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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Readme: the book thread.
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
I was chatting with a Swiss friend recently and found he'd never heard of Johann Rudolf Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, which shocked me a bit, so I picked it up to reread. I've now nearly finished it and I now feel I have to congratulate him on avoiding what is really a terrible travesty of a book chock full of pious platitudes and appalling geographical and biological anomalies!
But it is still okay as a bit of fun - it was written for kids and at that it is okay but still a bit over pious for my taste.
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What part of Matt. 7:1 don't you understand?
Posts: 48139 | From: 1st on the right, straight on 'til morning | Registered: Sep 2005
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
As I have tangentified the inquiry thread too much, I've nipped over here. I've just re-read "Red Moon and Black Mountain" by Joy Chant. The invented world descriptions, the peoples and their lives are brilliant - so much thought and knowledge in there. The plotting is intricate and skillful - things that didn't seem important at the beginning turn out to be critical at the end. The character development works well, and the way that she sustains the language style is impressive. I liked the way that each of the children had their own essential part of the story.
Up to the major battle, I'm with it all the way.
But, I realise that it is one, possibly the first of the books that made me unhappy about the emphasis on blood. Specifically, royal blood. It's usually in pagan contexts (which is odd). There seems to be an idea that, even in a war where thousands of the ordinary folk have spilt their blood on the ground, things can only be resolved by the one spill of the blood of someone with a special heritage. And it must be spilled willingly. Only, in this book, the character doesn't have the choice. He could say no, but he has been Chosen, and herded down a funnel to a place where he can only say yes. And this herding has been done by the agents of someone who is identified in the book as God.
This is not like our world, where God does the necessary Himself, and when he needs someone's choice, there is genuine freedom to say no. (We assume.)
And, being of a republican bent, I am not too keen on the idea of there being some special property of royal blood - unless it's haemophilia or porphyria, of course. Why does that idea hang around in literature. And why the idea about sacrifice? Once for all, wasn't it?
[ 12. December 2015, 17:08: Message edited by: Penny S ]
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
And, being of a republican bent, I am not too keen on the idea of there being some special property of royal blood - unless it's haemophilia or porphyria, of course. Why does that idea hang around in literature. And why the idea about sacrifice? Once for all, wasn't it?
Because of the ancient idea that the king is the leader of the land, and personifies it. You'll find that exemplified in the Fisher King, who is wounded and the land suffering along with him until he can be healed. The king was expected to be ready to give his life for the kingdom if necessary. There have also been ancient traditions where the real king would step aside for a bit while a surrogate was treated royally then sacrificed at the end of it for the good of the land. Blood is the life force. It had to be shed to give life, and healing and fertility to the land, or to appease the gods and atone. That sort of thing.
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
It is also well articulated in The King Must Die by Mary Renault.
It's been some years since I read it, but as I recall Red Moon, Black Mountain was definitely a post-Tolkien fantasy. It could never have been written, without LOTR. And you will recall that in LOTR it was Frodo who had to lose things, so that others might have them.
I believe you could prove by analyzing the text that Chant had closely read both Tolkien and Renault. This is not necessarily a bad thing; every fantasy writing of that period and many years after is either following Tolkien or rebelling against him.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
Oh, and as to Swiss Family -- there is a name for this phenomenon. Jo Walton coined it. You were visited by the Suck Fairy. With her magic wand she tapped a book that you enjoyed thoroughly in youth, and suddenly it sucks. All the idiocies, contradictions, plot holes, and limp characters are now painfully visible.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
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Huia
Shipmate
# 3473
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Posted
I found that when I finally tracked down and bought a copy of Aunt Robbo by Ann Scott-Moncrief ![[Waterworks]](graemlins/bawling.gif)
Huia
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Charity gives food from the table, Justice gives a place at the table.
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Sir Kevin
Ship's Gaffer
# 3492
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
Kindle, paper, vellum, papyrus, clay tablet... What are you reading?
Firenze
Heaven Host
I wasn't reading anything the day this thread was started as it was my birthday, but I met a college professor yesterday who is a Joyce scholar. I told her I need to re-read "Ulysses" which originally took the whole summer.
