What are you reading now?

[Chris Newman]

I had never heard of him. There are previews here.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stories-William-Sansom-ebook/dp/B0056MYYNQ#reader_B0056MYYNQ

"....That long second held me hypnotized, rubber boots cemented to the pavement. Ton upon ton of red-hot brick hovering in the air above us numbed all initiative. I could only think. I couldn’t move."

Should I be asking Santa for a Kindle?

Maybe. My bed time read at the moment is two volumes of biography each over a thousand pages. That feels heavy after reading a chapter. Being a bit of a Luddite I have never really considered the Kindle. The virtual books seem a similar price to the real thing. Fair enough, authors and publishers need to make a living. I just wish the pages were bigger (old age and reading).

I like the comparison of Samson with Kafka when it comes to microscopic description, although I do not think WS's subject matter is the same.

[Flay]

Um... forgive me, but it's Sansom, not Samson.

[Globaltruth]

As a teacher I often used Samson's first short story The Wall in conjunction with Ambrose Bierce's Occurrence at Owl Creek to show those amazing literary moments when time stands still. Samson writes for some four pages as he and Fireman Flower play water on a blitzed London warehouse and describes everything in the scene as the wall falls onto them and their fellow firefighters. I won't give it away.

Encouraging.

Sansom was in fact a firefighter during WWII which gives additional power and an alarming authenticity to his writing in this particular story.

I hope that your students did not develop a lifelong aversion to most writing that they were forced to read and analyse at school - this often seems to happen.

It's a shame he is part of a whole group of English writers whose writing is terrifically unfashionable & forgotten (for example, step forward Simon Raven and Jack Trevor Story)

[Hitch]

A chance charity shop purchase: The Nibelungenlied. Not having got much further into the Ring than the overtures, I'm enjoying reading Wagner's source material. The translator, A. T. Hatto, warns needlessly of a slow start. Apart from taking an instant dislike to Siegfried (will he mellow or shall I?), I've found that the tale canters along despite the odd deathless line such as: "Following this his stalwarts were furnished with clothes lined with vari-coloured squirrel."

[Chris Newman]

Encouraging.

Sansom was in fact a firefighter during WWII which gives additional power and an alarming authenticity to his writing in this particular story.

I hope that your students did not develop a lifelong aversion to most writing that they were forced to read and analyse at school - this often seems to happen.

It's a shame he is part of a whole group of English writers whose writing is terrifically unfashionable & forgotten (for example, step forward Simon Raven and Jack Trevor Story)

I hope not either, though one now writes regularly for the Country Diary column in the Guardian as well as being a naturalist. Another has already written a best-selling military autobiography.

Apologies for getting Sansom's name mispelt.

[Nick Armstrong]

the odd deathless line such as: "Following this his stalwarts were furnished with clothes lined with vari-coloured squirrel."

They sound like nice butch stalwarts

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

"Following this his stalwarts were furnished with clothes lined with vari-coloured squirrel."

I bet that tickled his stalwarts!

[vinteuil]

I'm still reading Our Mutual Friend .

French Frank is clearly plugged into the Zeitgeist - Wednesday 14 December 10pm Nightwaves - from next week's Radio Times: "Philip Dodd presents a Landmark edition focusing on Our Mutual Friend, the novel Charles Dickens finished in the last five years of his life. It is a great novel by any standards, but it is also a condemnation of aspects of life in Victorian London. Money, corruption, class differences, and social deprivation - all it lacks to be an evocation of today is some characters who text and others who form a coalition... "

[Globaltruth]

I hope not either, though one now writes regularly for the Country Diary column in the Guardian as well as being a naturalist. Another has already written a best-selling military autobiography.

.

In which case you should justifiably take some credit and so should Wm Sansom....

A rare photo

[Don Basilio]

Some time back I wondered that since Dickens' descriptions are so extraordinary and his plots so silly/convoluted, would it be better just to read his journalism and travel writing? So I did, American Notes, Pictures from Italy and Reprinted Pieces.

