The re-reading project

[Wilfrid]

Never seen the Yorkshire moors, indeed I think I've never been to Yorkshire. Dartmoor and Exmoor in the south-west, yes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles has a great opening and ending, but Doyle was never able to sustain Holmes for a whole novel and so he vanishes for a large part of it, leaving us with Watson.

[relbbaddoof]

1 hour ago, Wilfrid said:

never able to sustain Holmes for a whole novel

Absolutely. Holmes, as invented, could solve puzzles in an instant, so the novels had little to sustain them.  In The Valley of Fear half the book is backstory.

[Wilfrid]

Right. Doyle's predecessor Gaboriau does the same in his Lecoq novels.

[relbbaddoof]

1 hour ago, Wilfrid said:

Yorkshire

Speaking of which, until I went there a few months ago, my associations with Yorkshire were entirely cricket: Geoff Boycott, tank-like in his solid defense, and Leeds with Bradman's scores of 334 (1930), 304 (1934), 103 (1938) and 173* (1948).

 

[Wilfrid]

I was thinking Bradman's triple century was at the Oval, but that must have been Hutton. A Yorkshireman.

Yorkshire cricket books I do have.

[relbbaddoof]

6 hours ago, Wilfrid said:

Yorkshire cricket books I do have.

You're just teasing me. Here are a couple of my Carduses. The one on the left is a 1948 reprint of a 1934 book, the one on the right from 1922.

I have other, older, dustier looking cricket books on my NY shelves (only Shiva knows what lurks in the dust clouds in Cambridge) sandwiched, oddly, between two Vol-1/Vol-2 pairs of "Methods of Mathematical Physics", the left Morse/Feshbach, the right Courant/Hilbert. A decade ago I must have thought the sandwiching funny, but my humor escapes me now. In any case that shelf is too high for me after having paired a bowl of Snail Noodle Soup with two glasses of inexpensive Chianti from Chambers (the funk called for a semi-robust response).

Suffice it to say that the 1922 book has a description in it of the "Greatest" international cricket match ever, an 1882 match between England and Australia.

It was the ninth international cricket match.

Edited April 17 by relbbaddoof

[Wilfrid]

Beautiful.

Yes, the 1882 match which Australia won by 7 runs. Not out at the end, the young Cambridge student CT Studd who went on to become a missionary. I somehow ended up with two copies of his bio.

[Wilfrid]

Wuthering Heights is very special, but after nearly three hundred pages of people being very, very sick and/or very, very angry I need some light relief. Paul Bowles stays on hold therefore while I dip into Cervantes. I don't plan to read 900+ pages of Don Quixote; the book's structure makes it very easy to pick out and re-read favorite episodes. And yes, it's still funny.

[Wilfrid]

Fragility. The Naked Lunch was a bit beaten up, but my Don Quixote that I must have had since I was a kid is very frail. Turning the pages very carefully.

[Wilfrid]

I have to share this. Of interest only to anyone who really knows Wuthering Heights, so this is not going to reach a huge audience. Michaela, in 90 minutes, recounts the entire novel, using an investigation board and post-its, and it's fiercely accurate, very funny, she's right about how monstrous the characters are, and she drops her Kate Bush at the right moment. Is this obsessive? If you care at all, grab ten minutes.

 

[Wilfrid]

Distracted. All the "gothic" comments about Wuthering Heights reminded me of The Castle of Otranto, allegedly the first gothic novel.

I know I first read a library edition so thought of picking up a cheap, used copy. Fortunately, I remembered that I own an anthology, Three Gothic Novels, and it's in there.

A really quick read, barely 100 pages, and it confirmed my recollection that it's one of the most hilarious books I've ever read. Walpole was no fool; he was both creating a genre and reducing it to absurdity. I am not the first to see Monty Python roots here. "Villain!"

[voyager]

Maybe Wuthering Heights is a young woman’s book.    The angst of love deemed “unsuitable”.   A fascination with the exotic.   Every girl’s fantasy.  I read it in 11th grade English.

[relbbaddoof]

18 minutes ago, voyager said:

Wuthering Heights is a young woman’s book.    The angst of love deemed “unsuitable”.   A fascination with the exotic.   Every girl’s fantasy.

1) Although I found it "impenetrable" on attempted rereading (as said above) I was able to penetrate it as a young man (ghastly pun aside).

2) All love/lust was unsuitable in the India of the 1970s -- the crushes I had on teachers, on our cleaning lady, on the girl on the 123 Bus (we gazed at each other eagerly, morning and afternoon, for two years) -- no love was suitable. That angst might have been the appeal to me then.

3) The "exotic". To me that was England -- all cricket and moors and dogs.

4) Every boy's fantasy.

Edited April 28 by relbbaddoof

[Wilfrid]

I read a short study of WH, and the plot(s) are unbelievably complex when looked at closely.

I just finished squeezing the good bits out of Don Quixote. That took a couple of weeks because there are a lot.

Just opened The Sheltering Sky. I recall the arc of the plot well enough, but don't remember it page by page.

[Wilfrid]

I have more Paul Bowles than I remembered, including the bio. The Sheltering Sky is very good, but of course it's not Cervantes.

