What are you reading now?

[amateur51]

Ah thanks....it's Sophie Parkin....Mollies daughter....now Molly, I bet that's an interesting biography....she gave a very good Desert Island Discs a couple of years ago....thanks Am51....I'll have remember and wait for the paper back or possibly get my library on the case....though it would look daft on the shelves along with the celebrity trash that would also be there....

La Parkin has indeed led a very interesting life. Do you know Dan Farson's book about his life in Soho? - he was a one-time member of the Colony Club and an early TV sleb ...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Normal-Autobiography-Daniel-Farson/dp/0006383262/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385580429&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=Farson+Alnost+a+normal+man

[Dphillipson]

Percival Elliott, a youngish American author publishing for the last 10 or 15 years, wholly new to me, discovered probably through www.aldaily.com: a distinct "voice" and the sort of chap you would like to know, a rare bird, with one foot in literary academe and the other in black consciousness.

[amateur51]

Percival Elliott, a youngish American author publishing for the last 10 or 15 years, wholly new to me, discovered probably through www.aldaily.com: a distinct "voice" and the sort of chap you would like to know, a rare bird, with one foot in literary academe and the other in black consciousness.

What a remarkable site, Dphillipson - thanks for that. But I'm not having much luck with finding 'Percival Elliott' - google offers me Elliott Percival' and sundry others. Could you help out with a title or a link, please?

[Alain Maréchal]

My books are partly packed for an impending removal ("decluttering" is the current usage) so I am resisting the purchase of new books and forcing myself to concentrate on the unpacked bookshelves. This means that I am having a wonderful time serendipitously rereading lots of books that I first came to know when much younger but have not read recently. Its good to reacquaint myself with Evelyn Waugh: I do read Brideshead Revisited and the Men at Arms trilogy regularly but probably haven't picked up Scoop for forty years. Angus Wilson: does anybody agree that Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a much-undervalued novel? Gore Vidal - rereading the history cycle in chronological, rather than published order, which means I have to buy a new copy of Washington DC since he rewrote it to tie up the loose ends. Anthony Powell. I look at the Trollopes and turn aside (which sounds like a character out of Powell at the Regents Palace Hotel), but for some reason I seem to have three copies of Trollope mere's Domestic Manners of the Americans - and I've never read it.

[french frank]

Angus Wilson: does anybody agree that Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a much-undervalued novel?

You certainly don't hear much of him these days. I did enjoy ASA but haven't read it for years.

I seem to have three copies of Trollope mere's Domestic Manners of the Americans - and I've never read it.

She has quite a sense of humour. One line is engraved in my memory: "And thus expired the Phrenological Society of Cincinnati."

[Alain Maréchal]

There's a slightly batty anthropologist in ASA who maintains that the arrival of Christianity in Britain threatened the status of the pagan priesthood, so they all became Christian priests and incorporated their rituals into the mass, hence genuflections and gestures (which I believe in some irreverent quarters is known as the Hokey-Cokey) and the "eastward postion" facing the rising sun. So when the mass is celebrated its the pagan worship that is being continued. Its a persistent idea, once you've read it.

[Richard Tarleton]

Just finished Robert Harris An Officer and a Spy, a fictionalised account of the Dreyfus Affair but closely based on fact, and told in the first person by Colonel Picquart. A great read but a depressing and horrific tale. As the blurb says, "Compelling too are the echoes for our modern world: an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, and the age-old instinct of those in power to cover up their crimes". I first came across the Dreyfus Affair when studying for A level history, but Harris brings it to life as never before.

Also: Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy - Chestnuts, Economy and Culture - by Paolo Squatriti. It starts with a natural history of the chestnut (in the past its spread around the Mediterranean was largely attributed to the Romans, but pollen studies reveal it was present in suitable habitat since the last glaciation), and goes on to its economic and cultural significance in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It was (and still is - witness the annual chestnut festivals in Spain and Italy) cultivated for its nuts or its wood (though managed differently for each). The nuts were dried and ground to a flour [more productive per hectare than wheat], the tree provided beams for housebuilding, the grass under the trees were grazed by sheep, goats and cattle, fallen nuts by pigs, and chestnut coppice was used for firewood and vine stakes.

