Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe abridged!

31 January 2012 23:09

I’ve just managed to plough my way through my very first book by Sir Walter Scott, I had tried before and failed miserably and I hardly ever give up on books – it was The Talisman which felled me. So I was interested to hear a Scottish academic speaking on the radio yesterday as he had recently abridged Scott’s Ivanhoe, you can read about it here. Apparently he has cut it down to 80,000 words so that it’s more manageable for the modern reader.

I don’t know if it’s a good idea really as I don’t think I would feel that I had actually read a book by Sir Walter Scott if it has been gutted. I read The Pirate and I chose that one because I thought it would be a hard subject to make boring. I have to admit though that there were times when it was like wading through thick porridge with not a morsel of sugar or syrup to sustain me along the way.

I read it for the November’s Autumn classic challenge so I’ll be reviewing it on the 4th of February, but I will say that I felt a real sense of achievment when I got to the last page with no skipping or dodging of the slow bits. However I am truly thankful that I didn’t have to read Scott when I was at school!

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The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters by RLS

13 December 2011 23:51

I have these two books in a lovely Folio Society edition. I used to be a member but nowadays I tend to buy their books in second-hand shops. Again, they’re on my 2011 reading list. RLS is of course Robert Louis Stevenson but he tends to be shortened in Scotland. I read somewhere years ago that his middle name was pronounced Lewis – as he came from a very strict Presbyterian family which wouldn’t have had anything to do with French Catholic sounding names. It seems strange that they gave him such a name then.

Anyway, RLS wrote quite a lot of travel books and these are two of them. The Amateur Emigrant is about his journey from the Broomielaw Docks on the River Clyde in Glasgow to New York in 1879, on his way to San Francisco to be with the American married woman that he had fallen for. The voyage was grim and RLS had always been sickly so it must have been even worse for him but his descriptions of the types of people who have decided to seek a better life in America is well worth reading and he makes a lot of observations about their personalities. I had imagined that emigrants would have been ‘go-getting’ types but RLS describes them as people who had failed to do well in their home country and predicted that they would fare no better in the new one because of their attitudes. It seems that work was as hard to come by in New York as it was in Scotland and although in my family uncles opted to go to Australia in the 1960s I have to say that life wasn’t any better for them there than it would have been if they had just stayed at home, and was probably even worse for their kids, jobs wise anyway.

In The Silverado Squatters RLS is married to his beloved Fanny Osbourne who had managed to get a divorce. As you can imagine the Stevenson family were dead against Fanny who was years older than him and seems to have been ‘a bit of a gal’ but she made him happy. They spend their honeymoon near Calistoga in California in a wreck of a ‘house’ which had been inhabited by miners years before. It had no windows and holes in the roof so it’s just as well that the weather was good. I think RLS probably hoped that the dry heat would help with the consumption which he had suffered from for years. The place was infested with rattlesnakes which they didn’t realise were dangerous until the end of their month long stay there.

I enjoyed this book but I think that it might be of even more interest to Americans who might have travelled to the places that he mentions. He met Californian wine makers in the Napa Valley and saw the fancy mock French labels which they put on their bottles because then they could get people to buy it. RLS was impressed with the wine but Californian wine was in its infancy then and I can remember fairly recently that wine snobs were very sniffy about ‘New World’ wine. ‘The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.’ RLS.

He seems to have met quite a lot of Scotsmen around that area and they were always glad to hear another Scotsman and hear about the old country. They must have been homesick.

The Silverado Squatters ended very abruptly though which I thought was a bit strange, almost as if he had had to pack quickly and never added any more to his writing after he left the place.

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Therese Raquin by Emile Zola

2 December 2011 23:01

This book is in my reading list for 2011, I was supposed to be working my way through the list of 52 books, at least one per week. It started out well but I’ve fallen way behind now.

Anyway, this is a quick read at just 196 pages and my copy of the book is a 1960 paperback. I suspect that there have been better translations since then, that’s the only thing I have against it, the word egotism/egotistic was overused and I’m sure mis-used when something like arrogance or selfishness would have been better I think.

