Apropos of nothing at all except Austenmania…and I assure you, I’ve read them all, 2-3 times over…
Edited 20.4.2010
Click this link to view a great little video spoof of Regency heroes in clips from Sense & Sensibility, Wives & Daughters, Pride & Prejudice, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.
I’ve removed the actual video from this site because I think it’s probably a breach of music copyright.
I must be the only person in the universe who didn’t know that It’s Raining Men was a track by Geri Halliwell, but now that I do, I don’t think it’s fair to use her music without paying for it.
Thanks to Claire from The Captive Reader for finding it.
http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=4
also
http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=176
By: DKS on April 11, 2010
at 5:43 pm
Oh dear, this could get out of hand LOL!
By: Lisa Hill on April 11, 2010
at 5:48 pm
I have a book — and I’m not sure where it is, or what it’s called, because it’s away in a box somewhere right now — but it’s a hardback with a title something like, The History of English Literature, published somewhere early in the first half of the 1900s. The author devotes an entire chapter to Walter Scott, telling us that this towering (and so on) figure of literature will be around forever, admired forever, that he is a great author for the ages. Austen gets a paragraph, and the paragraph is fairly dismissive. I came across it a few weeks ago as I was packing the book away, and thought: Ha!
By: DKS on April 13, 2010
at 9:55 am
Oh the perils of reviewing books, eh?
By: Lisa Hill on April 13, 2010
at 6:51 pm
The perils of telling your audience that such and such a writer will be famous forever. It’s books like this that would prevent me ever putting together a list of Great Current Authors Who Will Endure — because the future is going to look back on it and say, “What was she thinking? I sort of recognise the author she’s put at number five, and number seven — of course, everybody knows number seven. But number three? Never even seen the name before. And her number one? That trash?”
By: DKS on April 14, 2010
at 7:18 am
Yes, yes, you are so right, but I’m glad some people are brave enough to do this. Where would we be without Bloom’s Canon and the 1001 Books You Must read? Lisa
By: Lisa Hill on April 14, 2010
at 6:06 pm
Harold Bloom? I like his brain, and I like his reading of P&P (since we’re on Austen this seems relevant; I thought his description of D. and E. as a pair of wills was astute) but he’s fixated on his pet bunch of people, and I wish he’d stop chewing over T.S. Eliot. Man died in 1965. Let him be. And I notice that not all the Wisdom literature in the world can stop him coming up with catty playground backstabbing names for things he doesn’t like, “Mediaversity” or “Somethings of Resentment” — and if his canon can’t get him past elementary kiddie behaviour like this then what use is it to me?
I’m not sure I’d trust his canon, and I definitely wouldn’t trust anything called 1001 Books You Must Read. The last So-many Somethings You Must Verb Before You Die book I looked at was on the subject of Albums You Must Listen To, and it was balls. Narrow focus, almost complete ignorance of everything outside English-language rock and pop.
By: DKS on April 15, 2010
at 8:53 am
Oh I love ‘em all. David Denby’s Great Books is my favourite because he writes so nicely about why we should read this and that, but yes old Bloom is a curmudgeonly fellow with far too much pompous old stuff and yes 1001 is of course populist (though less so with the 2006 original version). Naturally, I ignore anything that looks unappealing, but I have made some great discoveries like Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and I probably would never have slogged my way through Moby Dick if not for wanting to tick it off The List!
By: Lisa Hill on April 15, 2010
at 10:37 pm
Ah — and it’s not that I think literature should make you a better person, as if it’s a remedial pill, but why title a book, “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” and then go on to prove that you might have found a tonne but you ain’t absorbed a scrap of it?
But — I’ve just checked — oh all right, he has, “Cultural prophecy is always a mug’s game,” so — OK. Fair call. I’ll go with him.
By: DKS on April 15, 2010
at 9:41 am
PS Go on, write that list, you know you want to LOL
By: Lisa Hill on April 15, 2010
at 10:40 pm
I’d call him repetitive and prissy rather than curmudgeonly, or a Repressed Seething Well of Falstaff Slash Fic. (“Bite your thumb at me, Fally,” swooned the elderly academic, reclining on a couch of remaindered Faber paperbacks, “Bubble my cauldron, make my fire burn, fillet my fenny snake.”)
I like personal lists, but the pushiness of that “… you should do this before you die,” makes me arc up. It’s advertising fluff, and it exists to make people anxious. No single solitary human being on this good green planet needs to read L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between before they die. No one. And no one should tell them that they should.
By: DKS on April 16, 2010
at 9:12 am
Re. PS
20 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU TAKE YOUR NEXT BREATH, PAT A DOG, OR ORDER BOWLS OF WHOLESOME SOUP AT A RESTAURANT WHOSE NAME STARTS WITH G.
The entire oeuvre of Christina Stead although you can leave out Beauties and Furies, Miss Herbert, and I’m Dying Laughing if you like.
Proust.
Jose Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night
Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet
Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
Colette: Gigi
Virginia Woolf’s essay, Two Parsons
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
The Mezentian Trilogy, by ER Eddison
Felix Holt, the Radical, by George Eliot
John Crowley’s Little, Big. I’d recommend his Aegypt Books, but I still haven’t read the last one.
All of Bruno Schulz
Anita Brookner. Leaving Home.
Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
The posthumous collection of Gwen Harwood poems that came out recently.
Daniachew Worku’s The Thirteenth Sun
By: DKS on April 16, 2010
at 5:32 pm
Hmm, I like the List! I’ve read some of them!
By: Lisa Hill on April 16, 2010
at 6:39 pm
Well, whatever they were, they were possibly not awful.
CANON OF FOUR BOOKS WITHIN ARM’S REACH THAT I HAVEN’T READ YET
John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race
Graham Green’s In Search of a Character: Two African Journals
Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
By: DKS on April 17, 2010
at 3:36 pm
I picked up Christina Stead’s The Beauties and The Furies in the Op Shop today, and also the A&R edition of The Man Who Loved Children, which has a bigger easier-on-the-eyes font than the Penguin I already had:) Lisa
By: Lisa Hill on April 17, 2010
at 9:09 pm
You talked about us meeting once before; if we do, do you want my second copy of For Love Alone? It was secondhand when I bought it, and some of the pages are loose, and the spine cracks a little when I open it — actually this is sounding less and less appetising as I type — but it’s there if you want it.
By: DKS on April 18, 2010
at 10:17 am
That’s very kind of you = yes please! But we should organise a meet-up anyway, not just for me to collect loot *embarrassed smile* Please email me privately with possible venues and dates? Lisa
By: Lisa Hill on April 18, 2010
at 11:20 am