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Currently reading anything by a British writer?
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Ann
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Mar 30, 2023 04:14PM
Wilkie Collins sounds interesting! I’ve seen one television adaptation of The Moonstone and now I’m curious to check out the book. ☺️💞
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Ann wrote: "Wilkie Collins sounds interesting! I’ve seen one television adaptation of The Moonstone and now I’m curious to check out the book. ☺️💞"I'd love to see a television adaptation of this book! Reading a novel always whets my appetite to see the adaptation(s), and vice versa. :-)
Currently re-reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. I had heard of Gaskell before but never read any of her work until 2020. I’m consistently impressed with her style, her fearless attitude in tackling painful and often controversial topics.
I've just added
The Complete Poetry by John Milton to my "currently reading" shelf, but that's a bit misleading. The edition of his collected poetry that I'm actually reading from is the one edited by James Holly Hanford (Ronald Press, 1953); and besides Handford's introductory matter, I only plan to read Paradise Lost. But once I finish that, I will have read Milton's entire poetic corpus (spread over a 56-year period).
When I read Paradise Lost a couple of years ago I was amazed at just how many book titles were part of the poem. It's an amazing work of poetry.
Rosemarie wrote: "When I read Paradise Lost a couple of years ago I was amazed at just how many book titles were part of the poem. It's an amazing work of poetry."It's been regarded as a must-read classic in the English-speaking world for a long time, so it's influenced a LOT of later writers.
I read too many books “at once”, and always quite a few by British writers are in the mix. Here are a few current ones, although this is not comprehensive:Josephine Bell, The Port of London Murders
Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger
R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone
George Borrow, Lavengro
Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not…
Algernon Gissing, The Keys of the House
James Hilton, Random Harvest
Henry Kingsley, Ravenshoe
Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street
Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune
John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury
John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
John Wain, Hurry on Down
H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay
Good variety, Patrick. I've read a number of them over the course of many years.
Yes, I’m enjoying all of them. But then I like everything; I’m not a fussy reader. 🙂
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.
I've only read one of Lawrence's novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had a lot more depth than I expected. I've read more of his non-fiction, which I really enjoyed and a fair number of short stories.
His book on American literature is REALLY interesting,
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.
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).
That was a novel, the Manning book, I just couldn't finish, Patrick. Exactly for the reasons you mentioned.I'm a huge Hardy fan!
^ That is so interesting! I am liking it very much, but there is no doubt that reading chapter after chapter of one character’s exasperation with another, exasperating character could be…exasperating. 🙂 I like the Bucharest setting / atmosphere.
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.
Have you read anything else by Boswell?
Part of the Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; Now First Published from the Original Manuscript;...with Preface and Notes, which I also need to go back to, and I have my eye on the Journals too.
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.
For those who may not be familiar with the term "roman-fleuve," Google defines it as "a novel featuring the leisurely description of the lives of closely related people" or "a sequence of related, self-contained novels." (The second definition is the one that's intended here.)
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.
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.
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.”
The excellent Goodreads group Works of Thomas Hardy (https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... ) often features discussions of individual poems by Hardy. I've not read many of these; but the comments there whetted my interest, so I've begun intermittently reading (when I'm between other books)
The Complete Poems of the author. (In this edition, the text itself has 954 pages; so this will definitely be a long read!)
Author members, please note that you can post comments promoting your own books in this folder: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group... , as per our group's rules. However, self-promotional comments made in other folders will be deleted.
A couple of days ago (although I didn't get around to posting about it until now), I started reading the text of the play
A Man for All Seasons (1960), by British playwright Robert Bolt. I've seen the 1988 movie production starring Charlton Heston, and have the impression that it's more faithful to Bolt's original than the better known 1966 movie version starring Paul Scofield (which I haven't seen, but have some information about). So I wanted to check out my impression by going back to the source! :-)
For October,
The Ghosts (1969) by Antonia Barber is a common read in another group; I'm joining in, and it worked out best for me to start a day early. It was originally recommended to me by my library colleague Paula Beasley (who has kindly loaned me her copy) and was actually written for younger readers; but that's not necessarily any problem for me. :-) (Some of my most enjoyable and rewarding reads have been children's or YA books!)
The Lady of the Shroud by Bram Stoker is a long-standing "loose end" in my reading; I started reading it as a kid, but didn't get to finish it at the time (long story!). I always intended to eventually get back to someday, but have never gotten around to it until now. But an unexpected window of opportunity having opened up in my reading schedule, I've finally seized on the opportunity to start it again. (I know a bit more about it from secondary sources than I did back then, but I'm still interested!)
With the end of the year approaching, I wanted to start a fairly quick read; so I went with one that's been on my to-read shelf for a long time, the nonfiction book
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton (180 p.). (However, I've already discovered that due to the author's style, the small print, and the complexity of the thought, it's not really likely to be a quick read after all. I'm in it for the long haul, though!)
The edition of The Everlasting Man that I started reading last month proved to be so defective (from incompetent digital scanning) that I bailed on it. But I still want to read the book in an accurately printed edition!Right now, while I'm waiting to start a buddy read in another group on Jan 1, I'm dipping into
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (1920), a collection of traditional Irish legends retold by James Stephens. This one is on my "being read intermittently" shelf.
