Really not enjoying the St. Mary's books by Jodi Taylor which is a shame because they are exactly the sort of thing I do like. Think I'll read Alan Walker's enormous biography of Chopin next.
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Best regards,
Jonathan -
The recently published biography of Ronald Blythe by Ian Collins, as delightful a book as I have read for sometime about a man whose writing I greatly admire.Comment
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Wondered if anyone else was reading Robert Sholl's biography of Olivier Messiaen. I have to admit that this book is a big disappointment. MessIaen is one of my favourite composers but this book is almost unreadable on three account.
Firstly Messiaen was not particularly interesting as a person. He seems obsessed with Catholicism to the exclusion of everything else. As a birdwatcher, I am keen to read about his avian influenced music later on in the book so reserve judgement in this respect. Apart from being a bit dull character, the author spends alot of time discussing the influence of religion on Messiaen and this is a killer for me as I am not religious with the Catholic Church repulsing me. I find the musical theory difficult but the spirituality described in this book is impenetrable.
The description of the music is interesting and so is the history yet there are no musical notations to assist. The book is at its best when discussing the back stabbing amongst his contemporaries. Poulenc's camp dismissal of Messiaen was no surprise.
Luckily this is a thin book. Can't say I would recommend this book as I understand so little of the writing and not inclined to use a dictionary for every sentence.Comment
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For George Eliot fans - and I’ve only read Middlemarch to date - I’m enjoying Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question, a critical biography. CC edited Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics recently.Comment
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Just about to start Trelawny's Cornwall.Comment
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Lytton Strachey Books and Characters - a book of Essays (I think my favourite literary form), here scintillating pen-portraits of some great and some quirky characters (the one does not exclude the other, of course) - Sir Thomas Browne, Madame du Deffand, Voltaire, Thos: Lovell Beddoes, Stendhal, Lady Hester Stanhope, Thomas Creevey. Also an excellent perceptive essay on Racine showing why the English-speaking world doesn't 'get' Racine (and why the French don't 'get' Shakespeare).
In the chatto & windus 'phoenix library' series : I love these editions, small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, conveniently fold flat on a restaurant table for when dining alone...
.Last edited by vinteuil; 01-02-25, 13:31.Comment
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I discovered Lytton Strachey when I saw the Holroyd biography in Penguin c.1974. I had not heard of Strachey but I thought anyone who had such a fat book written about him must be interesting. He was surrounded by other interesting people too, his brother James, for instance,the Freud translator, and Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Leonard Woolf are all worth attention.Comment
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There is really excellent film about the platonic relationship Strachey had with the painter Dora Carrington, it features respectively, Emma Thompson and Jonathan Price (Edit: other way round!) with music by Nyman, directed beautifully by Christopher Hampton.Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
... there is quite a good wiki page -
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Last edited by Roger Webb; 02-02-25, 09:52.Comment
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Gave up on the Jodi Taylor book and started Oliver Hilmes book "Franz Liszt, Musician, Celebrity, Superstar". So far, a slightly different take on his life to Alan Walker's books.Best regards,
JonathanComment
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Picked up 'Thursday Night Widows ' which is the third novel I have read by Claudia Pineiro. This one deals with the goings-on of a gated and privileged community in Argentina in the early 2000s. I had always assumed crime novels to be low brow until I read Reginald Hill's books yet Pineiro certainly ups the ante in literary stakes. This is as much a skewering of affluent Argentine society as a murder mystery. Crime used as a pretext to subvert our expectations. More like Ian McEwan than your standard crime fair. She is a brilliant and experimental writer....this novel having each chapter being the perspective of different characters to tell the story as if by mosaic.Comment
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