Books names association threads

[Danik 2016]

Similar to the celebrities thread but this thread focuses on books of the whole world.
Here are the rules:
Someone names a known literary work in English (including novels, short stories, poems and plays ) and the next person names a book whith the first name beginning with the first letter of the other books last name. NO REPEATS

Here we go:
Under the Greenwood Tree (Thomas Hardy)

Who´s next?

[Iain Sparrow]

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

[Danik 2016]

Following with Memoirs from the House of The Dead, by Dostoievsky

[Diggory Venn]

During Wind and Rain (Thomas Hardy)

[Danik 2016]

Ragtime (E. L. Doctorow)

[Diggory Venn]

Ring for Jeeves (P.G.Wodehouse)

[Danik 2016]

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

[Diggory Venn]

On the Portrait of a Woman about to be Hanged (Thomas Hardy)

This is fast becoming a TH association game Danik :smilewinkgrin:. Be warned though, I could give you over a thousand titles.....! :crazy:

[Pendragon]

Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

[Diggory Venn]

Faerie Queene, The (Edmund Spenser)

[Danik 2016]

Queen of Spades, The- Alexander Pushkin

[Danik 2016]

On the Portrait of a Woman about to be Hanged (Thomas Hardy)

This is fast becoming a TH association game Danik :smilewinkgrin:. Be warned though, I could give you over a thousand titles.....! :crazy:
I don´t think that would be a problem ;) but other titles are coming in. Anyway I thought I knew Hardy, but there are several titles like this one I never had heard of. Does it have any relation to Tess of the Ubbervilles?

[Diggory Venn]

I don´t think that would be a problem ;) but other titles are coming in. Anyway I thought I knew Hardy, but there are several titles like this one I never had heard of. Does it have any relation to Tess of the Ubbervilles?

This poem was written in 1923, just over thirty or so years after "Tess". It could be about Tess, or more likely about the hanging of Martha Brown, which had a lasting effect on Hardy, and which did indeed inspire the hanging scene in "Tess". Martha Brown was publicly hanged in Dorchester Prison in 1856, viewed by Hardy (who was sixteen at the time) and many thousands besides him..

I will try to pick a more up-beat Hardy title next time - 948 poems, 52 short stories and 14 novels to choose from..

[Danik 2016]

Never mind, Tam, it´s nice to learn more about Hardy. The fact is I don´t know his poetry and neither his short stories. Only his novels, and I´m not sure that I´ve read all of them.

[Danik 2016]

Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
This is my favorite Mark Twain, Pendragon!

[Diggory Venn]

Sign of Four, The (Arthur Conan Doyle)

[Jackson Richardson]

From Queen of Spades to Sense and Sensibility. Unlike Tam's Hardy enthusiasm, my Jane Austen enthusiasm only give me four books published in her lifetime and two immediately posthumously. She probably didn't want the minor works published.

[Jackson Richardson]

Bother, I didn't notice Tam's Sherlock Holmes intervention.

OK, Felix Holt the Radical.

[Danik 2016]

So much the better, Jonathan, now we have got two titles more.

[Jackson Richardson]

Bother, I didn't notice Tam's Sherlock Holmes intervention.

OK, Felix Holt the Radical.

[Danik 2016]

A Room with a View (E. M. Foster)

[Diggory Venn]

Okay, I will pass over for now the very obvious Charlotte Bronte title, dig very deep, and give you this one;

Vathek (William Beckford)

[Jackson Richardson]

But surely one word titles don't work? (Two of Jane Austen's novels are one word I notice.)

The one I thought of at once was Roland Firbank's Vainglory, but it will have to be Vanity Fair.

[Diggory Venn]

Mmmm, one-word titles ? Danik must officiate, but all it would mean is that you would have another crack with the same letter..

I am going to go as obscure as I can I think, sweeping my bookshelves and blowing dust off the owd `uns;

Frost at Midnight (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

[Danik 2016]

Why not? Here you are:
Middlemarch (George Elliot)

[Diggory Venn]

Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Robert Maturin)

There, I knew my love of Gothic novels would serve me well one day !

[Danik 2016]

Very obvious, but one of my favorites:
Wuthering Heights(Emily B.)

