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Thread: What do you plan to read next year?

  1. #1
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    What do you plan to read next year?

    I am thinking of reading:

    The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (French classic)
    Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev (Russian classic)
    Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell (Victorian classic)
    Villette, Charlotte Brontë (Victorian classic)
    Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope (Victorian classic)
    Ullyses, James Joyce (Irish, modernism)
    something by Ayn Rand (American Capitalism)

    I'm not sure what else. I might read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, as it's been a while since I read a western. I might read Paradise Lost by Milton. May read something by Thomas de Quincy. May read something by Sir Walter Scott as he was extremely popular once. May read some Edwardian books like Kipps by H.G. Wells. Might give D.H. Lawrence a go. Think I may read a few more classic crime books like The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, and something by Patricia Highsmith.

    I will read some straight entertainment books too, and probably The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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    Registered User Jackson Richardson's Avatar
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    Good luck, kev, and have fun. I’ve read all the Scott novels in my time and here is my tuppence worth.
    His first seven or so novels are set in Scotland at the periods of the social and political changes that had shaped Scotland as he knew it. These are worthwhile. Then he wrote Ivanhoe set in a medieval England that owed more to his imagination than any serious historical awareness. The rest of the novels (apart from Redgauntlet) are not up to standard.

    Scott’s prose style and manner need a bit of getting use to for contemporary readers and we will never get the sense of excitement they clearly had for C19 readers. However I found them worth the effort.

    To begin, I’d recommend his first novel, Waverley, or Rob Roy. Once you are use to Scott’s conventions, Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian are his masterpieces to my mind. And Ivanhoe is a good read.

    There’s the extraordinary sense of reading someone who was rated up with Shakespeare just within living memory and was the most popular British novelist of his time but has nearly sunk without a trace in popular culture. But they didn’t have the movies when he was writing.
    Previously JonathanB

    The more I read, the more I shall covet to read. Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy Partion3, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 1

  3. #3
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    Thanks for the tip. I guess he wrote adventure books. I may give Waverley a go. The only one of his stories I know anything about is Ivanhoe. It's slightly interesting because it has a Jewish heroine or love interest in a Mediaeval setting. Since Scott's a Scottish writer, maybe it makes sense to read one of his books that are set in Scotland. I don't know much about Rob Roy, except he's like a Scottish Robin Hood.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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    On RR's gravestone at Baile Chuidir it says "Macgregor despite them". Although the name Macgregor was proscribed it was a law that could not be enforced in the clan lands so he and others used it openly. Rob offered protection to drovers at a price. Roy is a bastardisation of ruadh - red of hair.

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    I hope to tackle novels by Iain Pears and Kinky Friedman.

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    I also want to read as much as possible by Marcel Pagnol.

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    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ennison View Post
    I also want to read as much as possible by Marcel Pagnol.
    I read a couple of his autobiographies, La Gloire de mon Père and La Maison de ma Mère. I actually read them in French :smug: Pretty good but very sad appendix.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ennison View Post
    I also want to read as much as possible by Marcel Pagnol.
    I read a couple of his autobiographies, La Gloire de mon Père and La Maison de ma Mère. I actually read them in French :smug: Pretty good but very sad afterword.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ennison View Post
    On RR's gravestone at Baile Chuidir it says "Macgregor despite them". Although the name Macgregor was proscribed it was a law that could not be enforced in the clan lands so he and others used it openly. Rob offered protection to drovers at a price. Roy is a bastardisation of ruadh - red of hair.
    I enjoyed Rob Roy because one learns a bit about how people lived in the Scottish mountains.
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

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    TheFairyDogMother kiz_paws's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ennison View Post
    I hope to tackle novels by Iain Pears and Kinky Friedman.
    And I thought that Kinky Friedman was a musician... a writer too?! LoL
    Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty
    ~Albert Einstein

  11. #11
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    He is a musician, apparently too. I had never heard of him but a close friend gave me a huge stack of books this summer including several novels by him that she had read when much younger and living in the USA. I have put aside a couple to start post-Christmas

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