What are you reading now?

[Warwick]

Lord Byron

The Kindness Sisters, Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

The Legitimation of Belief by Ernest Gellner; another pre-owned delight from the big river - for a pittance you get a classic ... my word he starts of at full tilt ...

[Beef Oven!]

......another pre-owned delight from the big river - for a pittance you get a classic ...

My word, the wonders of entrepreneurial capitalism

[kernelbogey]

After having read Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections I recently read Freedom. He dissects how families operate, how character traits get handed down through generations and how we sometimes torture each other, or love each other too much. I've just re-read Freedom, to as much pleasure as the first reading. Both books are long reads, but terrific page turners.

[Le Beau Serge]

The Captive Mind ~ Czeslaw Milosz

ISBN: 0141186763

[aeolium]

I've just finished reading Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. It's a strange novel, in a strange style and a character that seems to me a mix of Regency, High Victorian and late Victorian. Much of the novel is taken up with a comedy of manners and satire on human behaviour as if we are in a story by Thomas Love Peacock (and Meredith was connected to the Peacock family as he knew and worked with TLP's son and married his widowed daughter-in-law) yet nothing really prepares the reader for the bleak conclusion as if one has moved into a novel by Hardy. The work was published in 1859 so contemporary with Dickens' Tale of Two Cities but I would have struggled to identify the period in which it was written simply from the style and content. Anyway, it was an interesting discovery for me.

[french frank]

The Captive Mind ~ Czeslaw Milosz
ISBN: 0141186763

Welcome M. Serge, btw. Miłosz is one writer I haven't caught up with (well, there are a lot, but I have read quite a few E.European works). Interesting résumé.

Meredith is another who has slipped through the net. RF appears to be a publisher's '3 volumes of the usual number of pages'. Available in the Project Gutenberg. Perhaps.

As it is, much more light-heartedly, I set out for lunch with a pocket RLS. Much enjoyed the essay Walking Tours:

"He [the walker] cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more delight." That strikes a chord.

[Pianorak]

Philip Roth: American Pastoral. Unlike eg Updike and Faulkner I find I can relate to the characters, and his prose is no uphill struggle. Am really looking forward to reading some more PR.

[johnb]

Sorry to lower the tone: Christopher Fowler - Seventy-Seven Clocks. One of Fowler's quirky Bryant & May detective stories.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

and on the subject of detective stories both Irene [Vol 1] and Alex [Vol 2]by Pierre Lemaitre have left me agog awaiting Vol 3's translation

[Radio64]

Peter Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor" .. apparently an "80s classic", in the Penguin decades series.

Creepy stuff.

[frankwm]

Presumably you have checked the BBC iPlayer 2003 programme (if available 'there'?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fcx70

"Peter Ackroyd joins James Naughtie and a group of readers to discuss his spooky novel Hawksmoor".

There was a very successful 2part adaptation (by Nick Fisher) on Radio 4, broadcast January 2001/108mins - recorded 'on location' - so was (is, if you have a copy!) very atmospheric,

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Peter Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor" .. apparently an "80s classic", in the Penguin decades series.

Creepy stuff.

- try The House of Doctor Dee and Chatterton and English Music, too, R64 (the last often found in the wrong section in Charity Shops!) - ooh, and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Ackroyd has written some excellent works of cultural history, but the novels of the decade 1985 - 1994 are superb works.


I've just finished Barnaby Rudge (only the second time I've evr read it - better than The Old Curiosity Shop, but not among my favourites of his works. Nicola Barker's Five Miles from Outer Hope is next - and the weather looks perfect for outdoor reading, too (I love Barker's work - Deadmans blew my socks off when I first read it on a holiday in the Lake District five years ago - and I'm really looking forward to this.)

And I'm still dipping deeply into Nicholas Howe's Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England; Essays in Cultural Geography. The title sounds rather dry, but Howe (who died just after he had finished the book) has a writing style that really puts flesh on the bare bones of what physical and intellectual life might have been like in the 7th - 10th Centuries.

[Radio64]

Thanks for the suggestions, chaps.

Yes, Bookclub programme available but only just started so I don't want to hear any spoilers!

Now I've seen his face I remember he did a good series on the telly on the Romantic poets .. seen on youtube.

[Petrushka]

Great Escaper by Simon Pearson.

A biography of Roger Bushell, 'Big X' of Stalag Luft 3 and the brains behind the 1944 Great Escape. A shadowy figure who here comes to life - and what a fascinating individual he was.

I'm a glutton for POW stories from the Second World War and here is one of the very best, excellently researched and written. I can't say I'd have liked Bushell very much but in the crucible of war he seems to have been exactly the right man you'd want at your side.