[Diggory Venn]

The House by the Churchyard (Sheridan Le Fanu)

[Danik 2016]

Clockwork Orange (Antony Burgess)

[Diggory Venn]

On the Western Circuit (Thomas Hardy)

[Danik 2016]

Crime and Punishment (F. Dostoyewski)

[Jackson Richardson]

(The) Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole, which as a native Italian speaker confirmed to me today is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, not on the penultimate: Otranto, not OtrANto. Tam's not the only one here who can do Gothick.

Note to self: I must get round this summer to visiting Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill.

[Jackson Richardson]

Blast. Danik posted his while I was composing mine.

OK. Pride and Prejudice. Or even Persuasion.

[Diggory Venn]

Blast. Danik posted his while I was composing mine.

OK. Pride and Prejudice. Or even Persuasion.

I was waiting for you there JonathanB :hand:

I shall reply to your favourites with one of mine;

A Pair of Blue Eyes (Thomas Hardy)

[bounty]

evil under the sun---Agatha Christie (am reading her murder in Mesopotamia right now)

[Danik 2016]

Thanks for making me laugh on a rather boring grey Saturday, Jonathan. :D. No matter, nobody is gaining points here for being first.
Following bounty with Sons and Lovers(D. H.Lawrence).Didn´t like it, but it´s a classic anyway.

[Jackson Richardson]

Light Shining out of Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill. It's a play based about the period of the Commonwealth based on original sources. Originally written for a handful of players (there aren't really any characters continuously through the scenes, rather it shows a series of vignettes of life of the time) I saw a revival at the National Theatre in London with a cast of fifty or so.

[Danik 2016]

While we are on history...
Barnaby Rudge (Charles Dickens)

[Jackson Richardson]

Rasselas by Samuel Johnson. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Everyman used to publish a volume of Three Eighteenth Century (short) Novels and now all three have been mentioned. Rasselas, Vathek and The Castle of Otranto. I bought and read it as a teenager.

[Danik 2016]

I never read any of them, but I remember Helen Burns in Jane Eyre reading Rasselas.

The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)

[Jackson Richardson]

I'm reading Pope' Dunciad at the moment, but have Dickens' David Copperfield to move on to another letter.

[Danik 2016]

The Catcher in the Rye( J. D. Salinger)

[Jackson Richardson]

As a digression, the Italian gent I was speaking with yesterday reckoned Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho should be pronounced UDolpho rather than UdOLpho, but since Udolpho, unlike Otranto, is not a genuine Italian place and only existed in Mrs Radcliffe's imagination, I doubt it.

I can think of books I haven't read beginning with R, but I think it better if I confine myself to what I've read.

[Jackson Richardson]

PS I know the modern pc way to refer to her would be Ann Radcliffe, but I am so used to thinking of her in terms of dear Jane's Northanger Abbey so Mrs she will always be for me...

[Diggory Venn]

Like JonathanB I shall continue to stick to works that I have read and know well. Here`s one that I enjoyed when I was younger;

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

[Diggory Venn]

Like JonathanB I shall continue to stick to works that I have read and know well. Here`s one that I enjoyed when I was younger;

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

[This has posted twice - do not know why ???]

[Danik 2016]

The same with me. There is no point in listing books one hasn´t read, I think. As I ´m not native in English I usually have read the more obvious classics.
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)

[Jackson Richardson]

Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer. Ms Heyer wrote pastiche Regency romantic novels. Jane Austen it ain't, but they are ingeniously plotted, and the cliches are worked with wit and panache and a hint of camp.

[Diggory Venn]

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Bronte)

[Danik 2016]

A Tale of Two Cities-another historical Dickens novel.

[Jackson Richardson]

I think there's been a bit of cross posting.

For Tenant of Wildfall Hall I give you E M Foster Howards End.

And for Tale of Two Cities there is Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? which I finished recently.

[Danik 2016]

Sorry people I made a mistake, I should have posted a title with "H" and not with "T". Anyway Jonathan´s postings corrected that and here we are back to "H".
The Handmaid´s Tale (Margareth Atwood)- Very ironic :)

[Jackson Richardson]

Thomas Love Peacock is far more fun than E M Foster, so how about Headlong Hall?

[Danik 2016]

I don´t know this author, am going to take a look at him. Still with "H" we have the epic Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[Jackson Richardson]

Thomas Love Peacock is like absolutely nobody else! Nightmare Abbey is probably his best: it is partly a satire on Shelley, although Shelley (not a poet I care for) was a personal friend.

In fact if you are into English Gothick you ought to have a look at it, danik, as a parody. It is less than 100 pages.

