What are you reading now?

[Stanfordian]

Just started The Essex Serpent (courtesy of our local library).
After that will be Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (also courtesy of the library).
I need to see if they have Victoria and Abdul, too.

Library? Our's has shut!

I'm reading Hunter Davies 'The Co-Op's Got Bananas' - A Memoir of Growing Up in the Post-War North.

[Pulcinella]

Library? Our's has shut!

Yes, I think that we are quite lucky.
Here's its About us page:

https://www.exploreyork.org.uk/about-us/

[Pulcinella]

I'm even more impressed with Explore York!
I did not fully understand the catalogue entry for Victoria & Abdul (there was a record but with no copies) so asked at the main library just now when I was in town for lunch.
It turns out that that entry was for the previous (2010) edition, the copy of which they had 'discarded'.
But they were happy to order a brand new copy (rather surprisingly from Amazon) and will send me an email when it arrives at my local branch.
Not even a reservation fee to pay!

[Richard Tarleton]

I did not fully understand the catalogue entry for Victoria & Abdul (there was a record but with no copies) so asked at the main library just now when I was in town for lunch.
It turns out that that entry was for the previous (2010) edition, the copy of which they had 'discarded'.
But they were happy to order a brand new copy

The film effect

Finished Fiona Maddocks's Hildegard of Bingen. Not a huge amount about the music - a chapter, really, and interesting discussion reviewing the musicological takes on Hildegard's music over the last 100 years - she really only makes it into standard works of reference in the 1990s. The Feather on the Breath of God effect critical here. There is constant revisionism and re-revisionism about the extent Hildegard wrote/composed works attributed to her.

We are left with one name to which either truth or a concatenation of circumstances has attached these musical, literary and visionary offerings.....Through anonymity, Hildegard gathers power as the person without whom none of these things would have occurred and is in an ancient and proper sense their author. As the figure who by not existing would have caused their non-existence, she must be their one true begetter.................The Middle Ages does not offer us many names of the figures responsible for its magnificent artistic achievements and tends not to promote the reputation of its women....

The visions - migraine. A ground-breaker (women preaching ) but a religious conservative who preferred upper-class women in her establishment, she was feisty and combative when it came to firing off missives to archbishops, popes and emperors. But really - life in the 12th century pretty grim, thanks not least to the church. (It was to get worse in the 14th, with added plague and 100 Years War).

[Richard Tarleton]

Today's the day - new John Le Carré. Should be here shortly. I'll have to lay it down for a day or two for the sediment to settle after its journey before appreciating the bouquet in front of a log fire with a glass of something. He's been talking to James Naughtie on the Today programme (and I believe a longer version is on the website) - yesterday about himself, today about Smiley.

[cloughie]

Currently reading Tom Jones - not Fielding, his autobiography!

[Braunschlag]

Felix, The Railway Cat:)
The story of Huddersfield Station's 'Pest Control Officer'. Nothing deeply intellectual but it's enjoyable froth and I met Felix a couple of years ago lounging around the station.

[LMcD]

I've just finished 'A Change in Altitude' by Anita Shreve (one of my favourite authors). I'm also an admirer of William Boyd, having recently read (and greatly enjoyed) 'Ordinary Thunderstorms'

[DracoM]

Millennium People / JG Ballard

[Stanfordian]

Have two on the go:

a) 'A Life in the Day' by Hunter Davies. As with his previous autobiography 'The Co-Op's Got Bananas' it's so entertaining I don't want it to end.

b) 'To The Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-45'. A few pages each day of this second volume of diaries. A harrowing yet strangely uplifting read.

[un barbu]

"The Letters of Charles Lamb" in the two-volume Everyman edition of 1903 (picked up in Norwich last month for £4.25, I'm happy to say). I have just finished it with great pleasure. We read some of the essays at school but these show a different side to the man. I found his honesty, his courage, his kindness, and his self-sacrificing devotion to his sister very appealing.

[gurnemanz]

Have two on the go:


b) 'To The Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-45'. A few pages each day of this second volume of diaries. A harrowing yet strangely uplifting read.

I do agree with you. I got the diaries after reading LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii -The Language of the Third Reich). This was especially interesting for me as a fellow linguist who knows Dresden well and married a woman from Sachsen.

[Pulcinella]

I have just started my annual attempt to read the six books on the Man Booker shortlist, available at a good price (though a little bit more than it was last year) from The Book People: £39.99 inc p&p.

https://www.thebookpeople.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/qs_product_tbp?productId=867345&catalogId=10051&catId=153725

Does anyone else here do this, and are there any comments on this year's choices?

[eighthobstruction]

....I have just reread Christ Recrucified....Zorba the Greek....Report to Greco....and for the first time Freedom and Death by Nikos Kazantzakis....my favorite author. Report to Greco has become a book I just leave about the lounge and just read a few pages almost like an aperitif. It is an autobiography in the form of a novel, taking us from his youth to old age via all his philosophical journeys , roads, cul de sacs.... I love it, and the man, mainly because I see so much of myself in him - who couldn't. NK a great writer....I have never been to Greece or Crete, I wish I had, too late now really....
I have attempted Last Temptation of Christ and The Fratricides, but never got far with them....

[vinteuil]

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WNP Barbellion [1889-1919]. Having long been a fan of his 'The Journal of a Disappointed Man' am now enjoying the posthumously published 'Enjoying Life, and Other Literary Remains'. His essays - 'On Journal Writers', 'The Passion for Perpetuation', 'Possession' - contain many elements which prefigure Proust. I feel sure that French Frank, an admirer of Gissing's 'The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft' would enjoy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._N._P._Barbellion

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

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