What are you reading now?

[Bryn]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50825483

Strange that that piece failed to mention what was my experience of The Book People, its 'pop-up' events at workplaces. I have to admit I never bought a book from them. Their selections re. printed matter did not appeal. However, I did buy a few Yves Saint Laurent silk ties from them at bargain prices. They remain the very few ties I am happy to wear.

[ardcarp]

Michael Ondaatje's Warlight A sligtlly weird (and slightly scary) book. I don't really know what to make of it and I'm over halfway through. Anyone else read it?

[Don Basilio]

I was very good and pressed on with Swann in Love and we've now reached Baalbec with our grandmother and her copy of Mme de Sevigne.

I fear that the main pleasure is the one of having surmounted an obstacle but I feel I am "getting" the work better than I did at first reading a long time ago.

And there is the pleasure of the screaming Frenchness of it all.

The narrator seems to have, in Jane Austen's words, a sensibility too trembling alive. This means he is brilliant at descriptions of things and their human context, but hopeless at human relationships. Now wonder Giblberte gets fed up with him.

[vinteuil]

I was very good and pressed on with Swann in Love and we've now reached Baalbec with our grandmother and her copy of Mme de Sevigne.
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... I think the scenes at Balbec each time our hero goes there are among the most enjoyable. Plus of course the delights of the horrendous Verdurin cercle....

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[Don Basilio]

Yes the awful Mme Verdurin is good.

[richardfinegold]

Michael Ondaatje's Warlight A sligtlly weird (and slightly scary) book. I don't really know what to make of it and I'm over halfway through. Anyone else read it?

Yes, I read it afew months ago and so did my wife. It helps to hang in there and finish the book, as most of the loose ends are tied up.
It is the other side of the LeCArre Genre-the toll that the dashing spy's lifestyle enacts upon his or her family.

[richardfinegold]

I finished Roy Jenkins Churchill biography., all 900 something pages of it. It's Churchill's life as seen by a Politician , and of course Jenkins had more than a nodding acquaintance with Clement Attlee. Still, the ups and downs of a M.P. Election in 1920s Dundee gets several paragraphs, whereas the decision to target the German Civilian Population in WWII about half a sentence. I understand that it was a biography of W.C. and not a comprehensive history any of the events through which he passed, but while it is a good read I thought it was light on substance and ultimately therefore a disservice to W.C., although one does get the essence of the man.

[LMcD]

Ben Macintyre: The Spy And The Traitor

[richardfinegold]

Ben Macintyre: The Spy And The Traitor

I loved that book

[Petrushka]

I loved that book

So did I. A terrific read!

[Richard Tarleton]

Tremendous book.

[CallMePaul]

The Moor by William Atkins. This is a fascinating book about the role of moorland in English (Atkins does not consider Scotland, Wales or Ireland) culture, consciousness and crime.

[richardfinegold]

I am going to be starting Dombey and Son by Dickens. It is one of the few Dickens works that I never got around to

[richardfinegold]

The Moor by William Atkins. This is a fascinating book about the role of moorland in English (Atkins does not consider Scotland, Wales or Ireland) culture, consciousness and crime.

I remember when I first read The Hound of Baskerville that Conan Doyle had made the moor seem like a living, breathing, and malevolent force

[verismissimo]

Just on to my fourth Ibsen play - The Doll's House, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea and now Hedda Gabler. What a revolutionary he was. And how confronting, even now.

My first seen (and read) was The Wild Duck, acted by boys at school around 1958.