP notes.
Interesting discussion on Paradise Lost. I've read it as a strong believer and then not, and it definitely has plenty to think about from both perspectives. I'll confess I prefer his "regular" poetry.I'm reading A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. Only my second Zelazny, and not my usual type of book, I'm loving it. It's quirky and clever and I'm having a blast trying to figure out what's going on and identifying all the mysterious characters in the story. I had to request it through ILL, but it was worth the wait - and perfect timing, too!
Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
Books mentioned in this topic
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (other topics)The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (other topics)
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (other topics)
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (other topics)
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Eça de Queirós (other topics)Eça de Queirós (other topics)
M.P. Shiel (other topics)
Anthony Trollope (other topics)
Frank Herbert (other topics)
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I agree that One of Ours is disappointing in relation to her Great Plains trilogy and some others. I was surprised it was her Pulitzer winner. It is similar to Louise Erdrich's win for a book that is not even close to her best work.