OK another favourite which I have thought the funniest novel I know, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.

Somebody else can come up with another S.

[Diggory Venn]

Sylvia`s Lovers (Elizabeth Gaskell)

A novel I only read last summer, beautifully evocative of Whitby at the turn of the 19th Century. Little has changed there in the "old town" since Gaskell described it (written in 1863). I love novels where the literary tourist can still enjoy the buildings, streets and houses where its characters lived...

[Danik 2016]

Jonathan, I love parodies, though the nearest I have come of English Gothick is the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.
Tam, about three years ago I read Mrs. Gaskells biography of Charlotte Brontë. It is the first and to my mind the most important one.
Sanctuary by Faulkner.

[Jackson Richardson]

Tam and Danik may be glad to know that Sylvia's Lovers is a book I haven't read. I have been to Whitby though. It is very characterful - though the literary work which is mainly celebrated there is Draculla, a book I take it Danik knows. The literary work I associate with it is Bede's Ecclesiastical History.

Danik - I take it you know, at least by reputation, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. It is in part a parody of The Mysteries of Udolpho and so spot on I felt I knew just what Udolpho was like.

[Jackson Richardson]

Whitby also figures in Walter Scott’s narrative poem, Marmion. I forget the details of the plot in wading through all the doggerel verse, but I think there is a young woman walled up alive for unchastity at Whitby Abbey, with some documents that come to light later allowing two lovers to be reunited after ghostly apparitions in the High Street of Edinburgh and the Battle of Flodden Field.

Sounds a bit Gothic now I come to think of it.

The plot justifies the best known lines in the poem:

O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.

Going on from Sylvia's Lovers, Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate.

[Danik 2016]

I haven´t read Sylvia´s Lovers either But I´ve got Northanger Abbey. What I like about this novel, is the parody. I think it a pity that after an interesting beginning, the novel falls back into the usual Austen pattern for her female protagonists:love + advantageous marriage. But you are right, Jonathan, in English Literature the Gothick isn,t confined to a genre, if you look for it you find it spreads though the older kind of Literature as the novels of Walter Scott. Those old secluded castles and minor houses you still have are an invitation for lost souls and ghosts.
Going to another country but not away from castles and tormented souls, The Count of Monte Christo (Alexandre Dumas)

[Jackson Richardson]

We could have a disagreement about Jane Austen, but this is not the place. I must just accept some people don't get her, just as I don't get Joyce. (It is not a matter of an advantageous marriage - Charlotte Lucas makes one - but a companionate marriage, which is trickier to find - certainly there are very few happily married couples in Austen.)

[Danik 2016]

I should say there are different manners of reading Jane Austen, but we would have to open a specific Austen thread to discuss that. Let me only put, that behind the ideal of a companionate marriage lurks the disagreable reality of a whole class: that of the refined and accomplished women of poor or empoverished families who had to marry someone rich to secure a futur for themselves and their families.
Going on with the bookchain: The comedy Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmund Rostand)

[Jackson Richardson]

Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh.

[Danik 2016]

Ok, Jonathan, returning to England with The Return of the Native (T. Hardy). Again an obvious choice but one of my favorite Hardy titles.

[Diggory Venn]

You just beat me to that one Danik, and it would have been very apt considering my new username change...

However I will parry with;

Netty Sargent`s Copyhold (Thomas Hardy), a strange little tale published in 1891.

[Jackson Richardson]

Given my new username, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady.

Yes, I have read it.

No, I have no intention of wading through its 1000+ pages ever again, but it is fascinating that it still divides readers as it did at the time in to two opposite views:

A Clarissa is an oppressed feminist heroine and Lovelace a sexist s**t or

B Clarissa is a hung up prude and Lovelace a dead sexy Byronic hero.

I strongly incline to A, but wish Richardson didn’t stack up everything to make Clarissa too good to be true.

[Danik 2016]

Well, I was always very suspicious about Clarissa, therefore I never read it.
As we are now dealing with Ladies let´s go on with Lady
Chatterleys Lover. (Lawrence)
I compliment you both to your new usernames. But why are you all changing it? Just for fun or has there been any problem?

[Jackson Richardson]

Clarissa and Lady Chat probably represent opposite ends of the spectrum. I don't really recommend Clarissa for enjoyment.

Lord of the Flies William Golding.