I am also thinking about my sporadic romp through "Three Men in a Boat". My first-edition is over 100 years old and is in bad condition: fortunately I also have the paperback but I am not certain it contains the funny illustrations of the older one.
This is arguably the funniest book ever published in the English language!
I shall start next week when school is out for Christmas break.
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If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Writing is currently my hobby, not yet my profession.
Posts: 30517 | From: White Hart Lane | Registered: Oct 2002
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betjemaniac
Shipmate
# 17618
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
I agree with Albertus about A Murder of Quality - sort of the missing third corner of the Delderfield-Molesworth-George Smiley triangle.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Slightly surprised to discover that To Serve Them All My Days was written as late as 1972: if you'd asked me I'd have put it, from its style, in the late 40s (or indeed even the 30s, were it not for the fact that it ends during the Second World War).
Somewhere in Zimbabwe last month, stuck for something to read, I happened upon an ancient copy of Delderfield's "Diana" in an equally ancient hotel (pictures of George V and Queen Mary on the dining room wall....).
What a horrible, horrible book.
I'm not given to violence but I spent 600-odd pages unsure whether to punch the hero, or the bloody awful heroine he refuses to drop like a hot potato.
I'm (generally) a big Delderfield fan, but I'm not surprised this one had passed me by until now. By the end I was genuinely crying tears of rage about that dreadful woman and the way she managed to screw up so many other people's lives. Yet they kept going back to her.
About as unsettling as Lanark, but without the humour or the dragons.
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And is it true? For if it is....
Posts: 1481 | From: behind the dreaming spires | Registered: Mar 2013
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
I have tried Diana several times and have never made it to more than about a third of the way through - I think it is destined to sit on my shelf unread for ever!
[ 14. December 2015, 07:08: Message edited by: Welease Woderwick ]
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I give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
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What part of Matt. 7:1 don't you understand?
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
On the same sort of lines, have you ever read Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty? Beautifully written but all the main characters are complete and utter bastards!
Irredeemably so.
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I give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
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What part of Matt. 7:1 don't you understand?
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betjemaniac
Shipmate
# 17618
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Welease Woderwick:
On the same sort of lines, have you ever read Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty? Beautifully written but all the main characters are complete and utter bastards!
Irredeemably so.
Yes, it's ok until they all turn on him. Not a massive fan of Hollinghurst. I can do bleak with the best of them, but Diana's somewhere out beyond the wilder shores of Thomas Hardy, where the plot spent some time in the permafrost. It's just so wildly out of character for Delderfield. In some ways it's good to know he wasn't just a one-trick pony, but I can't help thinking he must have been in a very dark place when he wrote it.
For those who haven't come across it, if you imagine the second half of A Handful of Dust where Waugh's marriage has broken down and he's throwing it all into the book (and yes, he did write lineally so this is what happened) but string that out for 680 pages with no redemption for anyone and a steady spiral to the bottom of the drain, then you're not even halfway close to approaching what a bitter, joyless, painful book this is.
It's well written, but it's horrible.
I'm recuperating with a re-reading of LTC Rolt's Railway Adventure.
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And is it true? For if it is....
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Oh, and as to Swiss Family -- there is a name for this phenomenon. Jo Walton coined it. You were visited by the Suck Fairy. With her magic wand she tapped a book that you enjoyed thoroughly in youth, and suddenly it sucks. All the idiocies, contradictions, plot holes, and limp characters are now painfully visible.
Is there a name for the opposite phenomenon? I loved the Little House books as a child, but when I read them as bed time stories to my own kids, I saw the stories through Ma's eyes instead of Laura's. The husband who wouldn't settle, the poverty, the uncertainties and hardships of life; the books came alive in a whole new way.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Sipech
Shipmate
# 16870
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Posted
It's getting towards the end of the year and I'm getting into stats geek mode. I've just finished Daphne Du Maurier's The House on the Strand which was entertaining in parts, but didn't knock my socks off. I'm part way through Slavoj Žižek's On Belief and James Dunn's Baptism in the Holy Spirit. I'm on course to finish both of these in the next couple of weeks, which will leave me having finished 51 books in the year and averaging a little under 36 pages a day.
