I like to reread books I read as a child or teenager, or even in my twenties, partly for nostalgia, and partly to see how my perspective has changed. I recently reread ‘Imaginary Friends’ by Alison Lurie, a novel about a couple of social scientists joining a weird cult so that they could study it. It was a fun and interesting re-read.
Mary Renault, particularly The Persian Boy; anything by Tom Sharpe; Gore Vidal's Washington trilogy; Julian Rathbone The Last English King; Dickens, especially Nicholas Nickleby; Dorothy Sayers; Mary Wesley; and The Mabinogion are all things I find myself re-reading or taking on holiday for a "known" read.
I'm taking "To Kill a Mockingbird" with me on my travels (leaving here in an hour - yikes!). My church is having a discussion of it in a couple weeks, and then in August I'll be seeing a play of it. I don't know how many times I've read it, or how many times I've seen the movie. It continues to affect me, though in different ways over the past 55(?) years.
Tristram Shandy is brilliant. Weird in a way that nothing else has ever managed.
Tristam Shandy is so weird that I threw my copy in the bin, then pulled it out to put on the bookstall at our next church fete. But books that stay on our shelf are all intended fro re-reading, and usually get that. High on my list of comfort reading are Sherlock Holmes and most of PG Wodehouse.
I love Tristram Shandy, though more to read and relish in small portions at a time, as there isn’t exactly a fast paced plot to keep you hooked for long periods!
Glad I’m not the only one, MaryLouise - I find most people seem to hate his novels! I especially like The Wings of the Dove, and I’m not even sure why, as it’s such a melodramatic plot, and I don’t much like melodrama, but I am intrigued by all the subtleties and the moral ambiguities too. I find The Golden Bowl oddly fascinating because, yes, I don’t quite know what happens in it, and yet I find myself caring about the characters and being moved bu the whole confusing thing!
In a biographical sense I read it as James' swansong to the young, gifted Minny Temple who had died 32 years before of tuberculosis and who haunted Henry James throughout his long writing career for reasons we don't altogether understand. Milly Theale's illness is never identified: she longs to live, is told by her physician to live as fully as she can. She falls in love and believes she is loved, begins to live passionately.
She then discovers something and we might say she dies of a broken heart. Or not? A fine disillusionment, perhaps. She has moved to Venice, a magnificent enchanted palazzo and all the profound, ambiguous feelings James had about Venice are here in these chapters, the promise of Venice, the great parties, the labyrinth of canals, the hidden, secret, even seamy, side of a dream city. James reveals and conceals little by little as he writes this last tribute to Venice.
Set against Milly as a foil is Kate Croy, the clever young woman in love with a man she cannot marry because neither of them has money. And Milly is wealthy beyond imagining, fabulous, abundant American wealth that shimmers like another Venetian mirage. All James' novels are morality tales and all his young women are like Isabel Archer of Portrait of A Lady, in the same way that all his young women are adult Maisies grown up from the abused and vulnerable child in What Maisie Knew. And this may be my conceit alone but slowly the gorgeous palazzo where Millie is unseen, unheard and dying comes to take on the nameless horror of James' finest short story, The Turn of the Screw. But here too it is all mysterious, charming, glimpses of depths and vistas across the Grand Canal, clandestine meetings in English parks, regrets, impulsive choices, layered unsaid on unsaid.
I could spend my life in James' novels. Now you see it, now you don't.
I re-read favourite SF novels. Top of the list are 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and 'The Dispossessed" by Ursula K LeGuin. I think I am just captivated by her characters and the strange imaginative worlds they live in. Plus the way she uses them to explore moral and political dilemmas in our world.
I was sad to hear of her death. I would have loved to meet her and have a conversation. And thank her.
@MaryLouise, yes, I read it as a tribute to his cousin too. I’m fascinated by the idea of different ways the characters can be said to have everything or nothing. Milly has everything in terms of money and charm, but has lost all her family and her own life is cut short. I found the scene when the doctor lets her know, albeit indirectly, that she is dying, and that following scene where she is processing it in her mind, very powerful - that in telling her to live fully, he is ironically letting her know she won’t have much time to do so. And I find fascinating how James views Europe and America - corruption versus innocence, culture versus acquisition. And the way Kate’s plan seem heartless, but also makes sense logically as a win-win situation (though it didn’t turn out that way). I want to read it again now.
Reading what you wrote makes me feel the same way, fineline! Kate is remarkable in many ways and the giftedness of James is that we share in the process by which Kate comes to deceive Milly, so we understand her desperation and pragmatic reason, can empathise with that choice from within. And James' England is so often twinned with Europe in the later novels, with Rome or Venice, something of that amoral mysterious Europe that defeats the young American heiresses who arrive there filled with confidence and desire. That was where James first found publishing fame, the story of the 'innocent abroad', Daisy Miller who succumbs to Roman fever and is cheated of the charmed life we all assumed was in her future.
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Tristam Shandy is so weird that I threw my copy in the bin, then pulled it out to put on the bookstall at our next church fete. But books that stay on our shelf are all intended fro re-reading, and usually get that. High on my list of comfort reading are Sherlock Holmes and most of PG Wodehouse.
**Spoilers, indirectly**
In a biographical sense I read it as James' swansong to the young, gifted Minny Temple who had died 32 years before of tuberculosis and who haunted Henry James throughout his long writing career for reasons we don't altogether understand. Milly Theale's illness is never identified: she longs to live, is told by her physician to live as fully as she can. She falls in love and believes she is loved, begins to live passionately.
She then discovers something and we might say she dies of a broken heart. Or not? A fine disillusionment, perhaps. She has moved to Venice, a magnificent enchanted palazzo and all the profound, ambiguous feelings James had about Venice are here in these chapters, the promise of Venice, the great parties, the labyrinth of canals, the hidden, secret, even seamy, side of a dream city. James reveals and conceals little by little as he writes this last tribute to Venice.
Set against Milly as a foil is Kate Croy, the clever young woman in love with a man she cannot marry because neither of them has money. And Milly is wealthy beyond imagining, fabulous, abundant American wealth that shimmers like another Venetian mirage. All James' novels are morality tales and all his young women are like Isabel Archer of Portrait of A Lady, in the same way that all his young women are adult Maisies grown up from the abused and vulnerable child in What Maisie Knew. And this may be my conceit alone but slowly the gorgeous palazzo where Millie is unseen, unheard and dying comes to take on the nameless horror of James' finest short story, The Turn of the Screw. But here too it is all mysterious, charming, glimpses of depths and vistas across the Grand Canal, clandestine meetings in English parks, regrets, impulsive choices, layered unsaid on unsaid.
I could spend my life in James' novels. Now you see it, now you don't.
I was sad to hear of her death. I would have loved to meet her and have a conversation. And thank her.