What are you reading now?

[DracoM]

Just finished a second reading of 'Waiting for the Barbarians' by JM Coetzee. Read it years ago, but coming back to it the intensity, the anger, the subtlety of asking the central question 'who ARE the barbarians?' raised in all manner of careful and ingenious ways.

[Dave2002]

Reading “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling, which was a 99p Kindle deal a few days ago. This is a really good and thought provoking book, though the price has gone up a bit since I bought it. Very highly recommended. If you can’t afford to buy it now I suspect it’ll come round again. Maybe make sure your local library has a copy too, so that others might benefit.

It should really challenge your pre-conceptions, as it has with mine, though I did very slightly better than the chimpanzees on some of the tests.

Look around and you can find Hans on YouTube, and you may also find this site of interest - https://www.gapminder.org/

Reading, however, seems quicker to me, and it’s easy to reflect on ideas in breaks between reading sessions, and also to review previously read material and read passages again.

[Pulcinella]

I hope that the Booker shortlist books are worth slogging through this year.
I've just ordered the job lot (£50, Book People) after a couple of years of not bothering, as they had not sounded so appealing.
Book People seem to be adhering to the Atwood publication date, unlike Amazon.

[LMcD]

Currently reading 'Auntie's War', by Ed Stourton.

[MrGongGong]

This (big up your mates BUT both are wonderful )

https://artdotearth.org/guidebook-for-an-armchair-pilgrimage/

and this

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/humming-9781501324628/

[un barbu]

Reading 'Our Mutual Friend' once more with great pleasure and admiration. My recent move demanded major downsizing and 1600 of my 2000 books were sold off. This was the one Dickens novel I chose to keep, largely because of the wonderfully achieved settings and the presence at almost all times of the Thames, practically a character in its own right. In the bicentenary year I wrote introductions to several of the novels for the English Association's website; this was not one of them and I wish now that it had been.

[vinteuil]

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'Our Mutual Friend' remains one of the very few Dickens works I still find readable. I'm sure Proust based Saniette on Twemlow.

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[un barbu]

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'Our Mutual Friend' remains one of the very few Dickens works I still find readable. I'm sure Proust based Saniette on Twemlow.

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Yes, he is very much an extra extendable, and expendable, leaf in the Verdurin dining table. OMF was the first Dickens novel I read with any admiration and pleasure. In the end, when I moved, it came to choosing between it and 'Little Dorrit' but OMF won out mainly for its brilliant creation of its world, physical and moral. I was sad to lose the description of the last hours of Mr Merdle but one can't have everything.

[Pulcinella]

Yes, he is very much an extra extendable, and expendable, leaf in the Verdurin dining table. OMF was the first Dickens novel I read with any admiration and pleasure. In the end, when I moved, it came to choosing between it and 'Little Dorrit' but OMF won out mainly for its brilliant creation of its world, physical and moral. I was sad to lose the description of the last hours of Mr Merdle but one can't have everything.

There are free downloadable versions of Dickens, I'm pretty sure, so not all is lost if you have some sort of electronic reader.

[un barbu]

There are free downloadable versions of Dickens, I'm pretty sure, so not all is lost if you have some sort of electronic reader.

Thank you! I also have a good local library (the haunt of my childhood and still happily going strong long after Mr Carnegie opened it).

[Bella Kemp]

Nothing is more pleasurable than re-reading a great Victorian novel such as Our Mutual Friend. I used to find myself enjoying these mighty 19th century tomes but nevertheless longing for the end on first readings, but when one returns to these masterpieces it is like revisiting an old house full of the most amiable friends and one feels so at home one never wants to leave.
I am currently on my third reading of Middlemarch. It is outstandingly good.

[muzzer]

Those of you that have read all of Dickens, which would you suggest to someone who’s read Great Expectations and David Copperfield, and then stopped? Thank you in advance.

[DracoM]

Dombey and Son
Bleak House
.......possibly in that order.

And Edwin Drood is creepy too.

[Alain Maréchal]

Those of you that have read all of Dickens, which would you suggest to someone who’s read Great Expectations and David Copperfield, and then stopped? Thank you in advance.

Hard Times. Not long, simultaneously an indictment of the ideas behind Utilitarianism, the misery of the working classes in Northern England, the pompousness of the middle classes, and very funny,

p.s.Confession: 1. I haven't read all Dickens, there is so much, but I have read all the usual suspects, plus a few more. Barnaby Rudge is a personal favourite.
2: I gave up on Dombey and Son.
3. Trollope is more my sort of thing - AT satirized CD as "Mr Sanctimonious Sentiment" in The Warden (a brave man satirizes his own publisher!)
4. Zola is much more my sort of thing, and easier for me to read in the original. I recommend Zola to any anglophone who has a reasonable command of French - he writes in a very straightforward language.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Those of you that have read all of Dickens, which would you suggest to someone who’s read Great Expectations and David Copperfield, and then stopped? Thank you in advance.

For creepy - Our Mutual Friend
For comedy - Pickwick Papers

But. of you haven't read Middlemarch yet, I'd pause Dickens amnd treat yourself to that, instead. (In fact, for realistic portraits of women - rather than the simpering saints, doddering old dears, and hard-faced harridens that spoil Dickens' works, I'd put Eliot and Gaskell as a priority among the Victorian novelists.)