I would like to finish the year having finished 52 books and averaging 36 pages a day, which would mean I need a book that is a little over 400 pages long.
To even up my stats, I'd also ideally be looking for a non-British, female author. If it were a book on science, that'd be all the better.
Suggestions for something that fills those criteria?
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I try to be self-deprecating; I'm just not very good at it.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheAlethiophile
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
"Suck Fairy". Oh yes.
I can see that Chant was influenced by Tolkien, but I suspect she would have written something not dissimilar without him - though whether she could have found a publisher without him is moot. (There's an obvious Lothlorien borrow, isn't there, though?)
I don't think that what Tolkien does with Frodo is the same as what Chant does with Oliver. I have never felt any sense of wrongness with it. Frodo embarks on the way to Mount Doom with an adult understanding of hazard - even if he doesn't quite know how bad it will be, he does know it will be bad, and he may die. At the beginning. No afterthoughts.
I know where the king dying concept comes from - and have you read Naomi Mitchison's Corn King and Spring Queen? That's in my re-read pile! Maybe I shouldn't. Is it before or after Renault? And all those bog bodies in the real world. It doesn't mean it's an idea that needs to be used now as if it means something.
I keep having a little thought popping up whenever I type Chant's name. "It's a good name" - out of Wynne Jones.
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I know where the king dying concept comes from - and have you read Naomi Mitchison's Corn King and Spring Queen? That's in my re-read pile! Maybe I shouldn't. Is it before or after Renault? And all those bog bodies in the real world. It doesn't mean it's an idea that needs to be used now as if it means something.
It's one of those archetypal things. If you look at fantasy novels, you won't have to look far before you find some with quasi-medieval settings where people travel by horse, women have long hair and skirts, men fight with swords, and technology as we know it in the 21st century has mostly not yet been discovered but magic is king. The "Celtic strain" is a whole subset of romanticized mush that includes sacrifice, noble druids, mysterious stone circles, the wonders of an artistic civilization besieged by the barbarian Romans and so on. It's a sort of persistent B-movie script that lurks in the back of many people's minds and comes out when they try to put something together in written form.
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I now find myself in the throes of regret. I know that during my teens and early teaching years I read a vast amount of stuff, even while working at learning, writing essays (try fitting that stuff into a discussion of Hazlitt) and building up a lesson bank. (That involved reading up real medieval history because Y3 hadn't reached 1066, which they should have done, and I was supposed to fill in the gap between then and the Tudors.*)
And now, in retirement, I find reading like that pretty difficult. I did manage to do "Midnight Folk" and "Box" in about four days, with another two on "Red Moon", but they aren't new stuff.
There is, as it were, a huge mental undercroft** of books which not only can I not remember the content of, but I cannot recall at all. I know I read Tolkien for the first time. And the second. And the third. As one does. Until I rebelled at the sole active female only doing anything by pretending to be a man, and the only realistic female human, Ioreth, being such a stereotype despite being crucial to the plot. And Fred Hoyle, Apuleius, Virgil, Lewis, Williams, Homer (frequently - definitely did women better than Tolkien did); books on cancer, American First Nations, nuclear fusion; Mitchison, Renault, Sutcliffe, Engdahl, Dunnett, Bradbury, Asimov, Le Guin***. And the books from earlier on, of which I can remember the content, but not the titles or the authors.
I can read what I think of as fast reads, but the serious stuff is only readable in small chunks, despite my having the time for it, and a stack of books to do it with.
*I was somewhat put out by a bunch of "historical" novels which, in the midst of the well researched facts, would insert some Margaret Mead stuff about practices for which there can be no evidence. (Yup, William Rufus, sacrifice, but not the only such stuff. A Victorian novel has Harold Godwinsson's mum going off into the forest to call on Ran to drown Beorn Estrithsson, which she might have done. But she would not have been answered, which, in the novel, she was.)
**By analogy with the recent Dr Who season, though whether it is a better match for Skaro's slimy undead Daleks or Gallifrey's Cloister Wraiths I wouldn't like to say.
***I left out Andre Norton, because I wanted to comment that I think there may have been another influence on Chant there - she was very good at tribal societies as well.
