What are you reading now?

[vinteuil]

The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid'
there. There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment. The
young pianist would play, but only if he felt inclined, for no one was
forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: "We're all friends
here. Liberty Hall, you know!"

If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Prelude
to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was
displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an
impression. "Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite
well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm in for.
Tomorrow, when I want to get up--nothing doing!"

Les Verdurin n'invitaient pas à dîner : on avait chez eux «son couvert mis ». Pour la soirée, il n'y avait pas de programme. Le jeune pianiste jouait, mais seulement si «ça lui chantait», car on ne forçait personne et comme disait M. Verdurin : «Tout pour les amis, vivent les camarades!» Si le pianiste voulait jouer la chevauchée de La Walkyrie ou le prélude de Tristan, Mme Verdurin protestait, non que cette musique lui deplût, mais au contraire parce qu'elle lui causait trop d'impression. «Alors vous tenez à ce que j'aie ma migraine ? Vous savez bien que c'est la même chose chaque fois qu'il joue ça. Je sais ce qui m'attend. Demain quand je voudrai me lever, bonsoir, plus personne!»

[vinteuil]

... and I'm sure I've commented on this on these very boards before now - but surely in the Verdurins Proust was shamelessly stealing from the Veneerings in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend ??

"Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.
For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings - the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky."


... and for Dickens's Twemlow, Proust gives us, more cruelly, Saniette...

[AjAjAjH]

Mrs AjAjAjH is reading 'Bring up the Bodies' by Hilary Mantel. I bought it for her for Christmas.

[Mandryka]

Before plunging into my next 'biggie' (Andrey Bely's 'Petersburg'), I'm having a brisk canter through Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Before plunging into my next 'biggie' (Andrey Bely's 'Petersburg'), I'm having a brisk canter through Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground.

Psycho-Pooter! I read this earlier this year and greatly enjoyed it.

[Mandryka]

Psycho-Pooter! .

Exactly!

[vinteuil]

Thackeray: The Book of Snobs.

[Nick Armstrong]

Thackeray: The Book of Snobs.

I just cycled past his house, on Albion Street, W2....

[vinteuil]

I just cycled past his house, on Albion Street, W2....

... does it get a blue plaque? he was there briefly (1837, I think) before moving to 13 Great Coram Street (1838-1843), and then (after Paris and other wanderings) on to 13 Young Street (1846-1853), 36 Onslow Square (1854-1862), 2 Palace Green (1862-1863). I wonder if they all get blue plaques? Perhaps when the rain abates Caliban can do a bicycle run to determine this for the record...

[Nick Armstrong]

... does it get a blue plaque? he was there briefly (1837, I think) before moving to 13 Great Coram Street (1838-1843), and then (after Paris and other wanderings) on to 13 Young Street (1846-1853), 36 Onslow Square (1854-1862), 2 Palace Green (1862-1863). I wonder if they all get blue plaques? Perhaps when the rain abates Caliban can do a bicycle run to determine this for the record...

No need - Albion Street has a blue plaque, that's how I know he lived there. http://openplaques.org/plaques/2821

Just round the corner from Sir Giles Gilbert Scott http://openplaques.org/plaques/240 and W.H. Smith http://openplaques.org/plaques/315

And WMT has blue plaques at Palace Green and Onslow Square too: http://openplaques.org/people/509

[vinteuil]

... I just thought the bicycle ride might do you good !

[Nick Armstrong]

... I just thought the bicycle ride might do you good !

In this rain?



However, I know you have my best interests at heart!

PS: I see you said: after this rain abates...

[Stanfordian]

It normally takes me around 3 to 6 months to read a book.
My spare time is almost always spent listening to music and I can't read and concentrate on the music at the same time.
I have however recently finished reading this for the second time.



I expect many on here are familiar with this super book.

Hiya EdgeleyRob,

I enjoy the Parry biography by Dibble book too. I also love Dibble's Stanford biography too and the biography by Paul J. Rodmell. If you enjoy reading about the composers/pupils at the RCM as I do, for the insights given I strongly suggest the 'A Rebecca Clarke Reader' by Laine Curtis on Indiana Univ Press.

[Richard Tarleton]

Eleanor Perényi's 1974 biog of Liszt, picked up in a second hand bookshop. An excellently told tale, though she only goes up to 1861, and I see she had a spat in the New York Review of Books with Robert Craft who gave it a hostile review (largely it seems for not being a different sort of book). A musicologist she isn't, but she writes with great perceptiveness about Liszt and the French Romantics, and Liszt's women - Marie d'Agoult, Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein and George Sand, with whom he didn't have an affair but jolly well should have done, he'd have had a much more entertaining time than he did with the wretched Marie. It was Liszt who introduced her to Chopin.

I'd always assumed, vaguely, that Marie was a woman wronged, but on closer acquaintance (and on a reading of her correspondence) she was an appalling woman, utterly unable to appreciate Liszt's particular musical genius and totally resentful of it. She wrote a novel, Nélida (an anagram of her pen name Daniel Stern) which was a character assassination of Liszt (thinly disguised as a useless painter, herself as, er, a beautiful countess), which was nevertheless taken as factually accurate by Ernest Newman in his disgraceful book "The Man Liszt".

It has been observed that Liszt has been ill-served by his biographers - a genial but amateurish effort by Sacheverell Sitwell, and the above Newman, both of which I'd read previously. Alfred Brendel said there was no composer he'd rather meet.

[Resurrection Man]

"The Hydrogen Sonata" by Iain M Banks