What are you reading now?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... yep, for science fiction and science fantasy, he's my man.

A whole other world, innit!

PS - and of course I don't care for the rules of them as despise "detective fiction" - cos Simenon is Great Litrachur.

PS4 - and Adolfo Bioy Casares - and Borges - and Calvino.

(I'd no doubt include Casares as well, but I've not heard of him before ) *

Richard Tarleton mentioned Douglas Adams - yes, I have a lot of time for a writer who can describe drinks from a machine as "tasting almost, but not quite completely, unlike tea" - and who has such tempered optimism for all that technology has to offer that he can imagine a time when elevators can be given a "personality", and that this will inevitably mean that one of them will develop vertigo.

* - and Marquez, and Eco ... (Just who is the "ed" anyway?)

[vinteuil]

Your previous mentioning of Douglas Adams - yes, I have a lot of time for a writer who can describe drinks from a machine as "tasting almost, but not quite completely, unlike tea" - and who has such tempered optimism for all that technology has to offer that he can imagine a time when elevators can be given a "personality", and that this will inevitably mean that one of them will develop vertigo.

... not me, squire!


.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... not me, squire!

Whoops! Apologies; duly altered.

[vinteuil]

I'd no doubt include Casares as well, but I've not heard of him before ...

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Bioy_Casares

Borges said of his The Invention of Dr Morel -

"I have discussed with the author the details of his plot ; I have reread it ; it seems to me neither imprecise nor hyperbolic to classify it as perfect."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel

http://amzn.eu/f7TCVjj

.

[cloughie]

....>> "Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, ...., Svevo, Proust, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal'<< >>"Steeleye Span....Discworld""<<

....MY how are they going to cater for all us in the Nursing Home....

If it comes to that I'll settle for 'All around my hat' as everything will probably be over my head!

[Richard Tarleton]

Richard Tarleton mentioned Douglas Adams - yes, I have a lot of time for a writer who can describe drinks from a machine as "tasting almost, but not quite completely, unlike tea" - and who has such tempered optimism for all that technology has to offer that he can imagine a time when elevators can be given a "personality", and that this will inevitably mean that one of them will develop vertigo.

...and a rock star spending a year dead for tax reasons.....

[Bryn]

...and a rock star spending a year dead for tax reasons.....

... and SEPs.

[french frank]

Ah - but would you find the enthusiasm of others for those works "a bit tiresome"?

The 'enthusiasm/tiresomeness' would be quantitatively fairly insignificant, so probably not.

As with most things here I, like everyone, am only speaking of what is or is not of interest to me or to my taste. I shall never discover whether Terry Pratchett is a great/ marvellous/genius writer, as the idea of "a comic fantasy book series … set on the fictional Discworld, a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle" [viz. the Cosmic turtle] will never appeal to me.

Looking up 'magic realism' I was surprised to find Borges included.

[un barbu]

This thread has been most enjoyable. Teaching English for thirty years and running a school bookshop opened my eyes to many genres I might never have considered. My schoolboy assistants in the bookshop urged me to try Pratchett (so glad I did) and other pupils urged me to try Pullman (so glad I did.) I think the boys may have done more for my literary tastes than I did for theirs ( 'Old Mortality' did NOT go down well with an A level set). I have just finished reading, for about the fourth time, John Gross's 'The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters' and this thread was very much in my mind when reading his nicely acerbic account of the baneful influence of Dr Leavis.

[DracoM]

John Gross was my tutor! Good Grief!!
Pullman absolutely, Patrick Ness - 'A Monster Calls' is a shortish way in, but there is another huge and absorbing trilogy 'Chaos Waling' that repays handsomely.

[un barbu]

Thank you for the Patrick Ness recommendation. I'll look into that with interest.

[aeolium]

What I have just finished reading is Jenny Uglow's new biography of Edward Lear, Mr Lear, A Life of Art and Nonsense. I think it is a very fine study of his life and work, which while not displacing the excellent biography by Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (now nearly half a century old), provides a different perspective, the benefit of access to more recently available material, and the advantage of a great number of beautiful illustrations in both colour and monochrome.

What a tremendous legacy Lear leaves in his nonsense creations, his ornithological paintings and his landscape art! Uglow provides an essentially chronological survey of his life, predominantly relying on his surviving letters and diaries, and tracing his almost compulsively itinerant career. She dovetails the nonsense poems with the life events which they accompanied and in many cases reflected (e.g. the explosive second part of Mr & Mrs Discobbolos being written during a furious battle being fought by Lear against the construction of a new hotel just below his villa in San Remo). My only very minor quibble is that so much of the life is seen from the point of view of Lear through his letters and diaries, and we see relatively little of how his many friends viewed him - perhaps that is a problem of availability of material, as a lot of the letters received by Lear (and he received a great many) may well have been destroyed. His two great friendships were with Frank Lushington and Emily Tennyson, and there was a slim possibility of marriage later in life with Gussie Bethell, but it seems as though Lear's temperament made him seek company but distrust intimacy. His life was a predominantly sad one - plagued by epilepsy, fearing loneliness, always beset by worries about money - but interspersed with episodes of delight and pleasure.

One quality of Lear's I had not been so aware of, and which came out in this book, was his love of song. When a guest at his friends' houses he would frequently sing either settings of his own nonsense poems or settings of other poems, like Tennyson's. Some of his settings are included in The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, but he sometimes used other music. For instance, "How Pleasant To Know Mr Lear" is supposed to be sung to the tune "How Cheerful Along The Gay Mead" from Arne's oratorio, The Death of Abel.

Just as he would be painstaking about getting his ornithological or landscape paintings just as he wanted them, sometimes his nonsense poetry would cause him much trouble too. There is an illustration of the manuscript version of "Some Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly" which shows many amendments, crossings-out and annotations, indicating that the seeming inevitable rightness of the poem was the product of much labour.

This is a delightful and informative book which I would recommend to anyone interested in the life and work of this great Victorian polymath.

[Conchis]

William Maxwell - So Long, See You Tomorrow

[french frank]

William Maxwell - So Long, See You Tomorrow

I bought five Maxwell novels a few years back, including SLSYT. Quite enjoyed at the time but never since revisited.

[gurnemanz]

Just finished:Jessica Duchen - Ghost Variations. The strange story of the reappearance of Schumann's Violin Concerto. Thoroughly recommendable with lots of fascinating background detail, spiced with a little added fictional invention.

Now halfway through: Lara Feigl - The Bitter Taste of Victory. Post-defeat Germany with a cultural slant. Her prodigious research makes it a riveting read. I thought I knew about this period but there seems to be something new on almost every page.