What are you reading? How do you feel about it?

[whatausername]

I'm reading Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. I wish Mattie and Ethan were more articulate and better fibbers!

I am pilgrim. Intimidating read as it's such a big book but it's actually very readable and a page turner when you get into it.

PG Wodehouse Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, and I've suddenly stopped finding him funny - which is slightly upsetting, because I've love his books since I was 12 years old and can recall being in tears of laughter over The Code of the Woosters.

Chorus, Rebecca Kauffman. It’s well written but a bit depressing. It reads well though, can’t argue about that. Came in a book subscription package. Reminds me of Elizabeth Strout who I think is much better. But this is the first Kauffman book I’ve read so maybe her others are better.

Lisey's Story by Stephen King. About 600 pages of rubbish. He really has run out of ideas.

Tell us how you really feel 😂 I've yet to try Stephen King. I'm unsure how I feel about reading horror but will probably try one one day.

I'm rereading The Motorcyle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I read it as a teen and remember it being a good mix of travel and funny. I know he was a very political figure but this was before his zenith (his nadir to some!). However, I just wanted an easy read during my finals and to see if it is as funny as I remember.

I am currently reading Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang.
I am feeling underwhelmed.

Vine Street by Dominic Nolan. It's a crime thriller set in 30s Soho London. I'm loving it.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (written in 1891 and I have the 1898 edition).

I'm enjoying it and it's pretty amusing.

I love Edith Wharton. The Old Maid is my favourite.

Oh no, that's horrible to hear. It's horrible when you fall out of love with an author😕. Wodehosue wrote too much, and he tends to use the same jokes over and over. But at his best, he's sublime. Stephen Fry said there aren't enough superlatives, and it's true. You need to be selective, however, and stick to the best six or seven books. Right Ho Jeeves is as close to perfection as any work of art I know.

The TV adaptation is probably the best adaptation of a classic I've ever seen. You must watch it when you've finished the novel.

Hartley99: yes, I will! It's a great book.

@tobee, have you seen https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0gjkv0t/shakespeare-rise-of-a-genius? It's fantastic, and has Judi Dench in for you, as well as many others. (And I never realised before this that Jessie Buckley has an Irish accent!)

The early SKs are great. Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, The Stand. It's just his more recent stuff I don't get on with. The film of The Dead Zone with Christopher Walker is fantastic.

I’m sure I tried that and couldn’t finish it. Pity.

Almost finished Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Feeling like I understand the main character even though it's a short book.

Thank you @DuesToTheDirt

Oh no, that's horrible to hear. It's horrible when you fall out of love with an author😕

Don't want to sound precious here, but I'm feeling slightly bereaved.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (written in 1891 and I have the 1898 edition).

I'm enjoying it and it's pretty amusing.

Cranford has an undertone of sadness, I find.

It's odd. I finished this last night (got a few giggles out of it) but it's not PGW as I recall him - almost as if it's written by someone else who is steeped in the canon but is taking the characters in a different direction. There's still the wonderful language, but the characters have changed. Wooster is much less silly ass and more able to get himself out of scrapes, and Jeeves hardly figures at all. Perhaps the fact that it's a very late novel (1970s) accounts for it.

I suppose all writers are inconsistent. The critic Harold Bloom considered Shakespeare a mortal God, yet even Bloom admitted that some of the plays are weaker than others. He calls Richard III an overwritten melodrama, for example, and says The Two Noble Kinsman isn’t worth staging.

Dickens is patchy. ‘Oliver Twist’ really isn’t that good and even his best novels have weak scenes and characters (Agnes in ‘David Copperfield’, for example, is inhuman). I love Aldous Huxley, but hated his novel ‘The Genius and the Goddess’. I also love Orwell, but ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ is unreadable.

Same goes for poetry. I haven’t read much Wordsworth, but I’m told that in the final thirty years of his life he churned out nothing but garbage. Byron, Tennyson, Betjeman, Siegfried Sassoon and Ted Hughes are also patchy. All great poets, no doubt, but all capable of producing mediocre or embarrassing rubbish.

Reading Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. I am plodding through it but
it hasn’t grabbed me.

Kisses on a Postcard by Terence Frisby - About his (positive) experience of being evacuated, to Cornwall during the war, at age 7.

It's sad thinking about how his parents would have felt doing that. I can't imagine sending my own ds out into the world like that, and him just being at the mercy of complete strangers. It's a good book though.

I just finished “The Final Girl Support Group”, I love the way he writes women, it feels like how women would write about themselves.

Love Neville too, I’m going to read “Last Day’s” again because I’m struglling to choose my next book.

I'm reading CJ Clark's Ghost Woods and loving it so far. I've read a couple by the same author and loved all of them, all very atmospheric!