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[Valeria Victrix]

I may live to regret this (the first 200 pp. have been good enough, but have scarcely made a dent in the total): recently started a one-volume (not just a brick, more like a cinder-block) edition of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.

Believe it or not, I've almost finished!

Rather strange, but very good. I can't outright recommend the series for general consumption due to length (over 1,900 pp.!).

That was televised in a classic series back in the 80s by the Beeb.

[Jazzmoose]

[T.D.]

I may live to regret this (the first 200 pp. have been good enough, but have scarcely made a dent in the total): recently started a one-volume (not just a brick, more like a cinder-block) edition of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.

Believe it or not, I've almost finished!

Rather strange, but very good. I can't outright recommend the series for general consumption due to length (over 1,900 pp.!).

That was televised in a classic series back in the 80s by the Beeb.

I know of the series, but never saw any episodes. Now, having read the whole quartet, I'm amazed it was TV-serialized! Doesn't seem like very telegenic material, and I don't know how they managed to cut it down to a manageable size. Maybe I should check out a DVD or two.

[paul secor]

I may live to regret this (the first 200 pp. have been good enough, but have scarcely made a dent in the total): recently started a one-volume (not just a brick, more like a cinder-block) edition of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.

Believe it or not, I've almost finished!

Rather strange, but very good. I can't outright recommend the series for general consumption due to length (over 1,900 pp.!).

That was televised in a classic series back in the 80s by the Beeb.

I know of the series, but never saw any episodes. Now, having read the whole quartet, I'm amazed it was TV-serialized! Doesn't seem like very telegenic material, and I don't know how they managed to cut it down to a manageable size. Maybe I should check out a DVD or two.

About ten years ago, my wife and I watched the Raj Quartet series over the period of a few weeks. During that period of time, she also read the entire book. Better she than I!

[B. Goren.]

Just started this one:

[Head Man]

I may live to regret this (the first 200 pp. have been good enough, but have scarcely made a dent in the total): recently started a one-volume (not just a brick, more like a cinder-block) edition of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.

Believe it or not, I've almost finished!

Rather strange, but very good. I can't outright recommend the series for general consumption due to length (over 1,900 pp.!).

That was televised in a classic series back in the 80s by the Beeb.

I know of the series, but never saw any episodes. Now, having read the whole quartet, I'm amazed it was TV-serialized! Doesn't seem like very telegenic material, and I don't know how they managed to cut it down to a manageable size. Maybe I should check out a DVD or two.

It's brilliant and not that expensive here:

Jewel In The Crown

[ejp626]

I decided to start with Barometer Rising. Not enjoying it very much. I'm having a lot of trouble entering the mindset of characters from WWI. It's completely scandalous that this woman is having dinner with a known drinker, etc. The novel was actually written in the late 1940s but portrays this earlier period.

The book does get better after this enormous explosion that rocks Halifax (this actually did occur during WWI) and we see who pulls through. A little unrealistic in that virtually everyone who does survive becomes much nobler during the aftermath, but that can be overlooked. Still, not likely a book I'd return to.

I am mostly done with Callaghan's A Fine and Private Place and it is a bit more engaging though somewhat meandering. I note that, similar to Bissoondath's The Innocence of Age, a cop gets involved in a shooting. Wonder how many cops show up in novels and don't shoot someone? Pretty few, I'd wager. It's probably a corollary that if a gun shows up in the first scene (of a play or movie), it has to go off in the last scene. (Sometimes attributed to Hitchcock or Godard, it is more likely that it stems from Chekov.)

Also read Nikki Giovanni's Bicycles. Awful.

and Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Billy Collins. A few poems are keepers, but in general the poems are flabby, the stakes are too low and there just isn't enough of a point to these poems.

Not sure what I will tackle next. I probably should get back to Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, but I'm thinking that since the family will be away almost the entire summer, I'll read it then when I don't have as many distractions. Most likely I will go for a Toronto novel trifecta -- Atwood's Cat's Eye, Findley's Headhunter and Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls. That should keep me pretty busy until the summer.

[paul secor]

Toni Morrison's Home

[jlhoots]

Michael McGarrity: Hard Country

[paul secor]

Melville's Bartleby

[Valeria Victrix]

An enduring classic I reread every few years and never fail to fall in love with all over again.

[Jazzmoose]

Toni Morrison's Home

Wait a minute; you can't just post the new Morrison novel and move on like nothing happened! How was it?

[BillF]

Melville's Bartleby

Read at university on my American Literature course. Always fascinating!

[jazzbo]

I joined the Pete Campbell Book of the Month club.

Well the Pynchon was interesting. A bit cornier than I'd like.

Moved on to re-reading A. A. Fair's "Top of the Heap." I really like the B.Cool and Lamb series.

[paul secor]

Toni Morrison's Home

Wait a minute; you can't just post the new Morrison novel and move on like nothing happened! How was it?

Strong stuff. A novel about two great American products - race and war.

[A Lark Ascending]

An enduring classic I reread every few years and never fail to fall in love with all over again.

Gosh, recall reading that (along with a lot of Huxley) in the mid-70s and really enjoying it. One for retirement.

The story of England's privateers and nautical renegades, centred round the development of Falmouth (where my Dad was born). Limbering me up for the summer holidays (I'm hiring a small frigate to go a-raiding in the Bay of Biscay).