I really enjoyed this book which Zola wrote after he had read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I wasn’t too keen on Madame Bovary because I really disliked Emma, I couldn’t find any redeeming qualities in her at all.

The book is about adultery, amongst other things, but Theresa has had a tough life really as she was farmed out to her father’s sister as a very small baby. She ends up being married off to her cousin before she knows anything about life and men, and let’s face it – it was never going to be a success given the fact that she had shared a bed with her cousin/husband as a child.

When Therese forms a liason with one of her husband’s work colleagues they take things too far and disaster ensues. The lovers are conscience stricken and racked with guilt they descend into horror.

I know, it doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs but it is a good read and I’m looking forward to reading the only other Zola book which I have at the moment – Nana, sometime soonish.

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Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope

27 September 2011 23:42

This book is sometimes known by the title The Irish Member. I thought it was about time that I got back to reading the rest of the Palliser series. I had to make a mad dash for the radio off button one night a few weeks ago when I was in the kitchen late on. Whilst I was doing the dishes I suddenly realised that it was a Palliser book which was being serialised on Radio 4 Extra – or whatever they’re calling it this week! You can probably still listen to it on the iPlayer if you don’t want to read the book.

I found Phineas Finn to be a wee bit dry at the beginning and I could understand why some people have a bit of a problem with Trollope. I think that it was because I only had time to read about 20 or 30 pages at a time and for me anyway I find his writing much more enjoyable when I can spend a lot of time reading big chunks of about 80 or 100 pages at one go.

It is of course the story of Phineas Finn, a handsome young Irishman who stands for parliament really because he was in the right place at the right time. At the time it’s set (1860s) we didn’t have universal suffrage, not even for the men, so each MP was voted in by the small amount of men who were eligible to vote in the area, mainly wealthy property owners.

Phineas does indeed have the luck of the Irish and his parliamentary career comes on in leaps and bounds, mainly because he has the ability to be affable and really listens to people so other men take a liking to him. He gets into the right social circles and hobnobs with influential men and so his political career advances very quickly.

He doesn’t have so much luck where romance is concerned and this is partly due to the fact that he isn’t exactly constant and he tends to be easily distracted by whichever woman he is with at the time.

I’m looking forward to reading The Eustace Diamonds which is the next one in the series.

I remember that when John Major became our Prime Minister, about 20 years ago he said that Trollope was his favourite author and I think he got a lot of help in his career from reading the political books. Like everybody else I’ve puzzled over how a man who was so bad at counting that he was sacked from his job as a bus conductor could have risen to be our Prime Minister. I think he must have modelled himself on Phineas Finn.

Anyway, if you enjoy the classics and a political setting then you should give the Palliser series a go. My copy is an Oxford World’s Classic paperback and it has great notes in the back. Luckily I studied this period when I was at school so I knew a lot about what was going on in Britain at the time but I still learned from the notes. For instance: Did you know that John Stuart Mill the philosopher and economist and son of the Scottish philosopher James Mill, had written an essay called The Subjection of Women in 1869. He was an MP from 1865 and advocated votes for women. Amazingly ahead of the times!

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Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky

8 June 2011 23:31

This is one of the books which was inherited by us many moons ago and I added it to my 2011 Reading List to make sure that I got around to reading it this year, at last.

It’s a series of letters between a tchinovnik (a minor civil servant) called Makar Dievushkin and a distant relative of his, Barbara Dobroselova. Despite the fact that they both live in rooms in tenements which are just across the road from each other and they can actually see each other’s windows, they rarely meet for fear that people will talk about them.

As the story progresses the letters become more and more loving and really I could have rattled the two of them and clunked their heads together. For some reason Makar feels that he is responsible for Barbara and he spends money on her which he doesn’t have. Civil servants seem to have received their salary quarterly or even bi-annually and Makar’s money has run out so he ends up in debt. Poor Makar turns to drink which of course just makes things worse.

He still buys shawls, dresses and sweets for Barbara at a time when his shoes are so worn through that he is almost walking on the pavement. Barbara puts up a small half-hearted protest about him spending money on her but she wants the finer things in life and it seems that she is waiting for a man with money to come along and solve her problems.

