Books Options

[Turin Machine]

Just reading Cormack Macarthay's Blood Meridian. Excellent stuff, early but good, you can read a lot of his Border trilogy in it. Highly recommended.

[newres]

Just wondering what people are reading currently and your thoughts? I always have an audiobook on the go that I listen to running, driving and in bed. Currently I’m listening to Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie and I’m reading on a recommendation Kolmsky Heights as recommended by a friend. I’m struggling with it to be honest. I’m about 1/3 through. I have a feeling that my head might just be a bit too busy with things and that’s why as I’ve struggled a little with the last couple of books.

Incidentally, one of the authors I missed out was John Updike. The Rabbit books were absolute classics ofcourse. I used to collect first editions and rare modern books and at one time had a signed Franklin Library edition of Witches if Eastwick.

[Turin Machine]

Just wondering what people are reading currently and your thoughts? I always have an audiobook on the go that I listen to running, driving and in bed. Currently I’m listening to Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie and I’m reading on a recommendation Kolmsky Heights as recommended by a friend. I’m struggling with it to be honest. I’m about 1/3 through. I have a feeling that my head might just be a bit too busy with things and that’s why as I’ve struggled a little with the last couple of books.

Incidentally, one of the authors I missed out was John Updike. The Rabbit books were absolute classics ofcourse. I used to collect first editions and rare modern books and at one time had a signed Franklin Library edition of Witches if Eastwick.

I'm juggling Dissolution with George Cavendish's work. Someone who's work I adore is Marcel Pagnol, he writes about life in Provence before it was discovered, works of charming rural life riven through with drama and tragi comedy.
From a review of Jean de Florette,
"Playwright, filmmaker and novelist Pagnol (1895-1974) affectionately celebrated his native Provence along with the shrewdness and comic foibles of the folk. Jean Cadoret is a hunchback of charm and intelligence who comes from town to settle on his inherited estate where he plans to farm scientifically. His wife Aimee, a former small-time opera singer, and adoring little daughter Manon work by his side. But the jealous Soubeyransthe local patriarch Cesar and his nephew, the clownish Ugolincraftily plug up a spring on Jean's farm and wait for him to fail. When a cruel summer drought drives Jean to despair and eventually death, the Soubeyrans buy his land cheaply and divert the water for their own lucrative carnation farm. In the sequel, Manon appears as a picturesque goat-girl/dryad, scampering over the rocks in cast-off opera gear and playing her pipes. She avenges her parents and falls in love. The end brings astonishing revelations. Pagnol depicts his villagers as post-Roman pagans whose ""natural brutality'' shows through their Christian veneer. As in the author's earlier naturalist novels, the landscape and the willful spring are forces molding human fates. Those who offend nature, here lushly described, pay a penalty."

I have most of his published work, much of it in French although it's almost impossible to read as being Provencal himself he writes in that dialect. But the translated stuff is fascinating. We actually went on a semi pilgrimage to the village where much of his work is set and where he himself is buried.