Reaping What You Didn't Sow Wednesday
May. 11th, 2016 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. Death is fired for imprudently developing a personality, and his functions are put on hold until a suitable replacement can be found. This naturally leads to a lot of confusion and mess, but for a little while Death is able to enjoy his new job as a farm laborer and his new friends down at the pub. Children and wizards can see his true form, but it doesn't cause as much trouble as you might expect.
"I can tell because of the bones." <3 I enjoyed this book almost as much as Mort. Every scene involving Death settling in to village life was pure gold, and the rest was a mix of good, great, not-so-great, and amazing, with a little confusion and some clunkiness scattered in for good measure. Will Death save the day? Do you even have to ask? I'm delighted with Terry Pratchett for making the Grim Reaper such an unexpectedly (and hilariously) sympathetic protagonist.
What I'm Reading Now
Time of Hope has the strongest start of any C. P. Snow book yet! Or maybe I just like stories about kids having to deal with their parents' problems. Lewis Eliot is the narrator we've had all along, with the same transparent style. The different threads are beginning to meet each other here: we've got George Passant, who was the central figure of Strangers and Brothers, and another reference to Roy's youthful infatuation with Jack and the scandal it causes when his parents find out.
I liked the scene when Lewis' father takes him to a cricket match, the first sports game they have gone to together, in order to break the news that he is about to file for bankruptcy. As Mr. Eliot watches the players, he begins to daydream about a new career:
Lady Chatterly's Lover is chattering along. I'm a little bored with the endless references to "the bitch-goddess, Success" and her hapless hound-prostitute-acolytes. I get it! Success is a bitch-goddess! This imagery is theoretically pungent but strangely unspecific. The multiple significant glares of Mellors the Gamekeeper are also boring - in both senses, I guess. But I'm a sucker for earnest early twentieth-century cocktail-party sex talk, and LCL is almost nothing but. DID YOU KNOW that our civilization is about to fall into a bottomless chasm of malaise? Did you know that when that happens, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus? It's true! Or, maybe not true in a strict sense, but you have to admit it sounded pretty smart for a second there! Or if not smart, exactly, at least mildly titillating, and isn't that what this broken-backed eunuch of a country needs? No offence, Clifford :(.
Also, real men and real women are in alarmingly short supply in these rootless times! What makes men and women real? No one knows for sure, but it's clear what real men and women don't do: they don't lounge around in the Chatterlys' drawing room quipping about sex taxonomy over brandy like these jokers.
I thought Connie's experience with the needy playwright Michaelis and his humiliating criticism of her was very well drawn, and maybe a good metonomy for Connie's sense of betrayal and confusion in general - not just by sex, but by all the ideals of adulthood that seem to have dissolved at close range, like walking into a cloud. Connie has finally hired a nurse for Clifford and started taking long walks in her free time, which means that D. H. Lawrence has the chance to do some of that seasonal description he's good at.
What I Plan to Read Next
The further adventures of Death? And when I finish Time of Hope I'll be up to 1950 in my 99 Novels chronology, which means Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper and The Disenchanted by Budd Sculberg, two books I know nothing about!
What I've Finished Reading
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. Death is fired for imprudently developing a personality, and his functions are put on hold until a suitable replacement can be found. This naturally leads to a lot of confusion and mess, but for a little while Death is able to enjoy his new job as a farm laborer and his new friends down at the pub. Children and wizards can see his true form, but it doesn't cause as much trouble as you might expect.
"Hallo, skelington."
"Hallo, skelington."
He swiveled around.
The small child of the house was watching him with the most penetrating gaze he had ever seen.
"You are a skelington, aren't you," she said. "I can tell because of the bones."
[. . .]
LOOK, he said, IF I WAS REALLY A SKELETON, LITTLE GIRL, I'M SURE THESE OLD GENTLEMEN HERE WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT.
She regarded the old men at the other end of the bench.
"They're nearly skelingtons anyway," she said. "I shouldn't think they'd want to see another one."
He gave in.
I HAVE TO ADMIT THAT YOU ARE RIGHT ON THAT POINT.
"Why don't you fall to bits?"
I DON'T KNOW. I NEVER HAVE.
"I've seen skelingtons of birds and things and they all fall to bits."
