Comments | evelyn_b: Wednesday Reading Meme: Return to Wednesday Mountain

evelyn_b

Wednesday Reading Meme: Return to Wednesday Mountain

Jul 15, 2015 11:19

What I've Just Finished Reading

Strangers and Brothers, which I spent a long time dreading due to its being the start of an 11-novel series snuck into Burgess' 99 novels as a single work, was not bad at all. The prose is curiously transparent, like a YA novel, or like what you might expect fanfiction for a TV show to be like -- all dialogue, ( Read more... )

99 novels, t. h. white, p. g. wodehouse, c. p. snow, jane awesome, elena ferrante, kingsley amis, wednesday reading meme

Comments 9

egelantier July 15 2015, 21:10:37 UTC

ooooh, psmith! psmith is my favorite woodehouse's character, in all his fussy superhuman ways - although this is not his best book, or rather, it's not the book where he's at his most human and at once most superior. psmith in the city has all the shenanigans and all the psmith/mike bromance and the best zingers :D

there's also psmith, journalist where psmith does hard-hitting investigating journalism in america! will all the OTT AMERICA you might want (and some really questionable race-related scenes, but just.. ::hands::)

evelyn_b July 15 2015, 23:01:27 UTC

I do want ALL the OTT AMERICA (as for questionable race-related scenes -- well, I guess we'll have to see) and I enjoyed this one pretty well, so I will probably end up reading more Psmith soon.

wordsofastory July 16 2015, 04:54:04 UTC

The Psmith books are great! I also recommend them.

And I'm glad you're liking Emma. Personally, I think it's the funniest of Austen's books.

evelyn_b July 16 2015, 13:52:04 UTC

Emma is a delight! I'm finding it funny in kind of a low-key way; even though Emma has already done some potentially serious damage with her matchmaking, it's nowhere near the emotional intensity of Persuasion, where I was snort-laughing and bursting into tears practically every page. Maybe because Emma herself is so essentially unscathable (though I suspect she might get scathed a little at some point).

I've just reached the point where the narrator is trying to explain Emma's peculiar aversion to Jane Fairfax, and it's just so pointed. I love it.

I will report back on any future encounters with Psmith books. I really miss Bertie's narration, honestly; he is my favorite first-person narrator. But I'm sure there will be lots to like even without Bertie.

wordsofastory July 16 2015, 18:26:31 UTC

I love the relationship between Emma and Jane. Some of Emma's dislike is so petty, and yet so totally understandable.

osprey_archer July 18 2015, 16:59:16 UTC

Me too. The thing I love about Emma is that she's so very, very human, with moments of truly astounding pettiness but also a capacity to rise above that when she tries. She just spends the first half of the book or so not particularly trying.

lost_spook July 16 2015, 07:30:11 UTC

Pg Wodehouse is always so much fun! My favourites are the Blandings series. (Jeeves & Wooster are pretty great, too, obviously, but Blandings is lovely.) (PG Wodehouse spent a lot of time in America, so his OTT Americans are on a level with his OTT British upper class people, really. Do you already know about that one time he accidentally caused a huge Hollywood shake-up by telling the truth in an interview? He was initially over there for show-writing and then later because he wasn't popular in Britain over the whole unfortunate WWII broadcast things (which were actually pretty innocent & ironic and not pro-German; I've read them) from when he was also accidentally caught up in Germany and got interned for a bit ( ... )

evelyn_b July 16 2015, 14:05:06 UTC

I read a little Jane Austen when I was younger, and the Pride and Prejudice miniseries with Jennifer Ehle was a family favorite for a while, but she's been a joy to rediscover as an adult, now that I read more slowly and can appreciate a lot more.

No, I didn't know about P. G. Wodehouse's Hollywood shake-up! Details? I did recently hear about his German broadcasts and A. A. Milne being angry about it, though the details of that are not clear to me, either (through no one's fault but my own).

99 Novels has been great! I'm reading so many books that in my ordinary life it would never occur to me to pick up (because I don't know anything about them, or because I've pre-emptively categorized them as Whiny Dude Problem Masculinity Dirges). Some of them have been amazing, and even the ones I didn't love as much were worth the effort in some way, with maybe only one exception so far.

I completely forgot to take One Corpse too Many back to the library when I went out of town, so finishing that should be my next step.

lost_spook July 16 2015, 17:37:40 UTC

Aha, well, the Germany broadcasts thing is complicated, but the Hollywood thing is that PG Wodehouse gave an interview in which he (naively, or possibly at least partly deliberately blowing the whistle) said:

They paid me $2,000 a week - and I cannot see what they engaged me for. They were extremely nice to me, but I feel as if I have cheated them. You see, I understood I was engaged to write stories for the screen. After all, I have twenty novels, a score of successful plays, and countless magazine stories to my credit. Yet apparently they had the greatest difficulty in finding anything for me to do...It hit the headlines, and provided the financiers with the excuse to get on and reform Hollywood (probably coming anyway due to the Wall Street Crash), but the legend has rather become that Plum did it single-handed by accident, which is only partly true. But true enough ( ... )