Here's an extract from a fascinating section on the colour chestnut - people had to understand what you meant by it before it became widely used:

In ancient Latin there was no word for brown. The colour itself, obviously, existed all over the place, and it had been in the human palette since the Palaeolithic, when people first made representations of reality. However, brown did not strike Roman people as a distinct colour. Brown was at the most a kind of red...

...Post-classical people took two approaches to understanding light and therefore colour, both weighted with theological consequences...[was it immaterial and divine, or material, object and lowly matter]

....It is on fact in texts from the Carolingian epoch that chestnut first appears as a designation of colour. In order for the chromatic references to have carried meaning for the readers, the semantic field of "chestnut" as a colour must by 800 or so have been fairly stable and well established....

[amateur51]

Just finished Robert Harris An Officer and a Spy, a fictionalised account of the Dreyfus Affair but closely based on fact, and told in the first person by Colonel Picquart. A great read but a depressing and horrific tale. As the blurb says, "Compelling too are the echoes for our modern world: an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, and the age-old instinct of those in power to cover up their crimes". I first came across the Dreyfus Affair when studying for A level history, but Harris brings it to life as never before.

Recently I've finished Piers Paul Read's The Dreyfus Affair which is a factual account, fascinating and grim in equal measure. I'll certainly look out for the Robert Harris on your recommendation, RT

[Tevot]

An Officer and a Spy sounds pretty enticing. I'll look out for it. Fatherland was a superb read and I really enjoyed Polanski's adaptation of The Ghost.

I'm currently reading Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.

[teamsaint]

not so much reading, as looking at.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Chris van Allsburg.

Beautiful.

[DracoM]

Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.

PTSD big style in the Iraq War from a quiet, sensitive American soldier who suffered badly. Novel. Rich, not for the squeamish, sobering and brilliant. Riveting.

[amateur51]

Some good news for Simenon fans ...

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-publish-75-maigret-novels.html

[vinteuil]

Some good news for Simenon fans ...

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-publish-75-maigret-novels.html

... indeed good news for Simenon fans. Tho' perhaps by doling out these works in chronological order (as they seem to be doing) not every one will appreciate how good Simenon can be - the earliest works are not necessarily the strongest. Altho' the characteristic existential bleakness kicks in pretty soon with M Gallet...

I am glad they seem to be planning on the non-Maigret books too - many of these are his best works. For example - Au bout du rouleau, Le Bourgmestre de Furnes, La fenêtre des Rouet, Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire, Les Gens d' en face, L' homme qui regardait passer les trains, L' horloger d' Everton, Les inconnus dans la maison, La neige était sale ...

[amateur51]

... indeed good news for Simenon fans. Tho' perhaps by doling out these works in chronological order (as they seem to be doing) not every one will appreciate how good Simenon can be - the earliest works are not necessarily the strongest. Altho' the characteristic existential bleakness kicks in pretty soon with M Gallet...

I am glad they seem to be planning on the non-Maigret books too - many of these are his best works. For example - Au bout du rouleau, Le Bourgmestre de Furnes, La fenêtre des Rouet, Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire, Les Gens d' en face, L' homme qui regardait passer les trains, L' horloger d' Everton, Les inconnus dans la maison, La neige était sale ...

In an age where so many crime writers feel the need to write at such length that you could steadyalmost any wobbly table with the latest of the output, it is great that Penguin are re-publishing Simenon's slim masterpieces at a reasonable price - Messrs Waterstones are offering to deliver them post free at around a fiver. (yes that's Waterstones, not Amazon

[vinteuil]

it is great that Penguin are re-publishing Simenon's slim masterpieces at a reasonable price - Messrs Waterstones are offering to deliver them post free at around a fiver. :

... 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: