Get it here.This is quite a short work, but really got me thinking about sexual politics. On the face of it, Daisy is a beautiful, free-spirited American girl who falls foul of European standards of propriety, and simultaneously, by means of metaphor, its disease-laden miasma. I say on the face of it, because a little [...]
If anyone is still reading this blog, hello. I have neglected it for the last few weeks, as more pressing adult matters have dominated my time. Needless to say, being adult matters, they are exceedingly dull, and they have not completely gone yet, but the end is in sight. I therefore return. Huzzah. (Note ironic [...]
Get it hereI recorded a couple of chapters of this, so was quite keen to hear the rest of it when it was finished. I was very impressed with what I had read, and was even more impressed with the whole thing.This is a novel, in that there are some connecting characters, but really, its [...]
Get it here.I am a big Jane Austen fan, but have never read this novella for some reason – perhaps I have always regarded it as a piece of juvenilia. It is fair to consider this an immature work, compared with her later novels, but an immature Jane Austen is still worth ten ordinary novelists [...]
Get it here.In ‘Something New’ Wodehouse has Joan Valentine, the female writer,say of the magazine she works for: ‘It’s a horrid little paper–all brown-paper patterns and advice to thelovelorn and puzzles. I do a short story for it every week, undervarious names. A duke or an earl goes with each story.’ One week, I suspect [...]
I deliberately chose an early recording for this week, as the second anniversary of LibriVox will be celebrated (in some way, I am sure) on the 10th of August. It also almost exactly matches my first anniversary of downloading a Librivox recording. Strange to think that when I started this blog, I was anticipating a [...]
I saw a video of a Rube Goldberg machine the other day, (called a Heath Robinson contraption in this part of the world), and was reminded of the plots of P G Wodehouse. Perhaps it was the other way around. Anyway, bear with me.The point is, there are number of objects, the behaviour of which [...]
In all matters, it is generally a good idea to follow the advice of one’s spouse. So, Great Expectations it is. I have always loved Dickens, but discovered rather late that he published all his books serially. So, three chapters or so represented a fortnightly subscription. And he wrote them as he went along, reacting [...]
Get it hereI saw the film based on this book back in 1988, when I was 20 years old. Perhaps you remember it: Julian Sands got to plant the most romantic kiss in history on Helena Bonham-Carter. The fact that Julian’s career didn’t quite reach the highest of heights may well be put down to [...]
Get it here. Well – has the emperor got new clothes, or no clothes? I don’t know. Perhaps its a skintight bodystocking. Its hard to read this book with an open mind. It has become such a tribal piece of literature that it seems that you can either claim it as the greatest novel in [...]