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Currently reading anything by a British writer?
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Rosemarie
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Oct 06, 2024 11:19AM
I enjoy reading plays as well, Patrick.
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^ Glad to hear it! There is such a wealth of material. I remember as a teen that I read all of Ibsen’s major plays during a three-day sick-at-home, and wow, it really expanded my literary world.
I enjoy Oscar Wilde's plays as well. I've seen a number of them on stage.
^ I’ve read most of the major Wilde plays, except for the first two: Vera, or The Nihilists; and The Duchess of Padua. I don’t have much experience with his plays in the theater - maybe The Importance of Being Earnest, once many years ago. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time recently, and I was very impressed.
Have you read any of Wilde's fairy tales or essays?
I have a volume of the short fiction, including the fairy tales, but have not tackled it yet. I have not looked at the essays. Ellmann’s biography would also be of great interest! Wilde is a fascinating figure.
I recommend his essays, Patrick. They're entertaining.
Patrick wrote: "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...."American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) has always enjoyed a lot of critical attention, which started in her own lifetime; but according to Wikipedia her British fellow writer Manning, born more than 40 years later, has never been as prominent, and what recognition she has gotten, sadly for her, came mostly after her death in 1980. I've read some of the former's short stories, but I'd never heard of Manning (at least not that I can remember) until I read your post, Patrick.
Personally, I'll admit that I don't read plays much (though I do sometimes) and generally feel that they're better experienced the way they were intended to be, by watching a performance. (But that can be in movie or TV format, as well as live, and most of my viewing experiences have been on-screen.) However, I'd be the first to admit that with some plays, the stage directions add a dimension of meaning which makes the written form rewarding reading even if you've already seen a performance.
The only Shaw play I've ever read is Augustus Does His Bit (1917), which I read as background reading for teaching British Literature back when Barb and I were homeschooling our girls. (Even in just written format, it's still laugh-aloud funny in places!) But I've watched the 1967 movie production of his much more serious Saint Joan starring Genevieve Bujold (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062226/ ) and highly recommend it!
The Picture of Dorian Gray got five stars from me! So far, the only play by Wilde that I've read is Salome (also read as background for teaching British Literature), and that's been my only other experience of his work; I've never seen any of the plays performed. I remember appreciating that one; but my read was well over 20 years ago, and I'd need to reread it before I try to review it.
^ Excellent thoughts, thank you! Manning is well worth a look; despite my reservations about Guy Pringle as a person, that is if I knew him in real life, he is exceptionally well PORTRAYED. I wouldn’t feel irked by him otherwise. 😏I certainly agree that experiencing great plays on the stage is highly desirable, and can open up new dimensions. I read Maxim Gorky’s Enemies before seeing a superb production of it in San Francisco, and the performance clarified many aspects of the play and extended my understanding of it.
Unfortunately, so many fine plays will never be performed near one, or not adequately.
Patrick wrote: "Unfortunately, so many fine plays will never be performed near one, or not adequately."Alas, so very true!
Although I very much enjoy reading Golden Age mysteries, I am hopeless at spotting clues and honestly don’t even really care about solving the mystery, or about the rules of “fair play” (shocking, I know 😏 ). I am there for the characterization, the social milieu, the atmosphere, maybe the prose if I’m lucky. Arthur Rees’ The Shrieking Pit, published at the end of World War I, is an excellent example, set in seaside Norfolk, partly at a creepy inn. Ambience to burn, and well-written too. It also fits very well into my project of reading both non-fiction and fiction about all the English counties.
I'm hopeless at spotting clues too, Patrick.I enjoy the British Crime Classics books, from the library.
Rosemarie wrote: "I'm hopeless at spotting clues too, Patrick.I enjoy the British Crime Classics books, from the library."
That is a GREAT series!
I love the fact that there is a subset of Golden Age mystery writers known as the “Humdrums”, even if Julian Symons didn’t mean it to be complimentary when he coined the tag. Critic Curtis Evans and a number of bloggers have championed these authors, who indeed can be rather restful and soothing in their approach, and what’s wrong with that? They are also very readable and professional. One of the Humdrums is J.S. Fletcher (1863-1935), whom I have not read before, so last night I started The Charing Cross Mystery (1923), and I will report back. It gets off to a good start with an unexpected death on a train; trains are always aces in my book.
