What are you reading now?

[Joseph K]

What I've just finished reading is Fabrice Fitch's very impressive Renaissance Polyphony of 2020. I would recommend this to anyone who (like me) is interested in this period and style of music but doesn't know very much about the inner workings of it. Most of you will know that FF is also a composer and veteran Gramophone reviewer. He doesn't in any way talk down to the reader but encourages them through his enthusiasm and insight to want to understand what he's saying, and to want to hear the music of course. Some of the composition procedures he describes are fascinatingly arcane and would give the most hermetic serialist a run for their money, to a degree i hadn't really cottoned on to before. I would say this book is a must for anyone interested in this music, even those who might not be able to read the music examples except in a general or sketchy way.

Looks like one to add to the list.

[RichardB]

What I've just finished reading is Fabrice Fitch's very impressive Renaissance Polyphony of 2020. I would recommend this to anyone who (like me) is interested in this period and style of music but doesn't know very much about the inner workings of it. Most of you will know that FF is also a composer and veteran Gramophone reviewer. He doesn't in any way talk down to the reader but encourages them through his enthusiasm and insight to want to understand what he's saying, and to want to hear the music of course. Some of the composition procedures he describes are fascinatingly arcane and would give the most hermetic serialist a run for their money, to a degree i hadn't really cottoned on to before. I would say this book is a must for anyone interested in this music, even those who might not be able to read the music examples except in a general or sketchy way.

[Joseph K]

And let's not forget that 'Q' was the editor of 'The Oxford Book of English Verse' which at one time would be found in every middle-class home, and many a classroom. I hope he got a royalty.

That's the book, which I bought second hand, that I know his name from.

[smittims]

And let's not forget that 'Q' was the editor of 'The Oxford Book of English Verse' which at one time would be found in every middle-class home, and many a classroom. I hope he got a royalty.

[silvestrione]

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.........

AQQ appears, in semi-fictionalised form, in a film dating from the early nineties called The Last Romantics. I can't remember all that much about it now (I must have been about eighteen at the time), but I do remember that he is in some ways opposed to or in conflict with F.R. Leavis. Set in Cambridge, it follows the professors as they come and go, lecturing and tutoring and pontificating about this and that. There is a plot involving some undergraduates - I can't remember a single thing about that - but even after all the intervening years I still remember the great clash between AQQ and Leavis (played by Leo McKern and Ian Holm) which culminates in one or both of them reciting the end of the Waste Land. I thought it was terribly powerful at the time - though God knows what I would think of it now, if I was ever to see it again. Leavis/Holm, I think, was broadly "on Eliot's side": civilisation was going to hell in a handbasket and that left little room for the kind of decorous, unified verse of the past. A new type of writing was needed to reflect the emerging catastrophe - something altogether more fragmentary and nihilistic. AQQ, the old guard, was having none of it, of course.......

I did, at one time, own a book of AQQ's literary essays. I lost sight of them in a house move some years ago. But I still have a poetry collection edited by him which I read from time to time. I stole/borrowed it from a fellow undergraduate not long after I watched the film I just mentioned.

Yes! I remember that, it was on TV, BBC I think. An odd episode where one of his students had to be called down, from climbing a church spire...
Ended rather nicely with Leavis and wife on a bench in the garden, drifting back, from conversation, to read their books.

[waldo]

Currently reading, in an admittedly dilatory way, Fort Amity by Arthur Quiller Couch ("Q"), a writer I suspect few will have heard of these days...

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.........

AQQ appears, in semi-fictionalised form, in a film dating from the early nineties called The Last Romantics. I can't remember all that much about it now (I must have been about eighteen at the time), but I do remember that he is in some ways opposed to or in conflict with F.R. Leavis. Set in Cambridge, it follows the professors as they come and go, lecturing and tutoring and pontificating about this and that. There is a plot involving some undergraduates - I can't remember a single thing about that - but even after all the intervening years I still remember the great clash between AQQ and Leavis (played by Leo McKern and Ian Holm) which culminates in one or both of them reciting the end of the Waste Land. I thought it was terribly powerful at the time - though God knows what I would think of it now, if I was ever to see it again. Leavis/Holm, I think, was broadly "on Eliot's side": civilisation was going to hell in a handbasket and that left little room for the kind of decorous, unified verse of the past. A new type of writing was needed to reflect the emerging catastrophe - something altogether more fragmentary and nihilistic. AQQ, the old guard, was having none of it, of course.......

