Les Parisiennes des Mamanset: On the Advent of Newness

[botemp]

Lovers of Parisian style and fashion with a conscious mindset and lots of chatter in between.

Previous thread

(I've removed the usual links to recommended shops and other places guides from the OP because I suspect they're getting very out of date at this point)

I really enjoy reading Jane Austen books - I love her wit and they are to my mind beautifully written, with perfect choices of words, not very many just what's needed to tell the story. The stories are well-crafted, too. I also like the window the books give into a small section of society in the past. The Brontes, almost the same but I am not so interested in the stories that they tell. There's also much less wit, and more words... Also, maybe because I was born in Yorkshire, and know the area around Howarth a bit, I don't feel the romance.

But each to their own. I can see why people wouldn't like the books, and I am not attracted by Sci-fi, or thrillers for example.

I'm in a book group (naturally; I'm a middle class woman of a certain age), and as a result have been reading books I wouldn't have chosen for myself. It's been really interesting as I've been surprised how much I have enjoyed some of them, but there have been some stinkers. They have really made me appreciate good writing of all sorts.

@Galiana
I too do not get "classics".
I found them boring.
I have a primary degree in English.
I hated Dickens.
I don't get the appeal of Shakespeare.
Jane Austen and Emily Brontê were ok.
I feel to admit it.
But unlike you, I hate Science Fiction.

@MmePoppySeedDefage good writing is an interesting one.

So many poor words have been written.

BUT, you have fallen into the trap of wrapping up Science Fiction with Thrillers. You see it as genre.

Some of the most beautiful and contemplative books have been written by science fiction writers. All good literature asks the essential questions. Have you seen the film Arrival? It's based on a novella by Ted Chiang called The Story of your Life. It's exquisite, sad, meaningful, just beautiful. It asks questions about language and what language actually means, the use of language, how the tense in different languages actually informs how we see the world.

To dismiss 'genre' fiction means you're missing out.

Shall I just blow this place up? Russian literature, fucking awful.

I do feel the whole framing as things as "classics" is really counter productive, as someone who actually enjoys reading from the moment I could it was really frustrating at secondary to have to believe these classics were somehow better. I doubt it also turned the reading ambivalent into avid readers.

I agree the language and writing style of the classics can be a problem but some (not all) of them are such good stories I can forgive them. If push comes to shove, I'd always take a rattling good story over something beautifully crafted or deeply meaningful.

I never got on with Dickens until I watched the BBC / Andrew Davies dramatisation of Bleak House and decided to give him one last chance. Even now I have to really 'get in the zone' to read him (Dickens) because he's so long winded and sentimental that I get impatient and start to skim, but his novels are also so tightly plotted that, if you do that, you can miss things that turn out to be massive.

I quite like a bit of Dickens @Floisme.

He was the progenitor of the penny dreadful though, so we can blame all rubbish modern thrillers on Dickens (obviously not his work because his weekly installments cost a shilling a week, but it did start the craze of dark and dirty stories with cliffhangers that seems to have captured the imagination for the last 200 years).

I'm not agin to a bit of Hardy, Jude the Obscure is Dickens without the laughs.

If push comes to shove, I'd always take a rattling good story over something beautifully crafted or deeply meaningful.

Oh, no! I would always say the opposite. I never want a plot at all, or at least not one that pushes thrills and spills on every page. Give me the total immersion of Henry James or Patrick White - with just the odd tiny mis-step or predictable misfortune to devastate a life.

Do you enjoy your book group @MmePoppySeedDefage? As a middle-class woman of a certain age, I've always fuir comme la peste.

I could never get with the idea of reading someone else's choice and then discussing it in a group. Life's too short too short to entertain other people's literary choices!

Which is probably why I never get invited to book groups...

I thought book clubs were just poorly disguised wine and cheese nights? The concept wouldn't work for me either, I'm way too erratic in my tastes and tend to go down rabbit holes. I'd also hate having to read at a set pace but I can definitely see the appeal in the social aspect.

Ah! I definitely do wine and cheese nights and am invited to those, so I'm not a social pariah.

Friends talk about their book groups but never invite me, I think it's because they know me too well and I would absolutely say, 'I'm not reading that, it's shit'. Which is fair enough!

Oh I love a good book club argument. Almost as much as I love a clothes argument.

I will happily give SciFi a go if you can recommend some suitable starter books.

My book group spends about 5 minutes discussing the book and 1 hr 25 minutes chatting about random things. I've seen some 'questions for book groups to discuss "in the back of some books – we never get to that level. We do generally agree, but there have been some radical disagreements. It's not very intellectual or anything

One of my friends is in a book group where they have take turns to recommend a book which is a bit nerve racking. In mine, we are much more relaxed.

Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) is science fiction, but you don't think about it.

I love Ursula Leguin of course, so I recommend The Left Hand of Darkness all the time.

I love a plot because I get distracted without one - a personal failing. But other than that reading can be diverse ;)

Oh we are in books chat now. I always read all sorts, but has terrible time getting into Dickens, Shakespeare or the Russians.
I hadn’t read ‘English classics’ till I came here and I was really trying to force myself to enjoy Dickens but I was finding very difficult to get into it and a colleague at the time suggested me to read Jane Austen. I loved the fact that I could read the story without too much trouble and that was a nice plot and gave me an insight of a particular time and place of this country.

On paper I should love sci fi (bit of a geek), but I cannot remember really anything that I really loved reading. But I am taking note of the one Bani mentioned above and might give it a go.

I have been quiet as with my new job I had a couple of trips and had to dedicate mental space to get into the hang of things. Might still be quiet here but I am keeping an eye on the posts 😀

*but had terrible …

autocorrect 🙄(I am sure there is more)

I love the “classics”, and re-read Jane Eyre on an annual basis - it is comforting to me. Mind you, I also love Jilly Cooper, so my tastes are not particularly refined 😂

My last book group ground to a halt during the pandemic and never really got going again. I miss it but haven't got round to finding another - you need people to gel but I also like it when there are different tastes, otherwise you just end up reading the same kind of stuff and get into a bit of a rut.

I think we've had an Ursula le Guin debate before!

She's possibly a bit marmite? I don't, even though I love her, think she is consistently great. But I love her ideas and her anthropological approach to world building, and how she evolved as a writer.

We could morph over to clothes in books. PD James is a good one for always noting stuff like "her jumper was of good wool" and I remember as a child wondering how she could tell by just looking. And frankly I still wonder, because NOW I could tell the difference maybe but surely the quality differences in the wool would have been harder to spot in like 1978.

Hmm … For me discernment has mostly been a question of context, @banivani. I was 16 in 1978, and going through the racks at Top Shop or its precursors I would expect most affordable jumpers to be acrylic - so had to be careful to inspect the label of any jumper I liked, in the hope it might be wool.

Before the 1980s you might guess by colour - but Benetton exploded that option and all my bright yellow or purple university era jumpers were merino or mohair.

Now … If I meet a woman of my own generation in a professional context I assume her knitwear is real wool. If someone posts a link to a jumper costing £30 on MN I draw my own conclusions (unless it’s Uniqlo).

Actually it’s easier if not knitwear. I can tell even on a phone screen if a coat is pure wool or mixed with something else.

I’m in the early chapters of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s ‘The Long View’ - but surprisingly she hasn’t lingered long on the details of clothes yet.

Yes, but good wool? That's what baffles me. That they can tell a cheap wool from a luxury wool at a glance like that. See also "home-knit" that they immediately spot. You can spot some home knits for sure, but I have a colleague who knits and her jumpers look great. I'd know it was home-knit because it's so good, iyswim.

I would probably assume PD James used ‘good’ to mean not mixed with any cheaper fibres, possibly knitted all of a piece by ‘hand’ rather than stitched together in a factory. She’d be making a class distinction - maybe marking someone out as worthy of notice because they chose that item rather than whatever garish things would generally be worn by their community?

(It’s a long time since I read any of her work, but that’s the sort of code Golden Age crime novelists employed.)

Maybe PD James meant wool that didn't feel like sandpaper, which is my main recollection of wool jumpers from childhood in the 60s through to around the mid 80s. Likewise 'home knit' for me didn't mean hand crafted by an artisan up a mountain on Skye but made by your mum, who didn't even like knitting very much but who was buggered if she was paying shop prices.

Happy times reading PD James though, and also Sara Paretsky. I've never read Elizabeth Jane Howard - does she tell a good story?

The Cazelet series is a cracking story over 5 volumes written by EJH:

https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/fiction/cazalet-chronicles-books-in-order

I've enjoyed every book of hers that I've read. Falling is worth reading especially when you read the (excellent)biography by Artemis Cooper and know it's based on EJH's own experience.

She was very beautiful and consequently wasn't taken as seriously as a writer as she should have been.

She always clocks it by sight though which is what struck me. By feel, sure.

Philip k dick is who I always come back to- some of his short stories made me tear up when I read them years ago. One of the sci fi greats to be sure but the stories are about people.