I can report back that Dickens needs his plots. The descriptions weren't anything like as compelling. That's probably because plots mean characters, but he introduces characters that aren't necessary for the plot to evolve. In fact I wonder if he convoluted his plots in order to get in his characters.

[french frank]

French Frank is clearly plugged into the Zeitgeist - Wednesday 14 December 10pm Nightwaves - from next week's Radio Times: "Philip Dodd presents a Landmark edition focusing on Our Mutual Friend, the novel Charles Dickens finished in the last five years of his life. It is a great novel by any standards, but it is also a condemnation of aspects of life in Victorian London. Money, corruption, class differences, and social deprivation - all it lacks to be an evocation of today is some characters who text and others who form a coalition... "

Ho, ho! Just finished it - I wonder if I've got time to zip through it again to remind myself of the details

Dickens' Postscript is something of a justification of his plot. In particular he writes: "There is sometimes an odd disposition in this country to dispute as improbable in fiction, what are the commonest experiences in fact." He's talking here about the Wills but it rather ties in with what I was saying (somewhere?) about the use of coincidence to drive a plot. Coincidences happening all the time (last week I had a double win on a lottery, my number being drawn twice in succession, so far so good; but I was telling a friend about it at lunch today and his number was drawn in the same lottery; all three for £100), 'in fact'.

[Sparafucile]

Hullo,
Just started the late Geoffrey Moorhouse's The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery. Planning to read some Bede over the holiday, has anyone here read him?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Planning to read some Bede over the holiday, has anyone here read him?

Hullo Spara! Yes, I love Bede - the Oxford Classics translation of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People is very good; based on Colgrave's edition it gets the "easy" tone of the writer (with his "Good Luck to the Reader" preserved). The Penguin Classics translation is a little stuffier (no greetings to the reader here!) but has excellent background notes. There's also his Life of Cuthbert and Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow in another Penguin Classics which also contains the astonishing Voyage of St Brendan by that great writer Anon.

Bede is lovely to read and has a sly, conversational lightness that shows his ability to communicate complicated ideas in the most readily-graspable manner. Just don't question how the date of Easter is calculated!
He is a fascinating character and a great figure in many fields of knowledge; I so wish that his other works (in particular the Astronomy and Mathematical treatises) were available.

Best Wishes.

[marthe]

Sparafucile, let me know what you think of Moorhouse's The Last Office. I read it a year ago and found it quite interesting. I haven't read Bede but probably should. The book is on one of the bookshelves, so no excuse for not reading it. Maybe I'll give it a go once I've finished Hoskins's English Landscape history. I've just got through the Georgian enclosures and am starting on the history of the industrial landscape.

[Sparafucile]

Hullo,
I'm a couple of chapters into The Last Office only, I've been struggling with finding time over the last few days due to work (end of academic term mayhem), plus I'm coming down with a throaty/chesty cold. But the book is so far moving along quite nicely. Durham isn't somewhere I've ever visited, but I'm keen to rectify that when I can, on the strength of what I've read so far, and been prompted to research further. I've read quite a bit covering the English Reformation, and I have a copy of MacCulloch's Cranmer biography to collect next week from my Uni bookshop, so my reading for the foreseeable future is pretty much determined, or at least over the holiday period. I also have two Bede books waiting for collection from the bookshop. They had the Penguin volume in stock, so I've opted for that rather than hang on and order the Oxford World Classics edition. I can always get a copy of that at a later date. The other Bede volume is another Penguin one, The Age of Bede, and includes his life of Cuthbert, which is of course relevant to the Moorhouse book and the Durham scene. There'll be a couple of novels to offset the more serious tones of the historical reading I imagine. Also crossing my library bows recently was Roy Porter's London, a Social History, which is a book I've meant to delve into for years, but never seemed to find the time. I've always enjoyed his writing, so vibrant and enthusiastic for his subjects, his early death was a sad loss to the academic community.