And the winner is.....
Well, I have as usual read mangled extracts from a number of books (including the dreadful Harold Fry), and I finally finished Parade's End which was impressive, but occasionally confusing. I started reading Ragnarok by AS Byatt which I found horrific. Her incredibly irritating babyish style, describing herself in the third person as the thin child is pretty nauseating - and oh yes, how very much superior the Norse Gods are to any other kind of mythology... I am hoping for some sort of revelation, but doubt it I can finish it.
Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss, - too depressing, not in the mood for reading about lonely people, living subdued low-key lives in the sub-Continent. I have read The God of Small Things - been there, done that... no, I'm being rude, I didn't give it the chance. But I can see the concrete-floored kitchens and the low oil light and the cockroaches scampering away - and I have heard the tales of failed trips to Europe and so on, and I don't want to be stuck there hearing them again. Perhaps I should try a bit more, but I'm not sure. I also started Antonia Fraser's biog of Marie Antoinette, which I was beginning to enjoy enormously - but I cast it aside in favour of a re-read of Anna Karenina - prompted by the astonishing revelation that no one else in the book group (except perhaps Anne B) had read it - and I read it when I was 16.
I started it two days ago - and I remembered that when I read it before I read it in two days - because in that era I could sit and read for two days - and no one would ask me not to. I was on hols at the time, just after O-levels. So far I am loving it. The writing is perfect, the characters are interesting, one wants to know more about them. I am really quite excited, and I have the feeling I am reading a "proper book". This is not because it is a major classic - but because it is so well-written and engaging and one has no feeling "oh dear, this is a bit tired, thin, old hat." I wonder if I will feel that by the end. At the moment I am not feeling much sympathy for Vronsky or Anna - although she has only just arrived, because Tolstoy's description of her is a bit too good to be true.
It's interesting about repeated motifs in books (railway accidents in AK) - sometimes they can be very effective, but Ford M Ford goes in for repeated phrases - "some do not" "a man could stand up" and bangs them into the text periodically to make damn sure one doesn't forget the book's title. I am surprised he didn't call one of the four "pulling the cords on the shower curtains" since he repeats that phrase so often - I think it refers to an old style of shower - where all the water cascades down at once. I found it a bit clumsy - but perhaps the constant repetition was designed for the hard of thinking/memory. On the other hand there were lots of things I really liked (only because they are similar to some of the things I have done in TRF) and some amazingly experimental writing in places - not all of which worked, but at least the experiment was done. Parts of the book were less than totally intelligible - and the language included lots of slang - helpful for my research - so it required full attention.
For some reason I have been reading a great deal this month - probably because I have not been doing enough writing - and it has been great, especially since none of it, apart from Parade's End has been for research. Finally, I am also reading a book about geology - which is not to hand and which I cannot remember the name of The Rocks Remain: An Autobiography of the Earth... the second half of the title, not the first I think - rocks don't exactly remain, as metamorphic rocks illustrate. But it's by an American professor called Marcia Norwegianbrugen... and I probably understand only about 80% of it, but I am hoping what I read will integrate itself with my current sketchy outline of geology and create a more substantial structure.
Well, I have as usual read mangled extracts from a number of books (including the dreadful Harold Fry), and I finally finished Parade's End which was impressive, but occasionally confusing. I started reading Ragnarok by AS Byatt which I found horrific. Her incredibly irritating babyish style, describing herself in the third person as the thin child is pretty nauseating - and oh yes, how very much superior the Norse Gods are to any other kind of mythology... I am hoping for some sort of revelation, but doubt it I can finish it.
Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss, - too depressing, not in the mood for reading about lonely people, living subdued low-key lives in the sub-Continent. I have read The God of Small Things - been there, done that... no, I'm being rude, I didn't give it the chance. But I can see the concrete-floored kitchens and the low oil light and the cockroaches scampering away - and I have heard the tales of failed trips to Europe and so on, and I don't want to be stuck there hearing them again. Perhaps I should try a bit more, but I'm not sure. I also started Antonia Fraser's biog of Marie Antoinette, which I was beginning to enjoy enormously - but I cast it aside in favour of a re-read of Anna Karenina - prompted by the astonishing revelation that no one else in the book group (except perhaps Anne B) had read it - and I read it when I was 16.
I started it two days ago - and I remembered that when I read it before I read it in two days - because in that era I could sit and read for two days - and no one would ask me not to. I was on hols at the time, just after O-levels. So far I am loving it. The writing is perfect, the characters are interesting, one wants to know more about them. I am really quite excited, and I have the feeling I am reading a "proper book". This is not because it is a major classic - but because it is so well-written and engaging and one has no feeling "oh dear, this is a bit tired, thin, old hat." I wonder if I will feel that by the end. At the moment I am not feeling much sympathy for Vronsky or Anna - although she has only just arrived, because Tolstoy's description of her is a bit too good to be true.
It's interesting about repeated motifs in books (railway accidents in AK) - sometimes they can be very effective, but Ford M Ford goes in for repeated phrases - "some do not" "a man could stand up" and bangs them into the text periodically to make damn sure one doesn't forget the book's title. I am surprised he didn't call one of the four "pulling the cords on the shower curtains" since he repeats that phrase so often - I think it refers to an old style of shower - where all the water cascades down at once. I found it a bit clumsy - but perhaps the constant repetition was designed for the hard of thinking/memory. On the other hand there were lots of things I really liked (only because they are similar to some of the things I have done in TRF) and some amazingly experimental writing in places - not all of which worked, but at least the experiment was done. Parts of the book were less than totally intelligible - and the language included lots of slang - helpful for my research - so it required full attention.
For some reason I have been reading a great deal this month - probably because I have not been doing enough writing - and it has been great, especially since none of it, apart from Parade's End has been for research. Finally, I am also reading a book about geology - which is not to hand and which I cannot remember the name of The Rocks Remain: An Autobiography of the Earth... the second half of the title, not the first I think - rocks don't exactly remain, as metamorphic rocks illustrate. But it's by an American professor called Marcia Norwegianbrugen... and I probably understand only about 80% of it, but I am hoping what I read will integrate itself with my current sketchy outline of geology and create a more substantial structure.
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