[Diggory Venn]

Okay, let`s get it out of the way :arf:;

Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)

By the way, is there nobody else on this forum willing to participate with us in this rather pleasant pastime ? :D

[Jackson Richardson]

Thomas Love Peacock again, Crotchet Castle.

[Danik 2016]

A delicious parody of ghost stories, The Canterville Ghost (Oscar Wilde)

[Jackson Richardson]

O good, that gives me the chance to name one of my favourite books with a title taken from the poems of George Herbert, Barbara Pym's Glass of Blessings.

[Danik 2016]

Well, Bleak House (Dickens). By the way, loved the inclusion of Lord of the Flies.

[Jackson Richardson]

There's an odd connection in my experience between Lord of the Flies and Hardy which I might expatiate on later. I only read it as an adult, but I was aware of it at school when some other class, which I was not in, read it. I can remember getting the impression it was thought terribly shocking that schoolboys could turn murderous. I looked round my all boy school and thought "What's news?"

Bleak House is another all time favourites of mine, together with Glass of Blessings.

Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smolllet.

[Danik 2016]

I was shocked the first time I read it. It´s a great novel though.
Going back in time with The Cantebury Tales. (Go where we want we always come back to "C").
I'm not quite sure if you want to be called Jackson or Jonathan now.

[Jackson Richardson]

Tristram Shandy.

Or since the full title is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, what about The Turn of the Screw, which still gives you an S? (Henry James is an author I’ve read and re-read trying to appreciate. It was on this board last summer wading through on of his shorter works I decided I never would.)

Jackson – the 2016 me. (Thanks for the congratulations upthread.)

[Diggory Venn]

The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

I loved this as a child, and re-read it in my thirties. Very nostalgic, and losing none of it`s quaint eeriness...

[Jackson Richardson]

I re-read it last autumn and was very moved by it - I identified with both Colin and Mary as awkward people exercising power over others through being nasty - a bit like Miss Havisham and Eeyore. Then they learn its nicer to be nice without compromising their integrity. I needed to learn that as well.

The wonderful woman who does our garden reminded me of it - she loves the gardening side of it. I still get very bored gardening and found the tone of the final chapters a bit twee. But it is still a profound book for the reasons I mentioned.

[Danik 2016]

All the English Literature Books I like are going into this thread. I still remember reading The Secret Garden.
Trying to reconcile you with Henry James, J.: I think he has that in common with Jane Austen: his books show how the social tissue is laid out. The important things are said between lines.
Sense and Sensibility, may be too obvious, so the North American classic The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne).

[Jackson Richardson]

Because I love Jane Austen I think I ought to like Henry James. I like the idea of the abstract nature of their novels, with minimal action. But for all her apparent limitations, Jane conveys (in elegant prose with a permanently ironic slant) even minor characters of endless individuality and seen in detail in the context of their position in family and society.

I find James’ prose elephantine and mannered. I do get little sense of the individuality of his characters and hardly any of the social setting.

Can't think of another book at the moment, but I'll return here if I do.

[Jackson Richardson]

The important things are said between lines.

I can see the things between the lines in Jane Austen - in nearly every speech in Emma I can see how the characters are deceiving themselves or each other.

But it just doesn't click with me in Henry James.

Back to finding a classic beginning with L.

I've already mentioned Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, so have a very different C18 classic - James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. Non fiction is allowed, isn't it?

[Danik 2016]

I think that easy to understand, J. You are English and therefore the context of the Austen Novels is familiar to you even if you live in another time and another society. Henry James portrayed the English society in several of his stories but his point of view was North American.
I suspect we had already Jude the Obscure, so the not at all obvious Jane Eyre.:) The follower may choose "O" or "E" to continue the chain.

[Jackson Richardson]

Anthony Trollope The Eustace Diamonds. I'm not an unqualified lover of Trollope but there is a very funny chapter when Lizzie Eustace, having said she loves Shelley, goes down to the sea shore with a copy of Queen Mab to read it and doesn't get beyond the opening. If you love Shelley, you probably won't find it funny.

[Danik 2016]

I think I have read very little of Shelley´s works.
The Devil's Advocate (Morris West) a former bestseller.

[Jackson Richardson]

Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy as per my by line.

[Danik 2016]

Back to Dickens with Martin Chuzzlewit. But as the complete title of the novel is Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, there is also Murder in the Cathedral, the beautiful play by T. S. Elliot.

