What 📔book are you reading right now?

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

Well, keep an eye out -- you never know. 😉
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Hmm maybe it should be a different colour and have the word "POLICE" on it.

But it already says "TOELL OE\¿ _€"!

Rivendell_librarian said:

I've just started Shippey's Road to Middle Earth. The first chapter seemed to be a lot of Oxford academic nit-picking but I'm hoping it gets better. Also having come across the term Kafkaesque so often, I'm reading The Trial. Long paragraphs but fairly simple language. The difficulty is the surreal nature of some of the scenes. No spoilers on this book please! The surreal nature makes it more interesting.

I'm also reading a People's History of Christianity on the late ancient period. I've just read a fascinating chapter on children's toys and games of the period. There were no Xboxes, but there was hide and seek, blindman's bluff, board games, pebbles rather than marbles, dolls (which boys had as well), toy carts - sometimes drawn by caught mice!

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Ok well a remarkable two years later my episodic reading of this has finished. A lot of good stuff, a lot of academic philological stuff, a good balanced chapter on the films and a lot of vituperation against anyone (esp Philip Toynbee) who dared to criticise TLOTR and Tolkien's work more generally. Too vituperative for my liking but maybe that is the way of Oxford dons, though Shippey only spent a few years among the dreaming spires. I will definitely keep it and I'm sure will refer to it from time to time, but for me it's not a book to re-read once read, unlike its subject.

I'm beginning to think that Colin Dexter was right about Oxford and its many murders.

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

But it already says "TOELL OE\¿ _€"!

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I have no idea what those hard to read letters mean.

"AI".

Idril Celebrindal said:

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

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"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. "

'Polostan' by Neal Stephenson. Apparently the first in a series, and only 300 pages, which is very short by his standards!

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
I don't think I've read it since I was 9 years old, at most. I liked it a lot as a little kid, so I'll be interested to see what I think of it now.

Interesting read, and quite a bit different from the 2015 film that's based on it, not just in the motivation of the protagonist but in the events that occur.

I don't know if this is the place to post this; it is akin to Book Review but I think well worth reading especially for those of us who are often gently (or even not so gently) criticized by folks who don't understand the appeal of re-reading the familiar.
(And I thought the vintage photo was cool 😄)

From The Spectator

A good book is the best medicine​

by Susan Hill
One reads a book at 20 and it speaks or it doesn’t, but re-read it 60 years later and it has become a different book
Sunday, November 3, 2024


(Getty)

“And they lived happily ever after. The end.” “Again.” My poor father, bidden to read the story of the moment over and over again. Long after I could read perfectly well for myself, at bedtime I needed to hear his quiet monotone that never failed to send me to sleep, just as, though my taste in books was always adventurous, I had a narrow range of preferred stories at night, or if I was unwell.

When the shadows thrown by the lamp form themselves into monsters, familiar comforts are required. Alice in Wonderland was read until the words must surely have faded on the page, and if he missed a line I was on to it. When I began to read Ladybird books to my own children, the top choice was Chicken Licken and you know how boring that is, but for under-fives, repetition is all and they quickly learn the list of animals who went to tell the king that the sky was falling in...”

If you are a reader, the pleasures of returning to a familiar book never cease. When overtired, unwell, unhappy, then for diversion and solace, re-reading a well-loved book is as efficacious as medicine to soothe and restore.

You don’t have to be ill or stressed to enjoy the benefits, nor does the book have to be great literature, it just has to be therapeutic.... When I was in hospital for weeks at a time, I read new books, though more slowly and with less concentration than usual, but when I could not cope I turned to Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. It never failed me.

I read dozens of new books a year but want to re-read few, not because they are bad but because of my own age. Yes, one needs the stimulus of the new. The love of learning continues through the longest life; the excitement of discovering a new writing voice which impresses, startles, enriches
is one of the thrills of growing old.

...I am working hard to get to grips with the basics (operative word) of quantum physics and engineering and I try to read some Latin every day, because I love it, as well as to keep my brain sharp. I tried enthusiastically to study Greek, only to discover that while learning a whole new language at the age of eighty-three is one thing, a whole new alphabet is something else again.

One reads a book at twenty and it speaks or it doesn’t, but re-read it sixty years later and it has become a different book, even if you think you remember it well. Well, of course it hasn’t, it is you who are different. I simply did not understand Crime and Punishment or Middlemarch when I first encountered them, except on the most straightforward level. I was too young, I had no life experience to bring to my reading or to see the subtleties, the layers of meaning, the human ironies.

