The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Book Thread
Chanterais:
I'm starting a bookie thread. My exams are over next Friday, and after that, I anticipate sinking into the loving embrace of a delicious novel or ten while I eat bon bons in the bath and drink champagne from my high heels.
Carrying on from Henrypie's notes on reading the Forsyte Saga:
--- Quote ---The Forsytes are great. I really love them.
I don't know if all editions have a family tree as a frontispiece, but mine does, and, while it comes in handy initially, it also reveals some plot turns that I would rather not have known about in advance. It reminds me a little of when I read War and Peace: years before I read it, I had happened upon just the shortest snippet of the movie version, with Audrey Hepburn, and a major plot element had been revealed in just the seconds I saw. I was flipping channels, or it was in a documentary or something. I had forgotten it entirely for years, but then when I got into the book and became attached to the characters whose futures I had inadvertently learned about years before, I had this eerie deja-vu feeling about them. It actually made the experience all the more poignant. Kinda made me love them more because I knew something they didn't know. Sniff. I can imagine having had an eerie forefeeling with Brokeback Mountain, but in fact I didn't.
--- End quote ---
Something similar, but inverted: I had seen The Age of Innocence years ago, and liked it tremendously (I'm not safe around movies with hoop skirts and white gloves and fluttering fans), and then a couple of weeks ago I read the Wharton's novel. Knowing what happens to poor Countess Olenska (In my next life, I'm coming back with the name Countess Olenska) is just heartbreaking. Even though Wharton describes her as being brown-haired and not especially beautiful, I couldn't help but see a blondely delicate Michelle Pfeiffer in my mind's eye. I had that awful sense of dread that you describe - of inexorably being pulled towards an end you can't escape from.
Actually, come to think of it, I did have that same sense with Brokeback. I watched it feeling like I was digging my toes into the ground, trying to stop that awful inevitability.
I've also recently finished Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, which is fabulously delicious, and lesbolicious to boot. Yum Yum.
Oh, I'm being called to grill the pork chops. Will be back later.
In the meantime, what is everybody else reading and loving these days? Recommendations needed.
henrypie:
Yay!
Thanks for starting this thread, Adriana.
Other books I finished recently are The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Slaughterhouse-Five, the latter of which was kind of like salt in my Brokeback wound. Ow, ow. The former was good but didn't have quite the payoff I had hoped for. I've also been nibbling at The Woman at the Washington Zoo, a compilation of essays by the late Marjorie Williams. Also good. And I reread Pride and Prejudice lately.
I also can't resist petticoats, smelling-salts, dance cards, coaches and six, etc.
Chanterais:
Curious Incident has been on my list for a very long time. In fact, I own it.
Does that ever happen to you? Books that you know you should read, that everyone recommends, and that you know you'd probably love, but for some reason, you just can't make the commitment? It stares balefully at me every time I peruse my bookshelves. It and Madame Bovary and (oh god, I'm going to be killed here) Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer have all ganged up on me. For some reason, it never seems to be the right time, or I'm not quite in the right mood to launch in. Strange, isn't it?
I Wikipedia'd Slaughterhouse-Five, because although I'd heard of it, it's one of thse books that just hasn't come across my radar before. In the blurb, I came across the quote "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." Holy depressing, Batman! Ennis del Mar much? Should I put it on the list, or will it make me want to slit my wrists? I mean, I'm up for some healthy masochism, but a girl can only take so much. Yea or Nay?
I know, I love rereading Austen. Even Mansfield Park, with stupid old Fanny Price, who has got to be the lamest character she ever commited to paper, is worth another go round. I backpacked around Asia for six months a couple of years ago, and I brought with me a Complete Works of Austen. A hefty brick of a book, it was worth its weight: comforting and funny and subtle in all the right ways. When smiling at strangers in turbans gets to be just too much, Jane is a good friend to have.
henrypie:
My grandparents gave me a 1906 complete Jane Austen in 10 volumes. Sits above all the other books, haughty and dusty. But I take em down and dust them off from time to time. They're not leatherbound -- just cloth -- but the paper is nice and cottony, and acid-free. Boo acid! I've never taken them abroad.
I loved Slaughterhouse-Five and would recommend it, no matter what. It's a killer but in a lighthanded way -- it'll only kill you if you let it, and I suspect many don't let it. But I don't know about that.
Speaking of Slaughterhouse-Five, one of my all-time favorite books is Catch-22 (I like hyphens). Now THAT was a killer, at least at the time. Gosh, I'd love to write my next essay about the two of them (you know, for the English class I'm not enrolled in).
(Someone snarky and wise once said there's no satisfaction like escaping a book which everyone else is reading.)
isabelle:
I'd recommend "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt, if you like to cry. I loved that book, it haunted me for days/weeks after finishing it. It is about growing up in Ireland from the 1920's onwards. Lots of humour AND emotions.
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