Originally posted by Bryn
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That wouldn't be too difficult! -
I was being gentle because I think there might just be a fan of the fatter tome here if soubriquets get shared with Amazon customer reviewers.Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostComment
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I have just come across the National Welsh Library series of novels from Aberystwyth University Press and reading Border Country by Raymond Williams. It is a masterpiece and so redolent of time and place. The language is so carefully chosen, so spare and yet so evocative. Seriously great read by a craftsman depicting all sorts of borders....Comment
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Raymond Williams - now there's a name from my literary studies past. Hadn't heard it for a while - had forgotten (or didn't know) that he was also a novelist.Originally posted by Harris in A View Post
[Welcome, Harris in A
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It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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What to take to the café today to read until the food appeared? I picked off my bookshelf a novel only partly read some years ago: The Revolution in Tanner's Lane, by 'Mark Rutherford' (William Hale White). Reading a review by an enthusiast makes me determined to persevere for longer than I did the first time. Like the reviewer, I picked up my copy in a secondhand bookshop (£3.99, marked down from £6 - at which price it presumably didn't sell), attracted by a title and author unknown to me.
Not sure of the date of my copy, but is the Tenth Edition, published in London by T. Fisher Unwin, Adelphi Terrace, probably c 1910 (written in 1887).It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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Appropriate to the time, reading Ben MacIntyre's Operation Mincemeat. Maybe not a literary treasure, but obviously thoroughly researched.
Looking forward to starting The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie. It's about playground rhymes, argot and other outside-the-classroom sayings...apparently fascinating for its regional differences and similarities.Comment
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1939, the year in East Anglia.Comment
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Lord of the Rings / vol 2 / TolkienComment
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Just about to start The Guermantes Way in the Vintage Enright imprint, having finished the first 2 parts (Kilmartin after Scott Moncrieff) in a battered, rapidly-disintegrating ancient Penguin. A La Recherche is, notwithstanding its acute dissections of memory & sensory impressions, also just about the funniest book I've ever read, though it does require, as others have commented, considerable stamina of the reader...& oodles of free time...Comment
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... v happy to see people here enjoying Proust - and I so agree with Maclintick that it's one of the funniest things (wch I certainly didn't expect when I first dipped my toes in it half a century ago - I knew it was Big and Important and wd probably Do Me Good : but no-one told me how funny it was... ). The various times I've done it in English it was with the Scott Moncrieff / Scott Moncrieff - Kilmartin versions : I have tried the 'new' viking/penguin six volume set that came out in about 2005, but found it flat and clunky. In French the old 3 vol pleiade is to my mind a better read than the recent four vol edition.
Nowadays I no longer feel the need to 'read it all the way through' - lazily I dwell on my favourite bits : Illiers/Combray, Cabourg/Balbec, the world of the Guermantes, the final sections. I can't always face the endless acres of the Albertine saga...
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OMG ! -- as those of tenderer years than mine are wont to exclaim. Your tantalising & brief description re "the Albertine saga", which I have yet to read, portends an experience more potentially laden with ennui than the 200-odd pages of Swann's pitiful and incomprehensible infatuation with the appalling Odette ? Perhaps I should give up, now...Originally posted by vinteuil View PostComment
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I'd have to say I tend towards M. Vinteuil's opinion, or taste. Françoise is one of the great comic creations. I wonder whether Proust had read Richard III, where the wily Buckingham advises the future king to feign unwillingness when the orchestrated 'crowd' clamours for him to accept the crown:Originally posted by Maclintick View Post
Play the maid's part: say No - but take it.
Marcel describes the family's arrival at Combray, greeted by Françoise. At Maman's signal, gripping his arm tightly, Marcel drops a coin into Françoise's hand 'confuse mais tendue' - embarrassed but (nevertheless) outstretched to accept it. Slightly demurring, but eagerly taking it?It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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Anne Victoria Roberts (The bestselling author of Liam's Story, apparently, which makes me wonder who the worstselling author of Liam's Story was!): Louisa Elliott.
A giveaway in the city library yesterday, and it looks an interesting diversion from the Tippett biography I'm also reading.Comment
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Have paused Proust after the first penguin volume, and caught up with a couple of shorter novels. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and Stoner by John Williams, both great even if Stoner is a bit of a downer. Went to a highly enlightening talk today about Alexander Baron, specifically a new collection of essays about him, so that will send me off to those of his I’ve not read.Comment
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Stoner is a lovely quiet book. One would not guess that Butcher's Crossing is by the same author. It is an enthralling Western that vividly captures the sublimity of the wilderness and has environmental themes that chime with today's issues.Originally posted by muzzer View PostComment
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