Makar is a bit of a ‘Mr Bean’ type of character so there is quite a bit of humour in the book but it is all a bit sad and depressing. (Well it is Russian.) A man whom Barbara despises proposes to her and she accepts as she believes she has no other choice and she is enticed by the thought of the clothes and the status which Bwikow says she will have as his wife. It’s obviously going to be disastrous for Barbara as Bwikow has already taken control of her movements before they even get married.

It’s worth reading even although it has a couple of characters that you feel like screaming at!

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Basil by Wilkie Collins

27 April 2011 23:37

This is another book from my 2011 Reading List and it’s the fifth book which I’ve read by Wilkie Colllins. It was first published in 1852 and was the second book which he wrote. Although The Woman in White is his most famous book it isn’t my favourite, I think that that is still The Moonstone and I even enjoyed Basil more than TWIW.

Basil is the 24 year old younger son of a man of property and wealth. Basil’s father is in fact a terrible snob and the most important thing to him is his family name and its noble pedigree, he’s a very proud man and he likes everyone to know their place in society, and to stick to it.

So when Basil falls in love/lust at first sight with a beautiful young woman whom he meets on an omnibus, and he subsequently discovers that she is the daughter of a linen draper, he knows that his father would never approve of the situation. Such is Basil’s infatuation that he contacts the 17 year old Margaret Sherwin through one of her family servants and after only a few meetings with her Basil meets her father and agrees to a marriage with Margaret within a week. Mr Sherwin stipulates that the marriage must be kept a secret and, reading between the lines, unconsumated, for one year as Margaret is young and he hopes that Basil’s father will then accept the situation.

The book is just full of class snobbery with Mr Sherwin and his daughter being portrayed as vulgar gold-diggers, which is to be expected of someone in ‘trade’. Basil’s life falls apart and he eventually realises what a fool he has been.

If you enjoy Victorian melodrama and thrillers then you should give this one a go. There’s a lot more plot than I have written about.

I think it is quite funny that I was reading this book just before the William and Catherine wedding because I remember that James Whittaker commented quite recently that William wouldn’t marry Kate because her mother had been an air hostess (shock horror) and they were in trade, and we couldn’t have an heir to the throne marrying into that sort of family! Two fingers up to James Whittaker then!

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The Claverings by Anthony Trollope

23 January 2011 22:45

This book was first published in 1867.

At first I thought that The Claverings was going to be very similar to The Belton Estate which was the last book by Trollope which I read but it ended up being quite different. I did enjoy it although it took me longer to read than I had expected but that was really just down to me being a bit too busy.

Joan Kyler and I have been doing what I think is called a buddyread together and we plan to exchange our thoughts on the book, anybody else who has read it please feel free to add your comments.

I do think that Trollope was a master of observation, even today all of his characters are very recognisable in society. I suppose human nature never really changes from one generation to the next.

As Joan has already mentioned – the men in this book are all fairly unlikeable really. The best that can be said for most of the male Claverings is that they are a completely lazy and feckless bunch and if they hadn’t been born into comfortable circumstances there wouldn’t have been much hope for them being able to make their way in the world, and Sir Hugh is an absolute swine of a husband.

The book begins with the beautiful Julia Brabazon jilting Harry Clavering because although she loves him she can’t see him ever having much money and she wants wealth and a position in society, consequently she marries a rich young lord instead and her troubles begin.

I’ll leave it there to see if Joan wants to add her observations.

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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4 January 2011 00:26

War and Peace has been eyeing me up and shouting READ ME from different bookcases in many different homes of ours over the past 30 odd years. At last I’ve got around to it and I feel really chuffed with myself for being able to tick it off my mental ‘must read ‘ list.

I really enjoyed War and Peace, I thought it would be really heavy going but it is actually quite a page turner. It might not be so smooth if you don’t have much of an interest in Napoleon and what was going on between 1805 and 1820 in Europe.

As you would expect from the title the storyline is split up between battles and the general chaos that ensued, and civilian life in the high society of Moscow and Petersburg and how they were all affected by the war.