Two authors I've discovered fairly recently are Cyril Hare and Basil Thomson. Then there's the series by Edmund Crispin, which have lots of humour and plays on words as well.
Rosemarie wrote: "Two authors I've discovered fairly recently are Cyril Hare and Basil Thomson. Then there's the series by Edmund Crispin, which have lots of humour a..."
All those are need-to-reads for me.
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.
That book has a real cliff-hanger scene-literally.
I don’t know if this is the right group for this question, but I don’t know of any other😊:I really like to find contemporary British writers who describe British society at the time of Brexit and after. They don’t have to specifically deal with Brexit, but I’d like to read more about the “mood” of the country as well as living conditions. So far I’ve read the likes of Jonathan Coe and Ali Smith.
Could anyone recommend any?
Tina
Rosemarie wrote: "That book has a real cliff-hanger scene-literally."Truly! That cliff is a memorable and recurring location.
Starting this past Saturday, I'm taking part in another group's common read of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. (This is a new read for me; it's my ambition to eventually read all of Dickens' novels, and I have quite a few to go!) I'm late in joining in; the read officially started on Sept. 22. But the group as a whole is reading very slowly, only a chapter a day (to facilitate deep discussion, and emulate the serial experience of the first readers), so I'm confident of my ability to catch up.
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.
I'm sure you'll catch up, Werner. It's an entertaining book.Right now I'm reading The Man Who Knew Too Much by G.K. Chesterton. I'm enjoying it so far.
Reading "minor" novelists is one of my likes as well, Patrick.
Rosemarie wrote: "Reading "minor" novelists is one of my likes as well, Patrick."Neglected books speak to me!
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.
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.
The only bit of Peacock's work that I've ever read is his short story "The Capture of Mr. Chainmail," which appears in Great English Short Stories (1930), but it was one of my favorites there. I made the comment in my review of the collection (and so far, I seem to be the only person on Goodreads who's ever reviewed it!) that this story is "surprisingly and refreshingly free of the typical wealth-worship and class snobbery of that day."
Werner wrote: "The only bit of Peacock's work that I've ever read is his short story "The Capture of Mr. Chainmail," which appears in Great English Short Stories (1930), but it was one of my favori..."Very interesting, Werner! Peacock was quite a fellow. I suppose his works would appeal most to those who are pretty intense about literature and cultural history - the sort of cognoscenti that he himself wrote about and gently satirized.
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've read The Clayhanger trilogy and my favourite is the first book, mainly due to Edwin.
Rosemarie wrote: "I've read The Clayhanger trilogy and my favourite is the first book, mainly due to Edwin."I plan to read the whole thing. At this current moment in my reading life, I am so happy to have found a relatable character. 🙂
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 liked The Good Soldier, not to be confused with The Return of the Soldier, in which I really did not like the main female character!
Rosemarie wrote: "I liked The Good Soldier, not to be confused with The Return of the Soldier, in which I really did not like the main female character!"The Good Soldier is a very cunning novel. Talk about your unreliable narrators!
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.
With the aid of the Goodreads group What's the Name of That Book??? (https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... ), after a quest lasting several years, I recently tracked down a story collection I read as a kid,
Case for Mr. Fortune, by Golden Age English mystery writer H.C. Bailey, featuring his series character Reggie Fortune. I started rereading it yesterday.
Thanks, Rosemarie! (I'm liking it so far. :-) )
Currently reading a bit of Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene, a controversial reading for some no doubt, but interesting nevertheless.
However I'm curious if anyone here has read Stefan Zweig's books? (I know he acquired British nationality at some point) I'd like to know your favorite titles to give this author a try.
However I'm curious if anyone here has read Stefan Zweig's books? (I know he acquired British nationality at some point) I'd like to know your favorite titles to give this author a try.
Rosemarie wrote: "I was very impressed by Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game."
Thanks for the recommendation Rosemarie. I checked out the summary and it sounds interesting. I'll definitely give this book a chance.
Thanks for the recommendation Rosemarie. I checked out the summary and it sounds interesting. I'll definitely give this book a chance.
Back in the late summer of 2023, I started reading
The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy intermittently, in snatches between other books. Given that the book has 947 poems, and by today my intermittent reading had gotten me through just 234 of them in over 17 months, that wasn't working too well. So although it will be a gargantuan read, as of today I've started reading the rest of it straight through.
I really like Hardy's poetry, Werner. Happy reading!
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