I did, at one time, own a book of AQQ's literary essays. I lost sight of them in a house move some years ago. But I still have a poetry collection edited by him which I read from time to time. I stole/borrowed it from a fellow undergraduate not long after I watched the film I just mentioned.

[smittims]

As a keen reader of the 1970 Latham unexpurgated edition when it first appeared, I was amused by Stuart Sim's remark in his 800-page single volume reissue of the 1825 Braybroke version that ' the ommission of the sexual passages is not necessarily detrimental to the work as a whole'.

[gradus]

Just started Pepys Diaries in Wheatley's 1893 edition, very properly omitting anything that one's wife or servants should not read.

[smittims]

I too have enjoyed 'Q's writings . As for racial stereotyping , it was pretty well universal in the 19th century and not even seen as derogatory, See the many references to 'Jews' in Trollope. Thackeray's Rebecca and Rowena (a send-up of Scott's Ivanhoe ) is an early reaction to that. Maybe Thackeray's concections with India and the Abolition movement led him to a more enlightened view .

[kernelbogey]

Currently reading, in an admittedly dilatory way, Fort Amity by Arthur Quiller Couch ("Q"), a writer I suspect few will have heard of these days.

In my teens I read his Troytown, an amusingly affectionate portrait of his Cornish home town of Fowey (pronounced Foy).

[Sir Velo]

I'm still enjoying re-reading Middlemarch, though id say 'enjoyable' rather than 'great'.

Despite, or perhaps because of, reading Eng Lit at university, I struggle with the didactic novels of the 19th century, "loose, baggy monsters" as they have been described. GE appears to be top (or bottom, depending on one's POV) of the pile in this respect. I certainly read a lot less fiction than as an undergraduate, and these days look for entertainment or instruction in areas in which I have limited knowledge but interest. Currently reading, in an admittedly dilatory way, Fort Amity by Arthur Quiller Couch ("Q"), a writer I suspect few will have heard of these days. A strange hybrid work of factual history though with clear overtones of the Leatherstocking novels of Fenimore Cooper, it definitely merits more than just a footnote in the annals of literary history. There are some striking descriptive passages and the historical background to the conflict and the first nations ambiguous involvement therein is meticulously researched, as befits a former Oxbridge professor. There is also little of the racial stereotyping which mars some of Q's other writings, and the native Americans are presented plausibly but without condescension or overly romanticising.

[Joseph K]

Still reading the first volume of J.G Ballard's collected short stories, and I am enjoying them immensely. My favourite so far is 'Manhole 69'. It's surprising me, since I had read that Ballard wasn't interested in listening to music, that there is often a musical component to these stories, sometimes just in passing, but also sometimes as an integral part of the story.

[smittims]

I'm still enjoying re-reading Middlemarch, though id say 'enjoyable' rather than 'great'. I think Lydgate is a bit of a prat though. I feel like giving him a kick. I feel I'm supposed to dislike Brooke and Casaubon but I find them delightful; delightful, you know....

[JasonPalmer]

Good isn’t it!
Not so much an autobiography as a memoir and observation of his election to parliament and his time in it. The thumbnail sketches of his peers are beautifully crafted, funny, and often damning (George Osborne has the demeanour of ‘an eighteenth century French cardinal’). Although only a third in, it’s a depressing account of how the arcane procedures parliament and the quotidian politics that occurs within it are unfit for purpose. I don’t expect things to improve once he becomes a junior minister under Truss, and throughout Johnson’s premiership.

Prompted me to write the book details onto a note into my pocket for when i next passing my library, hopefully they can get it

[kindofblue]

Indeed. Remove the important bits? Isn't this what raises fiction to the level of literature?

The BBC's 25 Greatest Novels is an eccentric concoction, but at the top: "Middlemarch won this BBC Culture poll by a landslide: 42% of the critics polled included it in their lists..." No Trollope for smittims. In any case 'popular and successful' would see him eclipsed by Agatha Christie and JK Rowling!

I'm with you here french frank. It's the greatest novel I've ever read in the English language, stunning. On a lighter note, but still Eliot-related, during the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK a few years ago this happened -

Defenders of a George Eliot statue had no idea what they were doing and I’m here for it. ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)