[Diggory Venn]

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (Ann Radcliffe)

If I remember correctly this was her final novel, and the only one not to be set abroad (it being set in Scotland, which is not yet abroad..:seeya:).
I also seem to remember reading a short biographical excerpt in which it was stated that she never in her life travelled outside of the United Kingdom - which totally amazed me because the descriptions in her novels about foreign lands are so evocative...

Edit - On looking up TCoAaD I find that it was in fact her first novel - From the mists of time I knew it was significant in some way..:prrr:

[Jackson Richardson]

Murder in the Cathedral, the beautiful play by T. S. Elliot.

Since golden October declined into sombre November. It is beautiful indeed. The only hitch is the chorus calling themselves the poor scrubbers of Canterbury. Possibly the word hadn't got it's recent connotations, but I suspect an Ivy League educated churchwarden of St Stephen's Gloucester Road hadn't heard it.

[Danik 2016]

Daniel Deronda by George Elliot.
Also the irreverent Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Diggory you must live somewhere near Scotland. I first thought you might be from China (Tam Lin).

Getting a bit crazy with my own double posts!:rolleyes5:

[Jackson Richardson]

I was imagining Diggory from near his beloved Wessex (which is near where I come from). The reference to Bolton Abbey implies he's in God's own county of Yorkshire. (You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can't tell him much.) As a decadent Southerner I used to think of Yorkshire and the North generally as one stop from Scotland. But taking the train from King's Cross. London(whose literary association is Harry Potter) to Waverley, Edinburgh (whose literary association is Sir Walter Scott) by the time you reach Doncaster in Yorkshire, you are barely half way to Edinburgh.

[Diggory Venn]

Gentlemen, I think I have (unintentionally) fooled you both ! Danik, I am most definitely not from China. "Tam Lin" is the title of a traditional Scottish Border Ballad collected by the 19thC American folklorist Frances James Child. I took it from one of my favourite Fairport Convention songs of the same name...

Jackson, I am in fact a Lancashire lad still living in that fair shire....I only wish that I lived in Wessex (Dorset in particular). It is in my imagination that I live in Hardy`s world, hence the allusions to it and great fondness for it...:)

So now you know..:brow:

[Danik 2016]

That´s ok, Diggory!I started having my doubts, because you seemed so English!:)
Just a point about me, because I don´t want to fool you either: I´m not a he, but a she!:biggrin5:

[Jackson Richardson]

I've just started re-reading The Return of the Native! Now I know what a reddleman is.

I was born in the area of the map at the front of Hardy's novels and have been very glad to get away from there. But that map is intriguing. Which novel or story has scenes in Idmouth, ie Sidmouth? My parents came from there.

I have an uneasy feeling it shows I am an unreconstructed sexist if I assume any poster is male until I know otherwise. Whoops.

Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation or just Dombey and Son. Shall we keep to shorter, popular titles in future??

[Danik 2016]

It seems that Hardy changed the names of the real localities. It´s interesting to know that you were born there. I am very bad in English geography, but if I am not mistaken Lancshire is not far from the moord of the Brontë sisters.
I don´t think you are a "unreconstructed sexist" :) but maybe you are a bit absent-minded.
And most posters on LitNet seem indeed to be male.
A Streetcar Called Desire (Tenessee Williams)

[Diggory Venn]

That´s ok, Diggory!I started having my doubts, because you seemed so English!:)
Just a point about me, because I don´t want to fool you either: I´m not a he, but a she!:biggrin5:

I do beg your pardon Danik :blush:....I had no idea you were a lady. I shall take your comment about me seeming "so English" as a great compliment though :thumbs_up.

Jackson, the only mention of "Idmouth" is in the wonderfully-named short story/novella The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid written in 1883 and published in book form in the 1913 collection, A Changed Man and Other Tales. Some of the story is set in the present-day National Trust property Killerton House, near Exeter..

[Danik 2016]

Never mind, Diggory, and it is meant as a compliment!:thumbsup:You seemed too familiar with England and Hardy to be a foreigner. By the way, who is Emma Hardy?

[Jackson Richardson]

If the Brontes had lived a few miles to the west, they would have been in Lancashire.

Going a bit further north, but not in Scotland, Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, a childrens classic, but one I've only come to appreciate when I'm older.

Like Hardy, Ransome took real places and gave them different names on the map at the front (and he played about with the geography - he merged Coniston Water and Windermere).

