I ended the book with a sense of empathy for the devil!
Then you are ready for ** you do not have permission to see this link ** which native Russians tell me best captures Bulgakov’s “feel”. The Penguin version at the first link has the advantage of being fully annotated and helps with some of the “inside jokes” that non-Russians just won’t get.
With more enthusiasm than good planning I recently began reading Charles Dicken’s novel Bleak House. It has been ages since I read Dickens but I didn’t want to simply reread* an old favorite** no matter how much I’d enjoyed them. BH is a long novel, over a thousand pages, and while that itself doesn’t put me off, it does mean it will take some time and commitment to finish the book. The problem is I haven’t got far enough in yet to achieve total commitment. I can see myself putting it aside during the hubbub of the holidays and never going back to it. (I have incipient literary ADD which means I have a hard time reading systematically and usually can only deal with what is right in front of my face.) The Charles Dickens BH moment might simply pass. But it’s not like I’m going to brood about it. Just the opposite. It’s more likely I’ll see my copy in March and only then realize I never got back to it.
Perhaps this very post is an inoculation against forgetfulness.
*At some point I would like to reread Thomas Hardy & the Brontes
**Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, Great Expectations
*At some point I would like to reread Thomas Hardy & the Brontes
My high school English teacher, who was the biggest influence on my intellectual development, was a big Thomas Hardy fan. We read several of his books over the two years in her class. They were excellent books. I don’t think he gets modern recognition in the way he deserves.
TTHorne56 said
*At some point I would like to reread Thomas Hardy & the BrontesMy high school English teacher, who was the biggest influence on my intellectual development, was a big Thomas Hardy fan. We read several of his books over the two years in her class. They were excellent books. I don’t think he gets modern recognition in the way he deserves.
I was scarred for life by being given Jude the Obscure as my introduction to Hardy in high school. Undoubtedly Jude is a fine novel but is that really what you want to give a teenager first? I subsequently read the others but never really had a proper appreciation of Hardy. But a few years ago I found a cassette tape containing an english actor reading Hardy’s poetry and letters and selections from his novels and it really penetrated. So I think I’m ready for a fresh look. If you were going to pick a Hardy novel to begin with which one would it be?
Interesting. I did some research on Jude the Obscure just to refresh my recollection, then returned here and found your response. I think I can understand the issues with reading his very last book as an introduction to his writing. If I recall correctly, we read Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure in that order, the first in junior year and the second in senior year. To specifically answer your question, I would recommend Return of the Native. The overall themes, primarily the stultifying effects of English class structure and religious intolerance, are basically the same, but much less scandalously presented.
Jill_L said
Have you tried Dicken’s original short novel A Christmas Carol from which a veritable cultural industry has sprung? It’s very good and its familiarity might be your way back in.This is excellent advice. No time soon, though.
Thinking about it though, I am getting a mind’s eye recollection of having read it!
Thinking about it though, I am getting a mind’s eye recollection of having read it!
Or is it that you’ve seen one of the two dozen plus movies made from it? The reason I bring it up is that part of my own Christmas ritual every year is to rewatch the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge. I am not by nature a very sentimental person but this movie just bypasses all my defenses and instantly puts me in a Christmas mood. Early on at Mr Fezziwig’s Christmas party, when he comes dancing across the floor, wide eyed, arms akimbo, it is such a pure Dickensonian moment that it never fails to make me smile. At the end when Scrooge unexpectedly shows up at his nephew’s door for his Christmas party it never fails to make me want to blubber. Sim nails the role for me and gives one of the few movie depictions of genuine repentance.
Stephen said
Thinking about it though, I am getting a mind’s eye recollection of having read it!Or is it that you’ve seen one of the two dozen plus movies made from it? The reason I bring it up is that part of my own Christmas ritual every year is to rewatch the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge. I am not by nature a very sentimental person but this movie just bypasses all my defenses and instantly puts me in a Christmas mood. Early on at Mr Fezziwig’s Christmas party, when he comes dancing across the floor, wide eyed, arms akimbo, it is such a pure Dickensonian moment that it never fails to make me smile. At the end when Scrooge unexpectedly shows up at his nephew’s door for his Christmas party it never fails to make me want to blubber. Sim nails the role for me and gives one of the few movie depictions of genuine repentance.