There were only three parts of the book which I felt dragged a bit. I didn’t like the bits about Freemasonry in book V. It didn’t seem to add anything to the book but apart from that I’ve always disliked the Freemasons because to me it is just another word for corruption. It can’t be right that people get jobs and advancement because of a society that they’re a member of rather than the qualifications that they have. It was news to me too that the Freemasons originated in Scotland and Tolstoy sometimes called it the Scottish society. I’m mortified but according to the introduction in this edition Tolstoy saw it as a way of combating the corruption which already existed at court.

In book VII Nicholas Rostov has a wolf hunt on his estate and it seemed really out of place and distasteful to me but it made sense later on when Rostov compared his first experience of a battle with the hunt.

Almost at the end of the book, The Second Epilogue seemed never ending: The Forces That Move Nations – didn’t move me.

But that’s me nit-picking again and I would encourage any War and Peace dodgers (as I used to be) to have a go at reading it because I think most people will be pleasantly surprised.

As you can see the edition which I read is from 1943. It still has the original bookmark it was sold with and has very thin, smooth paper, the pages were very difficult to turn which was a bit annoying. I actually had to cut some of the pages so I must have been the first person to get to the end of it. This must have been a special wartime paper but it has aged really well, in fact it’s like new. We also have a paperback Pan edition from 1972 and the paper hasn’t aged at all well. Also it has no maps and no footnotes whatsoever, the 1943 book has very interesting comments.

I know that elsewhere in the blogosphere people are reading a new translation but I would be really surprised if anything could better this translation which was done by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

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A Christmas Tree by Charles Dickens

17 December 2010 23:30

This is a short story by Charles Dickens and I must admit that it’s the only thing of his that I’ve ever actually got to the end of. That isn’t saying much because it’s only 40 pages long. It’s a very wee book with quite a lot of illustrations by HM Brock. You can read it here. I first read the story about 20 years ago, I wasn’t feeling at all Christmassy and when I saw this lovely wee book in a second-hand book shop I thought it might help me get into the spirit of it all. Ho Ho Ho! – and all that.

To begin with it did conjure up Victorian images of all the traditional decorations that could be found on a Christmas tree. But Dickens just couldn’t stop himself from adding Christmas ghost stories and dead children! I suppose it might have seemed uplifting to your average Victorian, given the child mortality rate in those days.

I don’t know if my attitude towards reading Dickens has been coloured by the fact that from an early age I knew that he was a bit of a swine to his wife. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a good thing to know a lot about the private lives of authors because it can be really off-putting. Quite a few of them seem to have been bad and dangerous to know – if not actually mad too.

Should I give Dickens another whirl sometime in the future?

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Dracula by Bram Stoker

28 October 2010 23:16

Dracula cover

I’m really not into horror in fact I’ve avoided even the mock-horror Dracula/Frankenstein films but spurred on by other bloggers like Stefanie (So Many Books) and Jane GS (Reading, Writing, Working, Playing) I decided to give Dracula a go. And they were right, it is a good read, so much better than the only other book of Bram Stoker’s which I’ve read – The Seven Jewels.

I’m sure everybody knows the gist of the story, because even I did so I’m just going to comment on what led me to read the book which was Stefanie’s remark about it being full of weeping men, which it is, very weird. There isn’t a stiff upper lip between the lot of them, in fact I think the kindest thing that could be said of the men is that they are a bunch of wet willies!

I think it must have been designed by Bram Stoker as a bit of excitement for his lady readers, what with all that male bodily fluid being transferred to Lucy I suppose it was only fair that he should try to titillate his female readers with scenes that I’m sure none of them would have experienced before in Victorian Britain, such a lack of control! How exciting!

Anyway, first published in 1897 and it’s still entertaining us, can’t be bad.

When our boys were wee we rented a cottage in Whitby and because I knew very little about the book I had no idea that it featured in it. I had it in my mind that Dracula was set completely in Transylvania. I thought that all the tourists walking up the steps to Whitby Abbey were doing so just because it had been used as a film location. But Whitby is an interesting place to visit and spookily, while we were there we saw the most amazingly dramatic sunsets that we’ve ever seen.

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