Books you should read, but probably won't

[housesparrow]

Oh, children's books are different. Not only would I re-read them then, I read them again now. I go a new set of the Alice books last Christmas; the others were worn out.

We did have a good library, though I could only go there once a week and we were "rationed" on the number of books we could take out. My father had to join the library where he worked and get a children's ticket, so he could bring back extras!

[Flatypus]

Sept 4, 2009 9:29:15 GMT aubrey said:

Dick wrote very quickly and had no time to rewrite - always starting the next one - he was a professional writer, not an academic who did it part time and could spend 10 years over one novel, like most people who write literature these days.

So, he can be clumsy, with sometimes hackneyed plots and resolutions (but - Christ - Academic Fiction is not strong on plots, is it? Doesn't even bother most of the time. Just an old bloke wandering about and grumbling about not being able to get it up these days, most of it. Yes, Roth, I mean you); but he does things that no one else manages even today, and he can be amazing. Also very funny.

I disagree that Dick wrote as a 'professional'. I think he wrote as inspired. What might to one be raving incoherence, to another is the Voice of God. I happen to feel that Dick had a lot to say but it was on a level with somebody grabbing you to tell you the secrets of the universe that his latest LSD dose has revealed. Trouble is that it really is true "Who tells does not know, who knows cannot tell". You have to go on his trip to understand it; he can't take you there. Likewise no time for that Fear and loathing in Los Angeles 'Gonzo journalist' meaning unprofessional who can't be bothered to rationalise his thoughts and passes the buck to readers to do so. for Neuromancer though - this is the first time I've realised that it can read as New Romancer! A triple pun then.

Modern literary fiction? Haven't read Roth but that type of American oldster-angst doesn't inspire me. English seems to be all writers writing about writers unable to write. I wouldn't say that sales are the measure of quality but lack of sales may just hint at lack of anything worth the reading. I wouldn't exactly rush to bury my nose in Martin Amis though some of his father's are more interesting.

This division between 'literary' and 'popular' novels is a very modern thing that I don't really have much time for. The great authors of the past were not writing to be 'literary', they were writing for an age that expected literacy. There are some authors who must be read and can't really be appreciated in the same way through adaptation, because their class is in their style, just like poetry has to be read aloud for real understanding (yes, as a young man I was Keats and as an old man Donne).

Jane Austen is definitely one. I find myself slowing down and trying to guess what the words sounded like - probably a little 'northern' by modern standards: she would have live in Bæth not Bahth. But I still haven't finished Northanger Abbey though it is hilariously modern - I love the Boy racer whose horse cannot, absolutely cannot go less than ten miles an hour and the poor girl wondering just what is so marvellous about the trim and storage and go-faster stripes on his chaise. I've known him! (And her!)

The one it's impossible to get away from round here (there are brass plaques embedded in the pavement and a day dedicated to him) is James £$%^&* Joyce. Ulysses is clever, Finnegan's Wake even cleverer in multiple languages. So is Esperanto! I must admit that I love the irony that Joyce mostly wrote in Switzerland and was banned in Ireland until it came out of the Middle Ages about 20 years ago. Other than that I do have a feel about him as the Tracy Emin of literature. I did manage to read the first three pages of Finnegan's Wake I think, when I was too young to have a girlfriend.

[everso]

Sept 4, 2009 22:50:36 GMT Flatypus said:

Jane Austen is definitely one. I find myself slowing down and trying to guess what the words sounded like - probably a little 'northern' by modern standards: she would have live in Bæth not Bahth.

I'd be surprised if she sounded northern. She spent the first 25 years of her life in Hampshire. And Bath is more west country I think.

[aubrey]

Flaty, Dick's Inspired stuff was only for the last few years of his life - in the 50s and 60s he was doing it as a job - eating dog food when he was doing badly, all that.

I'd think that Austen had an accent that was nothing like the kind of accent she is played in today. But then, a lot of things are "wrong" in modern adaptations. Apparantly, breast-feeding was done in public with no one thinking much of it. And people were happy to wander about with filled chamber pots - though this is the kind of thing that she would not put in her books - squeamishness? Or because it wasn't worth mentioning, it was so common?

Shakespeare is supposed to have had a Bristol accent - someone's gone through his stuff and found Bristol rhymes (that extra "L").

[Flatypus]

You'd be right about the accent being unfamiliar. It's like that descended from an ape thing when you might find it apelike but not quite. One of the reasons I think Keats is often so popular (apart from being young and emotional) is the 'Cockney Rhymester' aspect, that his London speech was closer to ours than the 'respectable' speech of the day - which did go for the short-a where now 'respectable' is the other way round. There's every chance that some of the more educated East American would fit up to about Victoria and then you're moving more to Australian and white African. It makes a huge difference to earlier poetry. There are rhymes in Donne and moreso Shakespeare that just don't any more. I'm convinced actually, that the character Jacques, always pronounced as Jake-wizz should be more like Jackass because they hated the French, Jacks was and is (here) slang for a lavatory and very likely, there was still some vestigial second syllable in the French.