PERHAPS IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE WHAT SOMETHING WAS, WHEREAS THIS IS WHAT I AM.
"I can tell because of the bones." <3 I enjoyed this book almost as much as Mort. Every scene involving Death settling in to village life was pure gold, and the rest was a mix of good, great, not-so-great, and amazing, with a little confusion and some clunkiness scattered in for good measure. Will Death save the day? Do you even have to ask? I'm delighted with Terry Pratchett for making the Grim Reaper such an unexpectedly (and hilariously) sympathetic protagonist.
What I'm Reading Now
Time of Hope has the strongest start of any C. P. Snow book yet! Or maybe I just like stories about kids having to deal with their parents' problems. Lewis Eliot is the narrator we've had all along, with the same transparent style. The different threads are beginning to meet each other here: we've got George Passant, who was the central figure of Strangers and Brothers, and another reference to Roy's youthful infatuation with Jack and the scandal it causes when his parents find out.
I liked the scene when Lewis' father takes him to a cricket match, the first sports game they have gone to together, in order to break the news that he is about to file for bankruptcy. As Mr. Eliot watches the players, he begins to daydream about a new career:
"Lewis," he said, "do they have to be very strong to play this game?"
"Some batsmen," I said confidently, having read a lot of misleading books, "score all their runs by wristwork." I demonstrated the principle of the leg-glance.
"Just turn their wrists, do they?" said my father. He studied the players in the field. "But they seem to be pretty big chaps, most of these? Do they have to be big chaps?"
"Quaife is ever such a little man. Quaife of Warwickshire."
"How little is he? Is he shorter than me?"
"Oh yes."
I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father. He received it with obvious satisfaction.
He pursued his chain of thought.
"How old do they go on playing?"
"Very old," I said.
"Older than me?"
My father was forty-five. I assured him that W. G. Grace went on playing till he was fifty-eight. My father smiled reflectively.
"How old can they be when they play for the first time? Who is the oldest man to play here for the first time?"
For all my Wisden, it was beyond me to tell him the record age of a first appearance in first-class cricket. I could only give my father general encouragement.
He was given to romantic day-dreams, and that morning he was indulging in one of them. He was dreaming that all of a sudden he had become miraculously skilled at cricket; he was brought into the middle, everyone acclaimed him, he won instantaneous fame. It would not have done for the dream to be absolutely fantastic. It had to take him as he was, forty-five years old and five feet four in height. He would not imagine himself taken back to youth and transformed into a man strong, tall and glorious. No, he accepted himself in the flesh. He grinned at himself -- and then dreamed about all that could happen.
Lady Chatterly's Lover is chattering along. I'm a little bored with the endless references to "the bitch-goddess, Success" and her hapless hound-prostitute-acolytes. I get it! Success is a bitch-goddess! This imagery is theoretically pungent but strangely unspecific. The multiple significant glares of Mellors the Gamekeeper are also boring - in both senses, I guess. But I'm a sucker for earnest early twentieth-century cocktail-party sex talk, and LCL is almost nothing but. DID YOU KNOW that our civilization is about to fall into a bottomless chasm of malaise? Did you know that when that happens, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus? It's true! Or, maybe not true in a strict sense, but you have to admit it sounded pretty smart for a second there! Or if not smart, exactly, at least mildly titillating, and isn't that what this broken-backed eunuch of a country needs? No offence, Clifford :(.
Also, real men and real women are in alarmingly short supply in these rootless times! What makes men and women real? No one knows for sure, but it's clear what real men and women don't do: they don't lounge around in the Chatterlys' drawing room quipping about sex taxonomy over brandy like these jokers.
I thought Connie's experience with the needy playwright Michaelis and his humiliating criticism of her was very well drawn, and maybe a good metonomy for Connie's sense of betrayal and confusion in general - not just by sex, but by all the ideals of adulthood that seem to have dissolved at close range, like walking into a cloud. Connie has finally hired a nurse for Clifford and started taking long walks in her free time, which means that D. H. Lawrence has the chance to do some of that seasonal description he's good at.
What I Plan to Read Next
The further adventures of Death? And when I finish Time of Hope I'll be up to 1950 in my 99 Novels chronology, which means Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper and The Disenchanted by Budd Sculberg, two books I know nothing about!
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Date: 2017-05-23 01:12 pm (UTC)