What 📔book are you reading right now?

[GrandeMeal]

I'm reading The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Both are good so far. It's very interesting to read about the friends of Tolkien and how they influenced one another.

 

[Olorgando]

I'm reading The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings ... It's very interesting to read about the friends of Tolkien and how they influenced one another.

For the Inklings, I very much recommend the book by JRRT's official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, "The Inklings" from 1978. It concentrates on the three "major Inklings", C.S. Lewis (the "gravitational center"), JRRT and Charles Williams. Carpenter mentions that there have been several writings on this supposed influencing each other, but concludes that any actual influence had been rather in a single direction. While JRRT and Lewis were Oxford dons, Williams worked for the Oxford University Press in their London offices. He and his colleagues had moved to Oxford in September 1939 due to WW II. Williams and Lewis had first made contact a bit over three years before. By the time Williams moved to London in 1939, he was 53 years old, while JRRT was 47 and C.S. Lewis not quite 41. The two older men, for several reasons besides their greater age, were not the types to be influenced easily - least of all by Lewis. Lewis at least once commented explicitly on this being difficult with regard to JRRT. The other way around, JRRT once commented that Lewis "was a very impressionable man". One indication of this, and Lewis shifting his "allegiance", can be seen in the discrepancy between the first two books of his science fiction "Cosmic (or "Space") Trilogy", "Out of the Silent Planet" from 1938 and "Perelandra" (also titled "Voyage to Venus") from 1943. While the third volume "That Hideous Strength" from 1945 is much closer in publication date to "Perelandra" than that to the first book, the third one differs from the first two in almost every conceivable way. Not in the least that THS, at just over 400 pages (in my single-volume paperback) is longer than OOTSP (144 pages) and P/VTV (200 pages) combined. Don't let that middle book's publication date fool you. Lewis wrote fast, and, to shift to his better-known publication, "The Chronicles of Narnia", he had finished that long before sensible publishers actually brought those seven books to the market. And during WW II, publication of books (every conceivable thing was rationed in the UK during that time, not the least paper) was on a way-back burner.

 

[GrandeMeal]

@Olorgando thank you for the recommendation & thoughts on this. I just bought Carpenter's book from Amazon and will be reading that next. I'll let you know what I think.

 

[Aldarion]

I am currently reading John Haldon - The Empire That Would Not Die. Quite an interesting read on Byzantine ablity to survive... and also rather illuminating on how Gondor could have managed the same feat during the Third Age.

 

[Olorgando]

@Olorgando thank you for the recommendation & thoughts on this. I just bought Carpenter's book from Amazon and will be reading that next. I'll let you know what I think.

I do not think Carpenter to be faultless (I do not think this about any of the authors writing about JRRT whose books I own), but certainly worth reading.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

I was annoyed by his specfic in the Tolkien bio. And some of the lacunae in the Letters -- I would especially have liked to read the Professor's full -- and hilarious! -- response to the Zimmerman treatment.

 

[Miguel]

Altered Carbon.

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

I finished Words of Radiance, Book 2 of the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, finally. I go through lulls where I'll read for weeks straight and then I go a while without reading so it takes me some time sometimes to finish a book. Before I start Book 3, I'm reading Blue Moon by Lee Child for something that's not fantasy/sci-fi.

Blue Moon (Jack Reacher, #24)

“This is a random universe,” Reacher says. “Once in a b…

www.goodreads.com

Any of my fellow GoodReads members, feel free to add me as a friend https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/18247300-patrick.

 

[Olorgando]

Humphrey Carpenter's 1978 "tri-biography" "The Inklings" (something re-read).

 

[Starbrow]

I just finished reading The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. It was a Christmas gift from my niece (also a Tolkien fan). It was a good read and now I have to get the rest of the books in the series.

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Currently reading The Haunting of Hill House, for something different.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Ooh -- read that as a kid! Ever seen the original movie?

 

[Olorgando]

Tom Shippey's 2000 "J.R.R. Tolkien - Author of the Century" (also a re-read).

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Ooh -- read that as a kid! Ever seen the original movie?

View attachment 6344

Nope, maybe I should. I didn't watch the Netflix series yet either but heard it was good.

 

[CirdanLinweilin]

Joan of Arc by Mark Twain.

CL

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Dune by Frank Herbert

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

Just getting into Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

The first few chapters describe the life and character of the Bishop of Digne, his sister and housekeeper. This is the bishop who fed and put up Jean Valjean for the night after he had been rejected by the rest of the town ... and allowed himto keep the silverware he stole adding the two silver candlesticks. Hugo describes him and his household beautifully before Valjean arrives. It is very well written.

 

[Olorgando]

Re-reading Tom Shippey's 2003 revised and expanded 3rd edition of his seminal book "The Road to Middle-earth", which I had ordered in April of last year.
This one concentrates on the aspect of JRRT being one of the leading philologists of the English language of the 20th century, something many critics, even those sympathetic to LoTR and his other works, seem to have serious trouble getting into their numbskulls.
"Author of the Century", which I mentioned above, has a different approach, showing that JRRT was very much a modern (though definitely not "modernist") author of the 20th century, a point also made forcefully by Verlyn Flieger in her 1997 "A Question of Time".

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Speaking of whom, I just started reading Flieger and Anderson's edition of On Fairy-stories. Interesting information -- for instance, I wasn't aware that no copy survives of the lecture as originally presented.

 

[Olorgando]

Currently in chapter 8 of Shippey's 2003 3rd edition of "The Road to Middle-earth". This is the one he revised most massively due to criticism by Flieger of "furor allegoricus" about JRRT's last self-published shortish story "Smith of Wootton Major" (1967). Wiki states that there is a 2005 edited edition by Verlyn Flieger - but I've had problems ordering another of her books before. Flieger does qualify her criticism (to her credit), because the surviving commentary on "Smith" by JRRT himself that she quotes does not settle the matter. She quotes JRRT's flat statement "This short tale is not allegory." But them he himself immediately qualifies this statement by saying "though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretation at certain points.", and actually provides an example himself. Flieger herself concludes that in this commentary by JRRT he is conducting "a running argument with himself on the question of whether the story is or is not an allegory" - without coming to a decision.