Books!

It's not just you, my other half always has a sniff of new books when she or I gets one!

I will get to reading them once our house work is all done, hopefully in a few more weeks. Far too much brick and plasterboard dust around right now!

Goblet of Fire has arrived. Prisoner of Azkahban should be here today too but not here yet!







Edit - sorry for the aspect... not sure why it uploaded that way round.

looks beautiful artwork

They are stunning books... definitely rival my copy of LotR. Only annoying thing is having to wait for the next three to be published over the next few years!

Have you started reading them yet?

Not yet. I am storing them while we have some work on our house finished.... it is very messy, brick and plaster dust everywhere!

Does anyone else find Beren and Luthien a really hard read?

I take it you're referring to the extended cut, not the Silmarillion studio cut.

I don't have it, but judging from comparing the versions of Turin in The Sil versus Unfinished Tales I would say the trimmed down versions work better.  Since he's not using the mass appeal style of The Hobbit or LotR, the mythic approach can weigh things down.  Quick sketches work better for mythology.  In LotR Tolkien reserved the high language style for compressed narrative, and his instincts were good.

I find the whole Silmarillion a hard read. I find the language a bit turgid. I know that is not a good look on a Tolkien forum.

Which is why you want the short version of any story.  I agree that many of the stories in Silmarillion can drag, and it can only get worse when lengthened into book form.  That's why I have little interest in buying Children of Hurin or Beren and Luthian.

To me Tolkien's most enjoyable works outside those published in his lifetime were essays written to complement and fill out the background of Lord of the Rings.  Never tire of Unfinished Tales.  Love the Pukel men and Palantiri.

{{ The Pukel Men stories are among my favourites. }}

I must be a Hobbit at heart, I like a good old comfortable yarn by the fireside, not that highfalutin stuff.

and certainly not a Took, who seemed fond of highfalutin on occasions.

Do you have Unfinished Tales, Figgs? Some of it is faluting, but half of it was written to supplement LotR and is just fun.

no I don't have that, but I will get it now you mention it. My Tolkien street-cred is diminishing by the minute.

I have the Children of Hurin and it works fine once you get through working out what is going on.

I was going to get the Fall of Gondolin when it is out.

Beren and Luthien has a massive preamble about what Tolkien called certain people and races early on... Gnomes, fairies, Noldori. That together with the really old style language just makes it a really hard read.

Actually that preamble sounds interesting. I take it was written by Christopher rather than JRR?

Yes. B&L seems to have been one of the earliest writings and there are lots of alternations and drafts etc. When I say preamble I mean 20 pages of it!

{{ I enjoyed the long form poem version of Luthien and Beren thats one of the History of ME books. Though it does have that thing with Tolkien where you feel a bit like your peeking behind the curtain, as he reused bits of the poem in other contexts in LotR's (most notably Gimli's song about the glory days of Moria which has whole verses with only minor changes) on the presumption no one was ever going to read his earlier longer poem on Luthien and Beren so he may as well resuse some of the existing material. }}

Just read my first ever Barbara Cartland book.  cat-crazy middle-aged women just love this shit. I might get me some more.

Heaving bosoms and all that?  I once sat in a used bookstore and furtively flipped through a series of historical romances looking for the good stuff (I was a teenager and had some crucial shit to learn) and found that they all had basically the same plot:

1. Girl meets arrogant boy.  
2. Girl spends 2/3 of book compiling reasons to hate boy.  
3. Boy essentially rapes girl.  
4. Girl decides boy is not so bad.

Fortunately even at that age I had some idea of which parts of my education to ignore.  I don't know if it was Barbara Cartland, actually i think it was a couple authors, but all had the same basic plot.

{{ I've been reading Agatha Christie- short background first- my mum is a huge fan of her books and has read everything at least twice, as a result growing up I saw a lot of adaptations of her work, and I even read a few of the better known titles, Murder on Orient Express type ones.
The general impression young me was left with was the characters were all frivolous annoying rich young things, the plots very melodramatic and formulaic and that they were not for me.

However I decided this time to try ones I had not read before or could remember having seen adapted, and much to my astonishment whilst they re still full of frivolous young things and to tend to still lean into a bit of melodrama, they were also hugely funny.
Her writing at points tends more towards PJ Wodehouse than anything else, especially in her character descriptions.
Her treatment of class and society is laced with a cutting wit and satire and much to my surprise rather than being all murder in a big country house two of the four Ive read so far,whilst still containing a murder round which the plot revolves are in fact spy thrillers.
But its the often witty and satirical wording that has caught me most by surprise, as I don't recall the adaptions of her work I have seen conveying the humour very well, if at all.

