What Are You Reading? Feb 07

[suedonim]

So what are you reading, to start the new month? I'm reading 'Notes On A Scandal' by Zoe Heller. I found it hard to get into but am doing a bit better now. It won't be on my list of all time faves unless something amazing happens, though!

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Olivia Manning: completely new one on me!!
Robertson Davies: dh very keen. Had impression somewhat too cosy? Which is silly of me.
Never read Quincunx: that's a good idea too.

• and other ideas - thanks everyone!!

Oh, and just by the way on all these Tales of Adversity - I saw a really shameful strapline the other day: "and then one day in her preteen years - was it the day when she was introduced to drink, drugs and sex? - her tear-jerking story becomes a journey through utter hell".

It's the escalation of misery I object to.

Anecdote: some friends while very young and newly outly gay went to see their first gay porn movie. They got horrified quite quickly and went to leave - and the manager barred their way and said "But wait! There's MORE!"

btw I'd always thought it was rack - as in ref. to grisly torture device

oh and there's some Truman Capote which is up there with whoever you might say: the end of, which book is it, when an elderly man guesses his young relative may be gay and looks "with an overwhelming question in his eyes"

Is that "Other voices, other rooms", which was his first novella and is quasi-autobiographical? That's the one where he realises that the mysterious figure he's been seeing is the old guy in drag.

olivia manning is wonderful.

singersgirl, yes that's the one I'm sure

Have you seen the new movie? It had such a good review.

Ah, on the subject of first quasi-autobiog novellas, Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin - needs a bit of re-publicising. Marvellous thing.

I really should do some work now!

Jury service, Bink? Yikes!

I've just finished Fatima's Good Fortune by Joanne and Gerry Dryansky. Really charming, well written enjoyable book. If you are a Francophile, you will enjoy it because it is mostly set in Paris. I loved it.

Cosy on outside with veins of steel. You have to like Jungian magical realism though.

Bink, just a thought - if I were going on jury service I might take the opportunity to do a bit of re-reading, especially Dickens. I mean, what could be more appropriate than re-engaging with Jarndyce v Jarndyce?

It is the ideal book for Issymum! I also find books with tragedy, torture, cruelty very very hard to read these days.

dino - thing is I re-read Dickens all the time, so JvJ, which otherwise would be perfect I agree, isn't sort of dusty enough in my mind for the right effect.

Are there any other Victorian legal-system doorsteps?

(When dh did jury service, on his last required day when they were otherwise going to be discharged as no trials needed them, they were asked if anyone would volunteer for a fraud trial that was expected to last at least two years. Several did.)

I would like to see the new movie. In fact, it was the Philip Seymour Hoffmann one that got me interested in Capote. Before that I had thought you pronounced his name like a 'capote anglaise'. I must re-read "To kill a mockingbird" too.

Perhaps you should go all out and read lots of John Grisham or Jody Picoult. Then you can compare the UK and US judicial systems.

Bink - have you read much Trollope. Not so much legal system but Victorian business and politics in the Palliser series and The Way we Live Now. I reread them on a regular basis to remind myself that there is nothing new under the sun.

I have just finished the winter edition of Slightly Foxed,a quarterly literary magazine. Thanks to NQC who recommended it - a great find!

Marina, I mentioned it to dw in about April - and got it for Xmas!

Thank you so much for the recommendations and I'm glad that I'm not alone in my inability or rather reluctance to cope with the darker side of life. I completely agree about the oeuvre of child-abuse stories - hate them. However, I find the better written and more subtle the book, the deeper the effect. I read 'Disgrace' by Coetzee some while ago and I'm still haunted by the utter despair of the last scene in which he determines to put the dog down. Hell, I feel teary just thinking about it.

I have read "Possession" but years and years ago, so that can definitely go on my reread list. Dickens - perfect as it encompasses the dark side of life but it has resolution and a couple of centuries gives distance. I'll try Olivia Manning and I'd forgotten about the Salterton Trilogy.

Does this improve? Will I be able to read, with equanimity, dark tragedies in my retirement? Meanwhile, what about recommendations for comedy. Something to make us laugh in Feburary? Is it time to dust down PG Wodehouse?

And completely tangentially, I'm about to have a minor rage with DD1's school about forcing her to continue to read through the ghastly Ginn 360 New Reading series - oh look here is a poorly written and dry as dust story about the invention of the vacuum cleaner. I would love to think of her contributing to a thread like this in thirty years time (what would a thread like this look like in thirty years time?) and I cannot imagine an experience more likely to deter her.

I think it's always worthwhile to dust down pg wodehouse...

Esp Blandings volumes. They would make a stump of wood laugh.
Could not agree more about odious Ginn 360s.

or a Nancy Mitford

Hmm! Not so sure about Nancy Mitford. There is something brittle about the humour and the subsequent fate of the Mitford sisters rather colours the books. Glad to hear PG Wodehouse has got the Mnet Reading Seal of Approval. I've always felt mildly ashamed of my Wodehouse Habit. I read Wodehouse through the adoption process for DD2, perfect for life in Phnom Penh, and she is so wildly eccentric and funny I can't help wondering if it rubbed off on her.

"co-o-o-me into my a-a-arms, sonny boy..."
The man was an utter genius.