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  • Anna

    I was just about to post the very same thing ferney - but then i wondered if I'd read it wrongly? I've just finished Curiosity Shop (believe it not, never read it before, it's always been one I've convinced myself that of course I read it years ago. And Quilp - gosh, he's the stuff of nightmares!)

    I've also just got down from the shelf The Christmas Stories - Carol, The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth I never tire of Dickens and a while back, in a charity shop, I picked up some old bound volumes of unknown (to me) stories/journals such as The Uncommercial Traveller, Pictures from Italy, etc. I find his many 'grotesques' aren't that at all, they are just so true to life, you meet them all the time!
    Last edited by Guest; 24-12-14, 15:19. Reason: clarity.

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    • vinteuil
      Full Member
      • Nov 2010
      • 12816

      Originally posted by Anna View Post
      I find his many 'grotesques' are just so true to life!
      ... o indeed yes! When I was a callow undergraduate I repeated the usual clichés of his 'characters' being 'caricatures'; the older I get the more I realize he under-played rather than exaggerated. I mean, look at the denizens of this Forum!

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      • ferneyhoughgeliebte
        Gone fishin'
        • Sep 2011
        • 30163

        Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
        ... o indeed yes! When I was a callow undergraduate I repeated the usual clichés of his 'characters' being 'caricatures'; the older I get the more I realize he under-played rather than exaggerated. I mean, look at the denizens of this Forum!
        Bah! Humbug!!
        [FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]

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        • JFLL
          Full Member
          • Jan 2011
          • 780

          Originally posted by aeolium View Post
          I'm currently reading Nairn's London, a book of impressions about London and its buildings derived from Ian Nairn's travels through it in the 1960s. It reads like a piece of cultural history now, with so many of the places he describes having undergone complete transformation, but is still interesting for the picture it paints of that city and that time and also for Nairn's idiosyncratic approach, intensely interested in the unusual, the characterful, the personal, the communal life of buildings and places (including not a few pubs). Nairn was a sort of early forerunner of Jonathan Meades in his approach (and Meades is a great admirer of his work), though his prose style is more earthy and punchy than Meades', with unpredictable insights and arresting phrases. I recommend this, especially to those who knew and lived through the London of that period as I did not:

          http://www.waterstones.com/waterston...ndon/10849505/
          I've been enjoying this, too, aeolium, together with Nairn's Towns (an equally good collection of pieces on provincial towns, with postscripts on changes since 1967 by Owen Hatherley), and a fine book about him, Ian Nairn: words in place, by Gillian Darley and David McKie.

          Certainly outspoken and earthy (All Saints' Margaret Street is described as an orgasm), so it's surprising that in his TV films (many now on YouTube) he often comes across as a rather hesitant and fragile figure, despite the famous rant at the Munich Oktoberfest and the heart-rending sermon from the pulpit of a semi-destroyed church in Bolton.

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          • vinteuil
            Full Member
            • Nov 2010
            • 12816

            Originally posted by aeolium View Post
            I'm currently reading Nairn's London, a book of impressions about London and its buildings -

            http://www.waterstones.com/waterston...ndon/10849505/

            Nairn's London one of my favourite books on the subject; and yes, he was a magnificent presenter.

            I've been trying for some time to find his companion piece Nairn's Paris - but it seems unavailable - or available only at absurd prices

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            • Petrushka
              Full Member
              • Nov 2010
              • 12247

              Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View Post
              That has to be the wrong way round, Pet - quite apart from being a fantastic writer, Dickens' life had some extremely un-admirable aspects to it: the way he treated his wife (and women generally) and his attitude towards the Indian "mutineers", for example.

              By coincidence, I've just finished A Christmas Carol - it's been about twenty years since I last read it, and there are so many details that I'd forgotten, including (unbelievably) this gem:

              In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches.

              Sorry, for clarification I should have said 'admiring the life as told by Tomalin'. True enough about the way he treated his wife etc but Tomalin really does lay into some of the novels with hardly any of them escaping a critical mauling and confess I came away not greatly wanting to read them. Having said that, I am having my annual read of A Christmas Carol right now - just the right length to read in one day.
              "The sound is the handwriting of the conductor" - Bernard Haitink

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              • clive heath

                Is this the place to remind one and all that

                Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.


                takes you to " The Man who fought the Planners" ? .. and somewhere maybe there's that trip up the old A6. Merry Christmas.

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                • DracoM
                  Host
                  • Mar 2007
                  • 12971

                  Margaret Attwood / Year of the Flood.
                  And just before that, ironically, John Christopher/ The Death of Grass.

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                  • verismissimo
                    Full Member
                    • Nov 2010
                    • 2957

                    Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead. Not the most recent on the subject, but he writes so well.

                    Coming up to the centenary.

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                    • verismissimo
                      Full Member
                      • Nov 2010
                      • 2957

                      Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
                      Nairn's London one of my favourite books on the subject; and yes, he was a magnificent presenter.

                      I've been trying for some time to find his companion piece Nairn's Paris - but it seems unavailable - or available only at absurd prices
                      Never go to Paris without Nairn. Terribly thumbed by now.

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                      • ferneyhoughgeliebte
                        Gone fishin'
                        • Sep 2011
                        • 30163

                        Inspired by Petrushka's and gurnemanz's enthusiasm on the Radi4 Freezes its Schedules thread, I am reading War & Peace for the first time in Anthony Briggs' translation. And I am reading it for the first time - I've tried several times in the past in different translations and have never been able to get beyond the first few pages, so tedious did I find the characters and prose. But this is a real revelation - the prose communicates so much, the individuals mould into three dimensional individuals (rather than the cliched "types" I remember from the other versions).

                        This is going to be a real pleasure - my thanks to Pet & Gurne.
                        [FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]

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                        • antongould
                          Full Member
                          • Nov 2010
                          • 8782

                          Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View Post
                          Inspired by Petrushka's and gurnemanz's enthusiasm on the Radi4 Freezes its Schedules thread, I am reading War & Peace for the first time in Anthony Briggs' translation. And I am reading it for the first time - I've tried several times in the past in different translations and have never been able to get beyond the first few pages, so tedious did I find the characters and prose. But this is a real revelation - the prose communicates so much, the individuals mould into three dimensional individuals (rather than the cliched "types" I remember from the other versions).


                          This is going to be a real pleasure - my thanks to Pet & Gurne.
                          Enjoy ferny let us know who wins...in extra time presumably

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                          • ferneyhoughgeliebte
                            Gone fishin'
                            • Sep 2011
                            • 30163

                            Originally posted by antongould View Post
                            Enjoy ferny let us know who wins


                            My money's on Marya Dmitriyevna!


                            (For anyone who hasn't read the novel, she's a formidable woman described as a "terrible dragon" by the younger characters.)
                            [FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]

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                            • Don Basilio
                              Full Member
                              • Nov 2010
                              • 320

                              I'm reading "George Eliot's" Daniell Deronda. Only just over a third through. Is it Trollope with intelligence or a rather more approachable Henry James? It is certainly different from The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch. The characters (even when they are a rector's daughter) all seem socially a cut above her usual cast. Also it is not set in the early C19 but contemporaneously.

                              It's really two stories. Daniel Deronda's story (which hardly figures in the first third) and Gwendolen Harleth's. Her story is far more interesting.

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                              • Pianorak
                                Full Member
                                • Nov 2010
                                • 3127

                                El ruido de las cosas al caer (The Sound of Things Falling) - by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
                                Set in the Pablo Escobar period of the sixties, when Colombia was a main supplier of cocaine to the US.
                                My life, each morning when I dress, is four and twenty hours less. (J Richardson)

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