Folk tales are fun, for reading intermittently.
Rosemarie wrote: "Folk tales are fun, for reading intermittently."True; and I've always had an interest in folklore.
Back in 2020, I first encountered Shiela Crerar, the heroine of a short story cycle by British author Ella M. Scrymsour (whose full name was Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol) published in 1920, through the story "The Werewolf of Rannoch."
The Adventures of Shiela Crerar, Psychic Detective collects all six of the stories; and having gotten a copy for Christmas, I was able to start reading it yesterday!
Werner wrote: "With the end of the year approaching, I wanted to start a fairly quick read; so I went with one that's been on my to-read shelf for a long time, the nonfiction book [bookcover:The Everlasting Man|3..."I go for quick reads at the end of the year too - but for a different reason; I am usually trying to catch up with my 15 year old Granddaughter on how many I have read in the year - pathetic I know! Especially as she always wins whatever I do!
The Peppered Moth by Dame Margaret Drabble. I am only 35 pages in but I am already really enjoying this book. It has all the makings of a good old fashioned "novel". This has come as a pleasant surprise as before this one I selected "Jerusalem The Golden" witten by the same author, but 20 years earlier, and I didn't even get 35 pages in before deciding to consign it to the pile to be returned to the Oxfam bookshop! I have two others by her and they scored 7 & 8 /10.
I tried reading one of Drabble's books years ago and abandoned it quickly. Maybe I should give her another try. I have no idea what the book was called.
The book I just finished,
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, was written by the Irish author James Stephens. I should have mentioned this book here when I started it, since Ireland is definitely part of the British Isles!
A few years ago, my friend Andrew M. Seddon, finding that he had gotten an extra copy of the 2009 reprint edition of
Weird Stories (1882) by Victorian ghost-story writer Charlotte Riddell, kindly passed it on to me. I've finally begun dipping into it while I wait for a couple of review books I'm expecting by mail (so, for now, it's on my "being read intermittently" shelf).
I'm joining in our group read of
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré (and have started a little early).
I'm joining in another group's read of
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Originally, I'd expected to start it later, since Barb and I had intended to be out of town for a few days. But our plans are up in the air now, and our departure has been at least delayed (if we go at all). So I've gone ahead and started on the read. It's actually a reread for me; but the first time was decades ago, so I'm very much looking forward to the refresher!
Right now, I'm taking part in another group's common read of
The Jewel of Seven Stars (1904) by Bram Stoker. With this novel, as he did on a larger scale with Dracula, Stoker took an idea that had been written about before (in this case, reanimated Egyptian mummies) and gave it a definitive literary treatment which became the dominant influence for all of the subsequent portrayals in drama and fiction.
I recently finished two novels with deeply frustrating / infuriatingly obtuse male protagonists, Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed and Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune (the first in her Fortunes of War series, about World War II in the Balkans and the Levant).Wharton’s Vance Weston is supposed to be a brilliant young novelist, but it is difficult to credit that based on his thoughts (and we basically spend 500 pages in his POV). As for his actions, well, he doesn’t make a single good decision in the entire book, not one.
I am pre-committed to continue Vance’s adventures in the sequel, The Gods Arrive, but the guy drives me crazy. The same for Manning’s Guy Pringle, one of those individuals who needs a sycophantic audience and collects people to that end.
I am as yet undecided whether Guy Pringle is simply obtuse, or something much worse than that. The Great Fortune is mainly told from his frustrated wife Harriet’s POV.
Both the Manning and Wharton novels are very expressive on the theme of “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Guy and Harriet Pringle barely knew each other; the same for Vance Weston and his insipid wife Laura Lou. The resulting pictures are not pretty.
I started reading Manning's first book in the Levant trilogy and gave up on it very quickly, for the very reasons you mentioned-The Pringles.
^ I sympathize! I am in for the long haul, well into the second volume of the Balkan Trilogy at the moment, and enjoying it, even though the Pringles ARE maddening. Him, I can’t redeem - his concern for everyone BUT his wife speaks for itself. Her, if it were someone in real life, I simply can’t see why she would stay in the relationship. There seems to be nothing positive in it for her.
Just finished the first of six volumes of George Bernard Shaw’s Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead, 1963), including Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Man of Destiny, and Buoyant Billions. One’s chances of seeing even Shaw’s most famous plays in adequate stage productions these days is slight. Heartbreak House, for example, requires 10 top-notch actors: Not cheap or easy to assemble.
So reading is the way to go, but even among confirmed readers of the classics, plays (outside of Shakespeare) don’t seem to get the attention they merit. It is too bad. Shaw is hardly just dialogue - his stage directions are exquisite and enable one to readily visualize a production.
The same thought occurs to me as I read each of these Shaw plays, and indeed when I read almost ANY classic play: Where would the audience for this be found today? Because the demands on the audience are pretty intense: A rapt level of attention, an intense sensitivity to verbal nuance, a high level of cultural literacy and sophistication, the willingness to work for the art instead of just letting it wash over you.
Fans of British Writers
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