What are you reading now?

[amateur51]

... hmmm, seventy five books at a fiver a-piece - £375. Just as well you are bestest chums with Irritable Duncan-Syndrome ...

Mind you, I was lucky in picking up the twenty-five vols of the Complete Works - Maigret and non-Maigret - (Presses de la Cité - collection omnibus) for £80 some years back :smug face emoticon:

A fiver per month over seventy-five months is scarcely a King's (or a Queen's ) ransome.

However I shall of course be suggesting that my local library should purchase the series

That emoticon is a tad tautologous, innit vints?

[Nick Armstrong]

That emoticon is a tad tautologous, innit vints?

... said amateur, poking his stick provocatively through the bars of the cage...

To my shame I didn't know or had totally forgotten that Patrice Leconte's wonderful film Monsieur Hire

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/Monsieur-Hire

was based on a Simenon book

Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire

Michel Blanc's performance is just about as creepy yet heartrending as anything I know on film...

[amateur51]

... said amateur, poking his stuck provocatively through the bars of the cage...

You'll have us all hurled into the deepest darkest pit known to french frank if you carries on like that, Master Pip

And she knows a few

[vinteuil]

Patrice Leconte...

... who also made another of my fave fillums -

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ridicule-1996

[Nick Armstrong]

You'll have us all hurled into the deepest darkest pit known to french frank if you carries on like that, Master Pip

"You may be sure, dear Joe," I went on, after we had shaken hands, "that I shall never forget you."

[Nick Armstrong]

... who also made another of my fave fillums -


http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ridicule-1996

Indeed - delicious stuff - with the resonantly-named Fanny Ardant...

And his

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-hairdressers-husband-1990

is a gem too...

[french frank]

Intriguing book which I didn't know at all has been the Christmas present of no. 3 nephew: Four Hedges by Clare Leighton which was reprinted a couple of years ago having first been published in 1935. CL was the partner of the socialist journalist Noel Brailsford, and a wood engraver. This book is illustrated throughout with her engravings, mainly of plants and wildlife, accompanying the account of taming/cultivating her garden in the Chilterns throughout the year.

If you know the 1940 edition of Housman's A Shropshire Lad, illustrated by Agnes Miller Parker, Leighton's engravings of people are amazingly like Parker's.

[clive heath]

A303

Currently reading Tom Fort's book about the A303, a road I know pretty well as far as its intersection with the Fosse Way going south to Axminster. He made a set of TV programmes on the topic. Visiting my mother near Devizes takes us as far as Stonehenge as long as the queue doesn't extend up Beacon Hill in which case a deviation through Bulford is necessary. The road toward Devizes pictured on the cover as leaving the A303 on the eastern side no longer exists. Last seen with rolls of grass ready for turfing. Tom describes the view from the A 303 on the east side as "magnificent...It does not fail to lift the heart and magnetise the senses". However on Christmas Eve last the sun was in the west:




and the "pile of stones" was looking considerably different from the Midsummer sunrise morning when I first visited in company with friends from school, hippie students from Salisbury Art college, soldiers letting off thunderflashes, all united in song "Dere's de light an' I wanna go home". My borrowed bike got a puncture so I had a bit of a walk.


What I've learnt from the section on Winterbourne Stoke I'm somewhat ashamed to admit. I had never realised what a water-meadow was and how it worked and what it did. In this part of Wiltshire it maintained a constant source of grass to feed the Sheep variety "Wiltshire Horn" which ".. was regarded primarily as a dung machine..". Read all about it......

p.s. by the way (literally and metaphorically) if you turn left going west on the A303 just after crossing the River Test toward Wherwell on the B3058, in spring you will find a lovely Bluebell wood on the right hand side as you also will if you turn left off the A4 going west about a mile and a half after Froxfield. This road goes through the eastern edge of Savernake Forest.

[verismissimo]

The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Finally the third part of his walk across Europe in the 1930s. Completed/edited posthumously by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I've just finished J.K.Rowling's A Casual Vacancy on e-book. I was curious to discover what the writer of Harry Potter would do in writing an adult book. My worst fears were confirmed when layers of smut seemed to be the essential ingredient. Yet her ability to write a good story was evident in the end.

[Anna]

I've just finished J.K.Rowling's A Casual Vacancy on e-book. I was curious to discover what the writer of Harry Potter would do in writing an adult book. My worst fears were confirmed when layers of smut seemed to be the essential ingredient. Yet her ability to write a good story was evident in the end.

I bought that some months ago in a charity shop - thought it was terribly badly written (I've only read one HP book so don't know about them) although the idea was good the execution was dire. I then passed it on to another charity shop ..... Don't know anyone who has read her detective story under the name of Galbraith.

[verismissimo]

Sydney and Violet: Their Life with TS Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irrascible Wyndham Lewis by Stephen Klaidman.

It's riveting!

[amateur51]

Sydney and Violet: Their Life with TS Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irrascible Wyndham Lewis by Stephen Klaidman.

It's riveting!

It sounds fascinating, verismissimo - thanks for the recommendation

[Thropplenoggin]

Gustav Mahler by Jens Malte Fischer. A compendious doorstop with 766 pages.

[amateur51]

Gustav Mahler by Jens Malte Fischer. A compendious doorstop with 766 pages.

Is it worth reading, Throppers?