[Diggory Venn]

By the way, who is Emma Hardy?

Emma Hardy was Thomas Hardy`s first wife. Shortly before her death in 1912 she published a slim volume of poetry entitled Alleys. In the latter years of their marriage they became increasingly estranged and at their home near Dorchester, "Max Gate" she became a virtual recluse, living in rooms in the attic...Hardy`s poems after her death ironically became his most heart-felt, and are considered by some commentators to be among the finest poems of the 20th Century....

[Diggory Venn]

Where were we up to ? D I think...

The Darling Buds of May (H. E. Bates)

A novel I only came upon last year. Another topographical novel - set in the Kent countryside in the 1950s. Nice...:cool:

[Danik 2016]

I didn´t know that Hardy´s wife also wrote poetry. That his married life might be complicated is easy to imaginate from the marriages he describes in his novels.
The Mill and the Floss (George Elliot) I read a long time ago.

[Jackson Richardson]

I won't go all pooky that my suggestions of Swallows and Amazons was ignored. I know I've posted before reading all the previous threads.

So Ruskin's Fors Clavigera. I've only read one of the papers, but A I think it is out of print and B I can't think of any other examples of F.

I''m rolling along with Return of the Native got past the mumming. I'm finding it far more readable than Balzac.

[Danik 2016]

Sorry J. :blush2:, I guess I confused the sequence a bit. So back in style to Swallows and Amazons and away from the ever returning "C"with Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë.

[Jackson Richardson]

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Gone with the Wind.

[Danik 2016]

Vixe! Something is wrong here! Did I deserve this nice answer?:frown5:

The Wings of the Dove- Henry James

[Diggory Venn]

Domicilium (Thomas Hardy)

Thomas Hardy was born 176 years ago today (2nd June 1840)

These are lines taken from the above poem, written when he was about 16 years old. His Grandmother is narrating this particular part:

`Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs
And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts
Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats
Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers
Lived on the hills, and were our only friends
So wild it was when first we settled here.`

This was Hardy`s childhood home being described to him..

[Danik 2016]

That´s beautiful!
Did you ever take a degree in Hardy or is he just a personal passion?

Don Quixote (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) by Miguel de Cervantes. It´s supposed to be the first great European novel.

[Diggory Venn]

That´s beautiful!
Did you ever take a degree in Hardy or is he just a personal passion?

A degree ? Good Lord, no - not even an "O" level in English Literature ! No, just a passion for a damn good story...:thumbs_up
To be honest, when I first read a Hardy novel (Tess), I was intrigued by who wrote this ? I read, and am still reading about Thomas Hardy - I find him very interesting as a person as well as an author..

[Danik 2016]

I think I understand. I find him interesting too, special the way he represents the "Wessex"country life at the end of the 19th. century and the inefectual stuggle of the characters for more education, independence and sexual equality.

[Diggory Venn]

Queen Mab (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

I used to read this poem quite a lot in my youth. It gets us off the rather difficult "Q" at least...:hurray:

[Danik 2016]

Following you with:

The Major of Casterbridge- one of the more haunting Hardy Novels

[Jackson Richardson]

The Cloud of Unknowing. I've typed J or H in my time, as they are together of the keyboard. I've thought up a couple of Qs so I know what to do next time it comes up.

[Danik 2016]

Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)

[Jackson Richardson]

Rather different author, although probably a similar, if more manageable, drink problem, Evelyn Waugh Vile Bodies.

I remember the lady evangelist on the cross Channel ferry where everyone is sicking up (too sick making) getting them to pull their socks up by joining in a chorus of "There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God".

[Danik 2016]

Barchester Towers-A.Trollope

[Jackson Richardson]

xxxxxx

[Jackson Richardson]

Whoops. This and the last post ignored the question. Margery Allingham The Tiger in the Smoke. She is linked with Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie as one of the "Queens of Crime" but far more intelligent than Christie. This book is set against an atmospheric, blitzed London just after Worls War 2.

[Danik 2016]

Light in August (William Faulkner).
Trying to include some North American classics too.

[Jackson Richardson]

Apologies. I posted saying the next letter was L. Then I realised I’d not followed sequence. I edited the post to change the text completely and give another letter.

While I was editing, danik followed with Light in August before I’d finished editing.

Very sorry for the muddle.

[Danik 2016]

I think apologies are only necessary when one is being rude, not because of changing the letter, J. I noticed your mistake, but ok.