PS Along with the books espousing the idea of royal sacrifice I couple (note the metaphors surfacing from the substrate unbidden) books suggesting that droit de seigneur was a thing, and that it should not be joined with women taking knives to bed with them, husbands climbing through windows with cudgels, or, possibly, with the aforementioned royal sacrifice. (Wikipedia claims no evidence for the practice, except it being described as having happened in days of old when things were bad, and giving a more usual name, the right of the leg, which sounds derogatory. It is also reported more recently in tribal societies or corrupt Africa, where is should more properly be called rape.)
The middle ages of that sort should stay in the subconscious.
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
I too have difficulty recalling books. I have been using Goodreads to log my reading (the chat boards are useless) and it is always a pleasure, when I go and enter a book in, to discover that I already read it five years ago. The system allows you to add your own comments about it, which is a tickler for the sievelike memory.
Someone, elsewhere on the webs, propounded the delightful theory that Diana Wynn Jones was really Susan Pevensie. As you recall, Bob, Susan was the only Narnia child who grew to adulthood, the other three going off to be with Aslan. Calendrically it works out exactly right, and Jones indeed took courses from both Lewis and Tolkien when she was in college.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
It's the forty years ago, the fifty years ago that are a pain!
I should have kept a record then!
There used to be an SF and fantasy shop in Soho called "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed". A tiny front room, and another behind it, and an excellent man behind the counter who, once he had the measure of what you bought (and I used to go up to town monthly, the Saturday after payday, and come away with a stack), would recommend others he thought you would like. They would get things in early from the States. Then they moved to a large glass premises. Then, shortly after, they disappeared. The last time I went, I came away through a tremendous summer storm, when it became as dark as under a near total eclipse, the rain fell down like a waterfall, and the pavements were like streams. I was wet through, but because it was warm, that wasn't a problem. (I must have had the books in a plastic bag!)
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I've just looked up that shop on Wikipedia, and had a little giggle at the fictional shop named "There will come soft rains".
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
Yesterday afternoon I finished Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape, which was as good as ever, so that last night I could start Shrabani Basu's For King and Another Country about the Indian involvement in the First World War - it arrived yesterday but isn't officially published until tomorrow, and I'm already well into it. For History buffs, it is well worth it - fascinating stuff - but all so very tragic.
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I give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
Fancy a break in South India?
Accessible Homestay Guesthouse in Central Kerala, contact me for details
What part of Matt. 7:1 don't you understand?
Posts: 48139 | From: 1st on the right, straight on 'til morning | Registered: Sep 2005
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
The problem with DWJ being Susan would be that it is impossible to imagine that she ever went through a phase of being only interested in nylons and lipstick.
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
Tch. We never actually see that on screen/page. We only hear it alleged, by embittered siblings.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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pimple
Ship's Irruption
# 10635
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Posted
I've just finished "The Observations" - Jane Harris's homage to the Victorian novel. Probably wouldn't have given it a second glance if it hadn't been thrust in my hands last month at a U3A bookclub meeting. Couldn't put it down. I wonder if it was put up for the Booker Prize in 2006/2007. Probably not? Not literary enough? If so, they should change the rules. The depiction of the 15-year-old Irish heroine is a tour de force of wit and gaiety and empathy. I defy anyone not to fall in love with her!
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In other words, just because I made it all up, doesn't mean it isn't true (Reginald Hill)
Posts: 8018 | From: Wonderland | Registered: Nov 2005
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betjemaniac
Shipmate
# 17618
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sipech:
I've just finished Daphne Du Maurier's The House on the Strand which was entertaining in parts, but didn't knock my socks off.
Interesting, that's in my all-time top 10 I think. Where did you think it falls down?
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And is it true? For if it is....
Posts: 1481 | From: behind the dreaming spires | Registered: Mar 2013
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Tch. We never actually see that on screen/page. We only hear it alleged, by embittered siblings.
And Polly, old enough to know better.
I have thought that Susan would have had a really lousy time afterwards. She was still a minor, and would have needed guardians - likely to be the Scrubbs, who would add the weight of their own loss to hers, blaming her siblings for his death, as well as his moving away from their own beliefs. Quite apart from their initial obnoxiousness. She would have had a lot to work through, and support services would have been scant back then. Anything she wrote would have been horrendously dark.