Edited May 22, 2012 by A Lark Ascending

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I've just started re-reading, and in some cases reading, Alexandre Dumas' D'Artagnan novels:

1 The three musketeers

2 Twenty years after

3 The Vicomte de Bragelonne

4 Louise de la Vallière

5 The man in the iron mask

'Twenty years after' was the second wot he wrote, but it takes place ten years after the three later books, which were supposed to be one novel, but turned out to be too huge to be published that way. I've only read 1, 2 & 5 before.

Haven't made up my mind whether, when I finish #1, to go on to 3, 4 and 5, then 2 - taking them in story order - or in book order, in case there are things one's supposed to know about 2 when reading 3, 4 & 5. But I am inclined to read them in story order, if only because I had some difficulties following the incomplete sequence when I read a few of them, years ago.

Does anyone know this series well enough to advise?

MG

[B. Goren.]

[BillF]

Just finished this magnificent book, the most comprehensive jazz biography I've ever read - not surprisingly as the author says he was researching it for 14 years! I do wonder, though, about the accuracy of the mass of information it contains. There are two tiny issues that I know about personally and each is marred by inaccuracy.

Among those present at Monk's November 1971 Black Lion recording session in London were, according to Kelley, "young critic Alun Morgan and pianist Brian Priestley". In fact Brian, who had been at university with me, was 31 at the time and was something of a protegé of Alun Morgan, who at the time of the session was 43.

Kelley's account of Monk's Manchester concert of May 1961, which I attended, is based on recollections by George Wein and a review in the Manchester Guardian and is very muddled. It is not true that there was a very long drum solo and that Monk was "jeered off the stage". Admittedly, Kelley acknowledges that this isn't borne out by a "private recording" of the concert in his possession, but he describes the recording as covering two sets by the Monk group, when in fact there was only one, the first set being by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, a fact which Kelley elsewhere reports.

I guess it all points to the immense difficulty which any biographer has of reconstructing the past. The book leaves me with an overwhelming message of sadness and exploitation. Monk was for years unappreciated and penniless, then he was briefly in the limelight and was milked for all the system could get out of him, and finally was cast aside and forgotten in his final years.

A fine book!

Edited May 24, 2012 by BillF

[B. Goren.]

[jlhoots]

Edith Pearlman: Binocular Vision

[Valeria Victrix]

I've just started re-reading, and in some cases reading, Alexandre Dumas' D'Artagnan novels:

1 The three musketeers

2 Twenty years after

3 The Vicomte de Bragelonne

4 Louise de la Vallière

5 The man in the iron mask

'Twenty years after' was the second wot he wrote, but it takes place ten years after the three later books, which were supposed to be one novel, but turned out to be too huge to be published that way. I've only read 1, 2 & 5 before.

Haven't made up my mind whether, when I finish #1, to go on to 3, 4 and 5, then 2 - taking them in story order - or in book order, in case there are things one's supposed to know about 2 when reading 3, 4 & 5. But I am inclined to read them in story order, if only because I had some difficulties following the incomplete sequence when I read a few of them, years ago.

Does anyone know this series well enough to advise?

MG

My granddad had a whole bunch of Dumas in the attic, which I had a great time working my way through in early adolescence. He had a great hero of a couple of them - a fat cleric, whose chief claim to fame was that he could eat a ridiculous quantity of capons at one sitting, washed down with copious quantities of red wine.

I would recommend - if you have all the 'Musketeers' series to read them in order. I don't understand why you're saying that Vingt-ans Apres is last in story order - it's not. TMITIM ends with both Porthos and D'Artgnan buying the farm, so you're a little confused I think.

Anyways, great series of books, glad to encounter someone else who's read them.

[jazzbo]

[Matthew]

Had a long trip, with many hours in airports etc., so I was able to do a lot of reading.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. This is really a great novel. There's not much action, but Chandler explores major emotional issues in this book. It stuck me at the end that why Philip Marlowe in so invested in Terry Lennox is not so much because of the mysteries of friendship, but rather Marlowe was getting a look at his own inner life through the mirror of his relationship with Lennox. This Lennox who has no depth or reality to him, as Lennox himself says: "In here, he [Lennox] tapped his chest with the lighter -- "there isn't anything. I've had it, Marlowe. I had it long ago." I think what's haunting Marlowe about his relationship with Lennox is the worry that he, Marlowe, is just like Lennox: He's had it, there's nothing in his life, Marlowe is empty. It struck me that the ending in Robert Altman's movie of this book is a literal rendition of what Marlowe did emotionally to Lennox at the end.

Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption Of The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin. A nice book that sums up what was going on in Wilson's life at various stages. The music analysis is not very good, but if someone would like just the basic outline of Wilson's life, this is a good book to start with.

On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio by John Dunning. Highly entertaining read about old time radio, reviews of every program aired, it really is a look into days gone bye. Highly recommended.

Bull - Dog Drummond by Cyril McNeile. Very enjoyable book to pass the time.

[ejp626]

I was also on some long flights this weekend. I reread Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, which I think is a solid novel about an artist thinking over her past and the traumas of childhood that helped shape her art. Somewhat curiously, her relations with her parents and brother were very solid, but she was tormented by a small group of "friends." It goes into other aspects of her life as well, and might fairly be called a feminist take on the bildungsroman tradition. Perhaps my favorite part of the novel is how she describes the outskirts of Toronto getting more developed.

Even I experienced this in my little hometown where the open field we crossed to get to school turned into a whole bunch of houses the last time I was back. There was a "huge" woods behind the school where we would explore for hours. I assume much of that is also developed. I also can't imagine my wife letting the kids wander around for hours on their own, even in relatively safe Vancouver.