September Reading
kathy_t
4 years ago
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September reading
Comments (42)Finished "Far From the Madding Crowd" by Hardy the other day - enjoyed it and found that as the book progressed, it became harder and harder to put down and go and do âÂÂreal lifeâ things. I ended up doing a marathon read last night and was really immersed into Wessex and the lives of the villagers that Hardy had conjured up. What I was most interested in this read was the difference in vocabulary and references that Hardy uses in his writing. ItâÂÂs been a while since I have needed to do a âÂÂNew Words to Meâ blog post, but reading Hardy helped me to add a lot of new words to that list, along with loads of references to biblical and Greek/Roman myths. So -- why is it that more recent/modern writers tend to stick to the familiar vocabulary and images when other older ones didnâÂÂt? Yes, some modern writers do play a lot of with language (John Banville comes to mind), but generally speaking, there is not the range of vocabulary in more modern publications. (Perhaps itâÂÂs just the ones that IâÂÂve been reading?) Is it because the older (read: Victorian) writers wore their learning lightly and made these literary references assuming that the reader would know them? Or were these older writers being elitist and showing off their education to their readers? Would the average reader at the time of Hardy know his references to IxionâÂÂs punishment and when âÂÂthe sailors invoked the lost Hylas on the Mysian shoreâÂÂ? Or were his readers just as puzzled as I was (and hitting the books to find out more)? Another curious point is the link between the main female character -- Bathsheba Everdene -- and the more current heroic character of Katniss Everdeen in âÂÂThe Hunger GamesâÂÂ. I had wondered if there was a connection between the two, and in further research, it seems that HG author Suzanne Collins did name Katniss as a homage to the Bathsheba character -- both have strong independent characters that donâÂÂt always go down well in the society in which they live, both have similar romantic issues (Katniss/Peter (I think), and Bathsheba/Gabriel)⦠I wonder how many teen readers know that as the reference? Probably not too many, I would think, which is a shame as Hardy is a great read. ItâÂÂs a shame that more people donâÂÂt read more Hardy -- I think they think of him as writer of tragedy and sadness, but if you read his Wessex books, they are pretty light-hearted and funny at times. IâÂÂd almost classify Hardy as a rural more down-to-earth Jane Austen in some ways, but people tend to get stuck on the disastrous story of Tess and get scared off. TheyâÂÂre missing out. Apparently, David Nicholls has adapted a version of this for the BBC to play in autumn 2013. Maybe I can catch a bit of this when I visit in November......See MoreSeptember Reading
Comments (112)Siobhan - Thanks for agreeing to let me stay with you.. I think it would really be fun to have a meet-up with my RP friends at some point and your house sounds perfect. :-) I made the decision last night to yank the bookmark out of the Blackout book as I didn't actually care if the characters ever met up again since they were so incompetent about the whole thing. In its place, I picked up "Room" by Emma Donaghue which is great, fantastic, loving it. It's written from the perspective of a five-year old boy who has been born into a shed where his mother has been kept for seven years (a la those cases not too long ago where various people were kidnapped for years but escaped in the end..) It's really interesting how the author has imagined the boy to be and since it's from his perspective, you get to see what he sees; everything in the Room (the name of the shed) has a proper name for him: Wardrobe, Bed, Rug, and he rather thinks of them as living things. How will all fare when or if they escape? Rivetting book - I read half of it last night and now just want to go home and read it right now. Yes, that good. I hope it has a good/effective ending... Taking all my library books back to the library today bc none of them appeal right now. Thank goodness I didn't buy all of them. (I am keeping the ILLs, but ordinary books are going back there.)...See MoreSeptember reading
Comments (67)Vee, do you recall The Missing Will & A Dubious Codicil: A Double Autobiography by Michael Wharton? I finished it a week or so ago after noticing on the flyleaf where I had penciled in your name and the date 7 May 2006, probably because you reviewed it or at least mentioned it. Apparently, it took me more than eleven years to eventually get around to reading it! I should have suspected that Wharton had a wry, tongue-in-cheek style when I saw the title of the first chapter, "The Deformative Years." I wound up enjoying the second part, A Dubious Codicil, more than the first part because it covered the years he worked in Fleet Street writing the Peter Simple column for The Daily Telegraph (1957-1987, three or four times a week). Then he wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Telegraph for several years in the 1990s and then back to The Daily Telegraph for a weekly contribution. His last piece appeared there in January 2006, the month he died at age 92. Vee, did you follow Peter Simple? His glee at sticking his finger in the eyes of politicians and political junkies is hilarious to me (and infuriating, no doubt, to those who think politics should always be taken seriously but who are not so hidebound as to never read something that doesn't bolster their own opinions). Are there any Peter Simple-types left? I think I knew the young, female English reporter whose faux pas in 1974 was referring to Robert Mugabe as "Bob" to his face....See MoreSeptember 2022 - What are we reading?
Comments (58)I just finished two books. One is The Day They Shook the Plum Tree, the story of Hetty Green, her two children and what happened to her fortune. Hetty Green was known as The Witch of Wall Street and the richest woman in America, also a world-class miser and eccentric. I read this many years ago and her name came up recently so I read it again. Not academic but an interesting if unpleasant story. She inherited a fortune, partly made in the New Bedford whaling industry--I can't seem to escape whales this year--and made it into a mega-fortune. The other book is Every Life a Story by Natalie Jacobson, a news presenter in New England. Mildly interesting if you live locally. She is very well liked and a gubernatorial candidate who was mean to her during a TV interview lost the election because of it. Her four grandparents were Serbian immigrants to Chicago and that part was very interesting....See Moreannpanagain
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