I loved Wolf Hall, but couldn’t get into Bring Up the Bodies. Maybe i’ll try again, but I feel like I’d have to re-read Wolf Hall. I thought The Passage, which I read years ago, was just okay. At the time it seemed to me like an idea for a reality show.
I've had The Balkan Trilogy on my bookshelf, challenging me to dive into it, for a couple years, but I haven't had the courage to commit myself to yet another lengthy work. Your first impressions of it are encouraging; I might have to give it a try.
And speaking of books about expatriates...please forgive me, David. We're all writers and/or avid readers here, therefore sensitive to word usage. I have to mention that "ex-pat" is incorrect. The full word is expatriate, which means to leave/someone who has left (or in the original meaning of the word, has been forcibly exiled from) their native country. The "ex" part is akin to "exit", not "former". Miller, Hemingway, etc. were not "former patriates" (whatever that means), so the hyphen should be dropped. Sorry, this long-term expatriate just had to mention it.
Wow, thanks for that. I never noticed the distinction (obviously). I've been reading Trollope [joined the Trollope Society and there's a Zoom call every second Monday [we do about a dozen chapters a session], so my other reading's suffering a bit, which means I'm not much farther along on Manning than I want to be. But so far the first book's got me so far. Have you read J. G. Farrell? THE SINGAPORE GRIP turned out to be very engaging--satire, but wkth heart and lots of insider detail. Thanks for being a DL2 loyalist.
I was a studio arts major at the University of Washington between 1970 and 1976 when I took all three degrees at once. I was privileged to study under many now-famous and then-talented artists and other people with name recognition. The single class that literally changed my life in 1971 was put together by a group of international graduate students in music, art history, Anthro, and English from Caribbean and African countries. We heard musicians, read nonfiction, and were assigned Things Fall Apart. Gary was an anthropology major, but that novel all by itself was why my worldview changed. I don't think I'm giving too much away if I mention that later, when I was teaching Macbeth, I recognized the parallels and taught the play with the novel. Things Fall Apart was from Yeats's "The Second Coming," the same poem as Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The difference is that Achebe used his chosen line ironically.
I cannot recommend Achebe too highly. I have read the trilogy, but only reread the first—that one many times. It is why I figured out how racist the poem is. Well, give me space and I could go on far longer than I dared when I was teaching high school students.
Thanks, Jan. You're so attentive! Really appreciate it. I should've read TFA years ago--you know that list, the mandatory books you haven't gotten around to (yet). Though not so long on my radar, there's also Tayeb Salih's SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH, which NYRB published a few years ago. Be well!
I loved Wolf Hall, but couldn’t get into Bring Up the Bodies. Maybe i’ll try again, but I feel like I’d have to re-read Wolf Hall. I thought The Passage, which I read years ago, was just okay. At the time it seemed to me like an idea for a reality show.
I've had The Balkan Trilogy on my bookshelf, challenging me to dive into it, for a couple years, but I haven't had the courage to commit myself to yet another lengthy work. Your first impressions of it are encouraging; I might have to give it a try.
And speaking of books about expatriates...please forgive me, David. We're all writers and/or avid readers here, therefore sensitive to word usage. I have to mention that "ex-pat" is incorrect. The full word is expatriate, which means to leave/someone who has left (or in the original meaning of the word, has been forcibly exiled from) their native country. The "ex" part is akin to "exit", not "former". Miller, Hemingway, etc. were not "former patriates" (whatever that means), so the hyphen should be dropped. Sorry, this long-term expatriate just had to mention it.
Wow, thanks for that. I never noticed the distinction (obviously). I've been reading Trollope [joined the Trollope Society and there's a Zoom call every second Monday [we do about a dozen chapters a session], so my other reading's suffering a bit, which means I'm not much farther along on Manning than I want to be. But so far the first book's got me so far. Have you read J. G. Farrell? THE SINGAPORE GRIP turned out to be very engaging--satire, but wkth heart and lots of insider detail. Thanks for being a DL2 loyalist.
I was a studio arts major at the University of Washington between 1970 and 1976 when I took all three degrees at once. I was privileged to study under many now-famous and then-talented artists and other people with name recognition. The single class that literally changed my life in 1971 was put together by a group of international graduate students in music, art history, Anthro, and English from Caribbean and African countries. We heard musicians, read nonfiction, and were assigned Things Fall Apart. Gary was an anthropology major, but that novel all by itself was why my worldview changed. I don't think I'm giving too much away if I mention that later, when I was teaching Macbeth, I recognized the parallels and taught the play with the novel. Things Fall Apart was from Yeats's "The Second Coming," the same poem as Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The difference is that Achebe used his chosen line ironically.
I cannot recommend Achebe too highly. I have read the trilogy, but only reread the first—that one many times. It is why I figured out how racist the poem is. Well, give me space and I could go on far longer than I dared when I was teaching high school students.
Thanks, Jan. You're so attentive! Really appreciate it. I should've read TFA years ago--you know that list, the mandatory books you haven't gotten around to (yet). Though not so long on my radar, there's also Tayeb Salih's SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH, which NYRB published a few years ago. Be well!