For example in 'They Came to Baghdad' the main character, a young lady called Victoria, who is not rich nor in a big house but rather a short-hand typists from the East-End of London who is terrible at her job, loses her job due to being terrible at it, but the manner of her losing it and subsequent exchange with her employer just had me chuckling. Having just been told she is being sacked her response is-

'I couldn't agree with you more,' she said heartily and pleasantly. 'I think you're absolutely right, if you know what I mean.'
Mr Greenholtz appeared slightly taken aback. He was not used to having his dismissals treated in this approving and congratulatory spirit. To conceal a slight discomfiture he sorted through a pile of coins on the desk in front of him. He then sought once more in his pockets.
'Ninepence short,' he murmured gloomily.
'Never mind,' said Victoria kindly, 'Take yourself to the pictures or spend it on sweets.'
'Don't seem to have any stamps, either.'
'It doesn't matter. I never write letters.
'I could send it after you,' said Greenholtz but without much conviction.
'Don't bother. What about a reference?'
Mr Greenholtz choler returned.
'Why the hell should I give you a reference?'he demanded wrathfully.
'It's usual,' said Victoria.
Mr Greenholtz drew a piece of paper towards him and scrawled a few lines. He shoved it towards her.
'That do for you?'

Miss Jones has been with me two months as a shorthand typists. Her shorthand is inaccurate and she cannot spell. She is leaving owing to wasting time in office hours.

Victoria made a grimace.
'Hardly a recommendation she observed.
'It wasn't meant to be,' said Mr Greenholtz.
'I think,' said Victoria, 'that you ought at least to say I'm honest, sober and respectable. I am , you know. And perhaps you might add that I'm discreet.'
'Discreet?' barked Mr Geenholtz.
Victoria met his gaze with an innocent stare.
'Discreet,' she said gently.
Remembering sundry letters taken down and typed by Victoria, Mr Greenholtz decided that prudence was the better part of rancour.
He snatched back the paper, tore it up and indited a fresh one.'

Christie's writing is full of this playfulness and its completely unexpected to me.

The current one I am reading, 'The Seven Dials Mystery' is one of those rich young frivolous types, a murder in a huge country house and lots of  lords and nobs, but they almost read as I mentioned earlier like Wodehouse descriptions. We are introduced to the Lady of the Manor in the following description for example-

'The room was empty save for his hostess, and her reproachful gaze gave Jimmy the same feeling of  discomfort he always experienced on catching the eye of a defunct codfish exposed on a fisherman's slab.'

It could be describing a Wodehouse Aunt. And that passage goes on with Jimmy;s thoughts which could be those of Bertie Wooster-

'Yet, hang it all, why should the woman look at him like that? To come at a punctual nine-thirty when staying in a country house simply wasn't done. To be sure, it was now a quarter past eleven which was, perhaps, the outside limit, but even then.'

Its also got a lot of subtle and sometimes direct class satire. When the Lord of the manor hears from his daughter that someone has been shot, and mistakenly thinks she has shot him his response when roused from reading his newspaper, and upon discovering the shot man was no-one 'important' is to say “You shouldn't shoot people. You shouldn't really.' before return to his paper.

So yeah I have been pleasantly surprised to find myself grinning more than anything else whilst reading Christie's works. But where is all this wit in the adaptions gone? }}

Figgy and I had a brief discussion about They Came to Baghdad some years back. I had much the same impression: Christie absolutely adores irrepressible young women and includes them frequently. Murder on the Nile has a similar young girl who takes a dark turn in the second half, but Victoria is her masterpiece. I'm not sure but she may be the only lead character who is a young female. I get the impression Edwardian England was chock full of such young women just simmering to break free from their prescribed roles. It would have been delightful hell trying to teach a classroom full of them.

Agatha Christie is the best selling author in history for a reason. You get a little bit of everything with her.

I love Victoria, she is one of my favourite female characters in literature. She is so alive and vital, so unselfconsciously witty and brave. They Came to Baghdad is one of my favourite books period. Its the perfect mix of unusual feisty heroine, spy story and derring-do. I never wanted it to end, and I wanted badly for Victoria to appear in other books, but with no luck.
My favourite Christie books would be,

1. They Came to Baghdad
2. Mystery of the Blue Train
3. The Man in the Brown Suit
4. At Bertrams Hotel
5. Death in the Clouds
6. The Big 4
7. The ABC Murders
8. Dumb Witness
9. Why didnt they ask Evans
10 Passenger to Frankfurt

The first 4 are the feisty heroine, derring-do in exotic places, and the 4th one is a miss Marple and very atmospheric, 5 is classic sleuthing, as are the rest.

I wasn't too happy with the ending of They Came to Baghdad, a bit too James Bondish. But the rest of it was great. I wish she had brought Victoria back as well, but she didn't really play the part of detective I guess.

The girl called Anne in 'The Man in the Brown Suit' is also very engaging, but she isn't Victoria.