Are You Waiting To Read Any Books Because You Want To Read Another Book As A Sort Of Prerequisite? (10/16/22)

[Marc]

Are there any books you haven’t read yet because you feel you need or want to read a related book first?

Examples:
- I haven’t read Huck Out West by Robert Coover yet because I’d like to reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first to see how closely Coover mimics Twain’s style, characters, and themes.
- I haven’t read VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy because I think I should read the unread book I already have by him (which has nothing to do with the trilogy)
- I haven’t read this one short story/novella because I know it heavily references Wuthering Heights and I have never read that

[Whitney]

On the subject of Bronte's, I want to read Wide Sargasso Sea but haven't since I haven't read Jane Eyre yet.

Gwendolyn Kiste's new book Reluctant Immortals is about Lucy from Dracula and Bertha Mason ("the woman in the attic") from Jane Eyre. So, I may have to actually read Jane Eyre.

[Emmeline]

I want to read The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again but understand it has something to do with The Water Babies so I feel I should read that first.

And I am always wanting to buy things from Daunt Book's website but I already own at least two of their books I haven't read so...

[Marc]

The Kiste book is on my TBR, too, Whitney but I didn't know about the Jane Eyre connection (I had to read Wide Sargasso Sea for school without having read Jane Eyre; despite still being plenty to talk about, it felt like I was missing out on a lot).

Emily, I have the same thing going with Dorothy Publishing --- I want to order their upcoming releases but I still have one book left from my last purchase from them.

[Emmeline]

I feel like a decent movie of Jane Eyre should be background enough. Is that sacrilege?

[Marc]

Ha. I think it's called "time management."

[Whitney]

Emily wrote: "I feel like a decent movie of Jane Eyre should be background enough. Is that sacrilege?"

Ha! Tempting. Hopefully it won't turn out like the Seinfeld episode where George tries to fake it in a bookclub by watching Breakfast at Tiffany's instead of reading it.

Do they still make Cliff Notes?

[Lyn]

I won Mantel's Mirror and the Light in a giveaway, so now need to read the first two books in the trilogy before that one.

[Hugh]

I will be rereading Wide Sargasso Sea for a face to face book club discussion in late November, and this time I want to read Jane Eyre first.

[Maggie]

Neither of them new, but these books should be read back-to-back in either order. Howard's End and On Beauty.

[Marc]

Maggie wrote: "Neither of them new, but these books should be read back-to-back in either order. Howard's End and On Beauty."

Ha! I read On Beauty years ago and never knew it had anything to do with Howard's End, which I still haven't read.

[Marc]

Lyn wrote: "I won Mantel's Mirror and the Light in a giveaway, so now need to read the first two books in the trilogy before that one."

Definitely worth it, Lyn.

[Robert]

I'm like this with films - I won't see the adaptation until I read the original source

This means I've missed out on a lot of movies

[Emmeline]

Robert wrote: "I'm like this with films - I won't see the adaptation until I read the original source

This means I've missed out on a lot of movies"

I'm often like that now, but as a teenager I watched all the PBS classics and decided which ones to read based on that.

[Robert]

Weirdly when I was young, I had no problem with watching the film first, the turning point came with no country for old men, which I couldn’t finish because of the similarities

[Alwynne]

Emily wrote: "I want to read The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again but understand it has something to do with The Water Babies so I feel I should read that first.

And I am always wan..."

The Water Babies is worth trying partly because it's so weird, surprisingly vicious satire alongside outrageous dollops of sentimentality. I've been thinking about rereading it as part of Victober.

[Emmeline]

Victober?! Not one I've heard before!

[Alwynne]

Emily wrote: "Victober?! Not one I've heard before!"

Every October there's a group reading Victorian books, with a set of challenges and a group read, it's based on GR and via various blogs. It's been running for years but only on here for the last two or three:

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

[Whitney]

Robert wrote: "Weirdly when I was young, I had no problem with watching the film first, the turning point came with no country for old men, which I couldn’t finish because of the similarities"

I'm a die-hard film first person, but I had already read No Country before the film came out. You're right, they were almost beat for beat the same. I thought it made a great movie, though, as the book read largely like a screenplay, with little of the convoluted gothic wordiness of most McCarthy (not a criticism, I'm there for the convoluted gothic wordiness).

[Stacia]

A very long answer...

A year or two ago, a friend of mine read all of David Mitchell's books in order. Apparently there are recurring themes, easter eggs, etc. woven throughout the books. So, that's a project I would like to undertake at some point. I've read a couple of his books but now want to go back & read them in publication order.

Another reading project I'd like to do (that may be more reading in tandem) is refresh my Spanish knowledge. I read a few books originally translated from Spanish & now have copies of the Spanish versions, so I want/need to refresh my memory of the stories in English first + in tandem with my Spanish reading. Books like Signs Preceding the End of the World and The Story of My Teeth, which may be more challenging but also quite interesting because of the differences in the original & the translation, per an interview with Luiselli here: https://bookanista.com/valeria-luiselli/ .

"You’ve spoken before about each translation becoming a completely new work. In what ways does the English version differ from the Spanish?"

"I never know exactly because for me as a process it’s chromatic in the way it changes, changes, changes until one is different from the other. Some names changed, I guess. Siddartha, the narrator’s son, is called Ratzinger in Spanish, so it had a more Catholic bias. I like doing that in my novels – I change something relatively small, and watch the chain reaction of changes it produces. Originally, in Faces in the Crowd, the narrators’ husband was a screenwriter and then in English he was an architect. By changing that there was a whole world of things in the novel, a whole net of relations that changed. Even just at a metaphorical level, things that were just loose bits somehow became part of a new network of meanings because of that change."

And, since I'm straying a bit from the original question, I'll add that I have really enjoyed when I read things in "clusters", for example a few times in October, I've concentrated on Dracula or Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, reading the original, then following with variations on the classics. It's always quite cool to see what authors do with an old story to create a new one. I did a similar type of cluster reading starting with Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Related Tales, followed by Le Sphinx de Glaces, At the Mountains of Madness, and Pym.

My reading time has been so upended in the past two years. But this thread is making me realize how much I enjoy reading variations on the same work. (Same for seeing the movie version of books too.) Maybe I'll have to plan a small grouping for my 2023 reading....

I've enjoyed reading everyone's responses. Fun question, Marc!

[Whitney]

Back to Jane Eyre, I found a full cast BBC dramatization. It's very good, and only 2 1/2 hours. I'm totally counting it. One podcast I listen to asks their guests what is a classic book they will likely never read, and Jane Eyre tops the list.