I did enjoy them or else I would have abandoned them, but enjoyment is only part of the point. I have re-read both in the past year and in some strange way, they have changed me, as all masterpieces can. I read most of Thomas Hardy’s novels as a very young woman and, re-reading several lately, I found that the best are so much better, in deeper ways than I could have understood then, while the less good have remained the same. I did not appreciate Henry James at all, except for The Turn of the Screw, until the past ten years or so. Now there’s a novelist for grown-ups. The message would seem to be, if you didn’t get on with it when you were a young reader, try again later. If you still don’t, you probably never will.

It’s the same story with art. I could not possibly have appreciated until my fifties at least the painting that now speaks to me more than any other: Masaccio’s overwhelming The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The opposite can apply, mind. I wallowed in King Lear at eighteen but I couldn’t go through it again now and anyway, I would always rather read a play than see it performed, when you often miss the best lines.

I will re-watch my favorite films — Casablanca, The Third Man, Gosford Park. You don’t need any others, though I sometimes think that if you have Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers, you never need to see any other film again.

Started A Court Of Thorns And Roses. I've heard very mixed reviews of it; some say the plot is good but the writing isn't, some say it's not worth reading all together and some love all of it. I decided I'd be the judge of that.

Down With The System by Serj Tankian

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

'Karla's Choice'

A 'new' George Smiley novel written by john Le Carre's son, Nick Harkaway.

It's set between 'The Spy who came in from the Cold' and 'Tinker, Tailor...'.

It's had very good write-ups so there may be more in the pipeline.

The Fountainhead. I'm planning to participate in the essay contest. It's been good so far.

Tyelkormo the Fair said:

The Fountainhead. I'm planning to participate in the essay contest. It's been good so far.

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I read The Fountainhead my sophomore year of high school ( I guess I was 16).
I went on to read Atlas Shrugged on my own when I was a junior.
A bunch of us in the same grade were Ayn Rand nuts.
Thank heavens I outgrew that ["Objectivism"] phase a few years later. 🙄

Deimos said:

I read The Fountainhead my sophomore year of high school ( I guess I was 16).
I went on to read Atlas Shrugged on my own when I was a junior.
A bunch of us in the same grade were Ayn Rand nuts.
Thank heavens I outgrew that ["Objectivism"] phase a few years later. 🙄

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Yeah I'm not really a big fan of her worldview either. It seems too small, if you get what I mean.

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, to give his full name, led a similarly full life: beyond publishing nearly 200 books, among other things, he was the pistol-shooting champion of Ireland, and invented an asymmetrical variant of chess. I'd recommend his best-known novel, to start with:
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I had, at one time, a book of illustrations by his favorite collaborator, Sidney Sime. A couple of examples:
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To bring another TTF favorite into the discussion, in 1977, two members of the British folk/rock fusion group Steeleye Span created an album based on the novel, and featuring no less than Christopher Lee as both the narrator and the king. Here's a cut:

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Right off the bat, I was kind of put off by the idea of this dude going to Elf-land and basically declaring, "Hi, King of Elf-land's daughter! I'm your new husband!" Or something like that. There's also his quest to kill a hart, which I likewise didn't find very interesting 😐

As far as his influence on Tolkien, Wikipedia cites a specific work that influenced a part of The Silmarillion.

I've only just found out about this book recently, having read that it's a Tolkien ripoff. I borrowed it from the library out of plain old curiosity and am about halfway through. It is a Tolkien ripoff, and McKiernan in the forward as much as admits it (though he cites other authors who inspired him). It's less of one than I expected, though. So far there's no equivalent of the One Ring. There are analogues to the hobbits, Morgoth and Sauron, but not particularly any of the protagonists, and there is yet to appear a Gandalf equivalent.

What strikes me more is how badly it's written. The author desperately wants to rush the exposition along, cramming it in at every given opportunity. The aim is to make it seem as if it's coming in the words or thoughts of the characters but this is not always achieved. Also, the hobbit takeoffs, called Warrows, are sold as these "doughty" warriors because they're good with bows. It's kind of hard to take this idea seriously. McKiernan also goes into loving detail about the heights of the Warrows and the colors of their hair and eyes. Also, Warrows is kind of a silly word. Why pick something that rhymes with 'arrows'? Or maybe that's the idea? But the author has other names for them as well: 'buccan', 'Waldfolc', 'Waerlinga' (the last one probably inspired by Tolkien's 'Eorlingas'). The names of these Warrows are all almost parodic in nature: Tuckerby Underbank, Danner Bramblethorn, Dorby Thistletwig. Okay, that last one I made up but it's not too far off the mark.

Anyway, it's the first book of three. I'm doubtful I will finish the trilogy, but I will finish this book. I can't decide which come off as worse, this or the Shannara books, which I liked upon first reading when I was a teenager, but which didn't appreciate well with time.

I started that one years ago, but couldn't make it past the first few pages. You're clearly a hardier reader than I am, Gunga Din. 😄