Month: June 2012

Updates

Lunch Break Interlude VI

Geoff W

So apparently this is turning into a regularly occurring post – which is great, but who knows if it’ll last 😀   I’m making my way through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I didn’t know if I would like it this much, but geez it is a LONG book.  I’m just over half way through (pg. 604) and will have to take a break when I get to Part 5 (in about 40 pages) to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for my Books into Film book group next Monday.

So you know how I’ve been on a book ban for June – well it’s going decently well.  I ‘accidentally’ (not really, but I’m sticking to that story) bought A Weekend with Mr. Darcy by    Victoria Connelly for $2.99 for a fun light summer read later this summer (it reminded me a lot of What Would Jane Austen Do?). But the best part is, coming home from the gym Saturday morning (GO ME!) there were two boxes of free books at the end of the street and I of course went through them 😀 I picked up a copy of A.S. Byatt’s Still Life and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (this makes me nervous) for me and there was a copy of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha I picked up for Tom (and I’ll probably re-read).

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Random

Shakespeare On The Coffee Table (via 101books.net)

Geoff W

I’ve read Robert’s blog, 101 Books, for quite some time now and not only is it informative and witty, it’s incredibly entertaining.  One of the best observations in this piece:

“We read crap we don’t want to read just to say we’ve read it. Or maybe we don’t read crap we don’t want to read, but we still say we’ve read it.”

I really enjoyed this particular piece and wanted to share it with everyone (hopefully he’s cool with that).  Sorry if you all follow him and have already seen it, if you don’t follow him, you should!

CHECK IT OUT: Shakespeare On The Coffee Table.

Updates

Lunch Break Interlude V

Geoff W

As I said in the last one, it never fails when you do an update or a recap something else comes along that is pretty cool and you have to share – such as the book to the right.

Now I am in a book buying ban, but I am not in a book ban 😀  When I went to get my haircut this past weekend there was a woman handing copies of Justin Cronin’s The Passage.  I assumed it was for World Book Night (a few days/weeks late), but when I asked she had no idea what I was talking about. She said these were giveaways to spread word about the next book in the series/trilogy released this coming October. I don’t know if this has been common in the past, but it feels like this might be where the book industry is heading. With the mass production of books and the rise of ebooks who knows.  It reminded me a little of Scholastic’s giving 525 copies of the Hunger Games trilogy to my work for our gala.  But hey, I’m not going to knock it – it did add another book to my to-be-read pile/list, but it didn’t cost me anything!

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Books

Book 117: The Bird of Night – Susan Hill

Geoff W

I searched out this novel after reading Howard’s End is on the Landing and thoroughly enjoying Hill’s writing style. And after finishing The Bird of Night I’m even more convinced of her amazing writing style and ability, it’s no wonder the novel appeared on the Man-Booker shortlist in 1972 and won a Whitbread Novel Award (now called Costa Book Awards), and it’s definitely no surprise I found it stirring. I will definitely have to check out more of her work.

The Bird of Night is a story of love and madness. The narrator of the story, Harvey, looks back on his life and his time spent with Francis, the poet, and Francis’ rise to fame and coinciding decent into madness. There’s no way I can even begin to grasp everything in this compact novel, but I can definitely appreciate the beauty of the language and the intensity of the story. The quote below sort-of sums up the novel, or at least what I got out of the novel.

“And if he is mad, it is because one man’s brain cannot contain all the emotions and ideas and visions that are filling his without sometimes weakening and breaking down. But he will be perfectly well again, he is generally well. When he is not he is in despair and when he is fit he dreads the return of his illness. What can that be like to live with?” (149)

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2012 Challenges, Books, The Classics Club

Book 116: Mansfield Park – Jane Austen

Geoff W

[For an updated response check out my July 2015 reading of Mansfield Park.]

I finished reading Mansfield Park this weekend and I must admit that it’s still one of the best Jane Austen novels few people read. It’s a bit of a tome and the version I read with the tiny close quartered print was some times painful, but it’s well worth it. Mansfield Park counts for my Back to the Classics Challenge (Reread a classic of your choice) and also counts for The Classics Club. There will be an update later this week about where I am with my challenges and life.

I first read Mansfield Park sometime during college, not for a course, but because I realized I was never required to read Jane Austen and she was this entity that I found fascinating. So many of the teen movies from the early 1990s were based on her books (and Shakespeare’s plays) that I just had to read the originals. I remember reading them back to back but not what order, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Emma—and I eventually read Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sandition. I’ve enjoyed all of them but Fanny Price remains one of those characters who sticks with me no matter what I read.

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