[Wilfrid]

Almost finished The Horse's Mouth, Joyce Cary's largely comic novel about a wreckless, broken-down painter Gulley Jimson. I say largely comic because although Jimson's life is constant and largely self-made chaos, Cary relentlessly shows him looking at the world around him as a painter; and it's very well done.

The dialogue is well done too, which is just as well as most of the book is composed of multi-page episodes in which Jimson shares his world view with friends, former lovers, possible investors, equally broken-down priests and so on. Line by line, these scenes are beautifully written and very funny. But it does seem to me they could be fewer and shorter since they advance neither the plot nor our understanding of Jimson.

"...(W)ho is Gauguin? You don't mean that French painter who did dead dolls with green eyes in a tin landscape. I couldn't paint in his style unless I became a Plymouth Brother with the itch, and practised on public-house signs for fifteen years."

I do have a nice, boxed Folio Society edition with illustrations by John Bratby.

 

[Wilfrid]

On 3/25/2025 at 4:43 PM, Wilfrid said:

11. Cervantes, Don Quixote

12. Conrad, either Nostromo or Lord Jim (maybe the latter, I've read Nostromo more than once)

13. Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (quicker to read than to watch the TV adaptation)

14. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

15. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov

Mm, speaking of long...

Might have to step away from alphabetical order because there's a series of huge volumes coming up; there are shorter ones later in the list so I could mix it up.

16. Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (the whole thing or maybe only Justine?)

17. Eliot, Middlemarch

See what I mean?

[Wilfrid]

A few digressions (like re-reading Baltasar's three perfect little novels over the long weekend), but I will finish Crime and Punishment today. It feels very familiar. The breakneck pace of part one (axe murders), then countless conversations between Raskolnikov and various characters that slowly explain the intricacies of his family's life (including his sister being pursued by some complete sleazebags); then about two-thirds through, Sofia is foregrounded as an important character and it takes off like a rocket again.

Links between this novel and Nietzsche's concept of the ubermensch now seem ridiculously overplayed. Dostoevsky doesn't care about that part of Raskolnikov's character.

What it will make me do is jump wildly out of alpahbetical order and read Selby next, America's underrated Dostoevsky. I will go back to Last Exit as I've read his other novels much more recently.

[Wilfrid]

Just to add, having finished, Svidrigailov's killing dream, how like the dream that kicks off Wuthering Heights? Terrifying little girl ghosts. No reason to think that Fyodor knew that book; just my fortune to have read them so close together.

[Wilfrid]

Zipping through Last Exit -- the only moment the pace lets up is the union President going into detail about contract negotiations.

I had reason to look for my copy of Nella Larsen's Passing the other day, realizing to my dismay that I don't own it and must have read a library copy. I own it now and will add it to the list. But I guess it's Conrad next.

This is going faster than I expected, thanks to me noticing that many of these classics have free or cheap Kindle editions. It's easier to carry a phone with a Kindle app on the train than Don Quixote.  I see Lord Jim is free.

[Wilfrid]

My Lord Jim is a bit fragile too. But it will hold up.

[Wilfrid]

That copy didn't last well; big split down the spine now; but I finished it. I think my reaction was consistent with my reaction years ago. The first half, dealing with the sinking of the Patna and the aftermath, is gripping. Most of the second half, with Jim finding his feet among the indigenous people, less so; but the short closing chapters are impactful. 

I had not recalled Conrad's introduction to this edition where he argues against critics that having Marlow recount the entire story is plausible -- maybe he could get through it by talking for three hours. No, it's a wildly implausible technical device to give Conrad an alternative to the options of having Jim tell his own story (which would take away the main point of the novel) or having an omniscient narrator. Marlow knows a lot, but by no means everything. But nobody would listen to him at that length after dinner.

[Wilfrid]

Digression this weekend to re-read "Youth" and "Typhoon," two short works with ships bouncing around in terrifying storms; by no means all Conrad does, but he does it so well.

Reminds me I have the Hornblower novels, but do I want to re-read any of them?

[Wilfrid]

For me, this project will bring back memories. I was 18 years old, browsing the (very good) library at my high school when I saw a novel called  Justine. Like any kid my age, I knew Gerald Durrell's books about animals. I didn't know he had an older brother Lawrence. My first serious girlfriend, however, was named Justine.

I borrowed the novel which featured a main character that bore no resemblance to my girlfriend. But I was captivated. It was a while later that I read through the rest of the Alexandria Quartet, and it's significant that the later parts depart significantly from the intense romance of Justine. Which, read today, I still find beautifully if preciously written, but it's in  the narrator Darley's struggling voice so that makes sense.

Maybe the bigger deal is that before opening Justine I had never heard of the great Alexandrian poet Cavafy, so I am re-reading those highlights at the same time.

[Wilfrid]

Will have to shake up the alphabetical order. I want to re-read Dead Souls, I want to re-read Oblomov, but not one after the other.

Trying to plan reading for my upcoming European trip and in addition to the length of the books I can get through, there's the weight. I think my Modern Library Karamazov would need its own suitcase.