Thanks, Stephen.
Perhaps I’ll persuade everyone to watch it with me tomorrow night and begin a new tradition!
Yes! The reading thread also becomes a movie and music thread.
The best Christmas music I heard was ** you do not have permission to see this link **. I’m a complete sucker for droney British folk.
The version of ACC with George C Scott is pretty killer too. If I’m remembering correctly it was a TV production.
It’s more likely I’ll see my copy [Bleak House] in March and only then realize I never got back to it.
Oh well Dickens has been waiting 169 years for me. He can wait a bit longer.
After a bout with heavy Biblical type tomeage it’s hard to seek respite in Serious Literature. Lately I’ve been rereading old science fiction favorites. In this case the work of Alfred Elton Van Vogt. The big names of the 1950s & 60s, Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein still have a substantial readership but my perception is that Van Vogt, who was equally well regarded at the time, has become rather a cult author. The difference is that C, A & H wrote what’s called “hard” SF, their speculations being based on at least conceivable science. Van Vogt’s work is probably best described as science “fantasy”. Laws of physics my a**! Ten-mile-long starships cross the galaxy in a week. Matter Transmitters zap objects not from ship to planet but from one part of the ship to another – the ship is ten miles long, remember! Alien psychic attacks. Sentient alien cities. This stuff is full of lunatic joy. I begrudge no one their enthusiasms but something like Star Wars seems pretty thin gruel next to it.
If you have any kind of taste for this the thing to know is that Van Vogt’s best work are the short stories he wrote from 1939ish to 1950ish, especially during the war years. Later in his career he took some of those stories and expanded them into novels, a common practice among SF writers of the time. This is lesser material but is mostly what you would find in a used bookstore. You can go online at the usual outlets and look for these collections in cheap paperbacks:
Destination: Universe! (1952)
Monsters (1965)
The Far Out Worlds of Van Vogt (1968)
The first two have one duplicated story but they’re all from the 1940s. The latter is split between the 40s & the 50s.
Ok on judgement day when the sole (and I mean the sole) criteria for entering bliss is your response to the work of A. E. Van Vogt, you can’t say you weren’t aware.
JUDITH: Stephen: Please forgive this major thread drift here but you mentioned a dictionary you have that explains the difference in such words as a labyrinth versus a maze. Would you tell me the name, please. I tried going through your comments to find it again but no luck.
———————–
Judith,
Here is that post you asked about
@Stephen: I am a collector of dictionaries. The normal kind of course but also tomes more specialized. I recently acquired a Dictionary of Untranslatables, which as the title indicates, collects words that have no precise equivalence in other languages. The one I am enjoying now, the one that has actual relevance to this topic, is Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning , which compares and contrasts terms that are associated but not identical, the more abstruse the better.
————————–
The author’s name is Eli Burnstein.
Aside, in a funny sort of related way, just before I posted this I tried to look up the word polysemy in my old Webster’s unabridged and I found no entry. What a word not to find in a dictionary –I had to google it! 🙂
As long as we’re revisiting this thread…
I’m reading a terrfic book, a collected trilogy of three novels, actually, written between 1901 and 1911 by Polish author Jerzy Zulawski, translated into English in 2021 by Elzbieta Morgan. It’s astounding that this work has been so little known outside Europe (but then not really I guess).
** you do not have permission to see this link **
On the Silver Globe
The Conqueror
The Old Earth
These works are science fiction, describing the history of the colonizing of the Moon. It’s dated as you would expect, written in an era when it was still thought possible that the Moon might support life on its own. But it’s so psychologically and spiritually astute a work that it feels utterly contemporary. Given the time in which it was written the first novel shows the influence of both Jules Verne and H G Wells but it quickly transcends them both. For me Verne’s work never ever really surpasses a “boy’s adventure” level, and as prescient as Wells was, he always views his characters from as it were a great height.
Zulawski was a european humanist. He is more interested in what his characters experience on the Moon than on the Moon itself. (Although he has an almost hallucinatory sense of landscape.) He allows for a level of human tragedy not possible on the shining starships that came later in the genre pulp “Sci-Fi” of the West.
I’m just beginning the third novel. If it holds up to the first two then this will have been one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It makes me wonder what else is out there that I just haven’t discovered yet?
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