I shall have to try the House on the Strand next, I think. It being on my re-read pile.
[ 15. December 2015, 18:46: Message edited by: Penny S ]
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
In the circles I move in there is a considerable interest in Susan, and there's a good deal of material of one kind or another. Neil Gaiman wrote a short story about her (only for the strong of stomach).
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
In the circles I move in there is a considerable interest in Susan, and there's a good deal of material of one kind or another. Neil Gaiman wrote a short story about her (only for the strong of stomach).
I've read that. It isn't on the re-read list. There was one clever piece I read that linked her with Pullman's Oxford. (One of them.)
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I think Susan's fate can be related to the short story Lewis wrote - "The Shoddy Lands", in which the narrator experiences the narrow dreamworld of a woman known to one of his friends.
My English tutor at college was not a fan of Lewis, having had a woman friend of his turn up for a tutorial with him, and be rejected as soon as she walked through the door of his room with no explanation. My tutor thought it was misogyny. It was curious to find that cohort of women writers who did benefit from him and Tolkien after hearing that.
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Is it usual to take a friend to a tutorial? Sounds odd to me. I'm afraid I too would have (politely) done the same. Nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with an ability to concentrate without distractions.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
I parsed Penny S to mean that a woman friend of his (the narrator) turned up for a tutorial with him (Lewis), not that she accompanied the narrator - which would indeed have been an odd proceeding.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
Firenze has it right. The woman thought she had a personal tutorial with Lewis, and, being rejected, reported it to her friend. Who clearly carried the anger at her treatment for some time.
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venbede
Shipmate
# 16669
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Posted
If a tutor is due to give a tutorial, it is his job to do so. He can't just tell the student to bog off when he sees them.
If Lewis did behave like that, it should have been reported, but in those days that probably wouldn't happen.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Trudy Scrumptious:
Some people interested in "the problem of Susan" may enjoy reading or re-reading this Purgatory thread from several years ago.
Thank you for that link - I hadn't read it, and it's nice to see that things I thought out for myself have been thought out by others as well!
The tutorial story was always odd.
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by venbede:
If a tutor is due to give a tutorial, it is his job to do so. He can't just tell the student to bog off when he sees them.
There's always at least two sides to a story. Lewis might have told her to bog off for all sorts of reasons. For all we know it could have been the wrong time slot, or he might have been expecting someone else. She might not even have been his pupil if he'd been covering for someone else that week and hadn't met her before. Who can say.
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
Quite. Or someone might have been playing a very nasty trick. It's not unheard of for someone to tell a pupil/student that a member of staff wants to see them when they don't.
But Mr Toomey was still somewhat unhappy about it. And that's all I can say.
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
To go back to For King and Another Country, which I have now finished - it really was excellent and I would recommend it highly to those interested in the period BUT I thought it was sad that it only covered The Western Front and did not look at Indian involvement in the Dardanelles, Palestine, Egypt, etc.
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I give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
Fancy a break in South India?
Accessible Homestay Guesthouse in Central Kerala, contact me for details
What part of Matt. 7:1 don't you understand?
Posts: 48139 | From: 1st on the right, straight on 'til morning | Registered: Sep 2005
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Sir Kevin
Ship's Gaffer
# 3492
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by QLib:
How to be Good by Nick Hornby.
I have liked Nick's books and I have liked his films.
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If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Writing is currently my hobby, not yet my profession.
Posts: 30517 | From: White Hart Lane | Registered: Oct 2002
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Sir Kevin
Ship's Gaffer
# 3492
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
We never actually see that on screen/page. We only hear it all
Dunno about this Susan, but my wife does not transmogrify characters from other books. My lovely bride has completed NaNoWriMo and her first book is SF. She is about midway through it. God willing she will finish it in 2016. It is SF and is about a certain sort of marine mammals who may or may not speak with humans. Dunno where it is going but it shows promise. I am just collaborating on locations at this point. Her published authors to this point were book reviews of young adult literature when she was in grad school.
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If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Writing is currently my hobby, not yet my profession.
Posts: 30517 | From: White Hart Lane | Registered: Oct 2002
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