Classics
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I don’t read a lot of poetry because I mostly don’t really get it, but occasionally something catches me. In this case, a quote in Civilization VI, when you receive the Great Writer Li Bai, an 8th century Chinese poet: Flowers surround me, alone with my drink, I pour for myself, no companion to join…
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This is another of the books that has been sitting on my shelf unread for years because it’s too heavy to carry around on the train. The Sagas of the Icelanders, published as a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, is a collection of some sagas and tales from the Viking age. Translated and edited by a…
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How have I waited so long to read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood? It’s a classic, and has been televised, and is the kind of thing that sometimes you don’t read because you think you know all you need to about it. The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and I really should have…
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I’ve had this book on my shelf for a long time, wanting to read it but thinking it might be hard work. Seven Viking Romances, translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, is a collection of Viking adventure stories. These tales are less serious than the Icelandic Sagas and have many more fantastical elements.…
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June Book Club was a double bill: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway and The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. A Moveable Feast is a collection of vignettes recalling the years in the 1920s Hemingway spent living in Paris. Each of the people he knew there, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, James…
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Reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy was my main reading goal for this year. I spend a couple of hours a day on a train and I like to use that time constructively. Some books need a bit of time and effort, and commuting makes it easy to do that. War and Peace has…
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Free kindle books! Yay. There are books now out of copyright that are available free for the kindle and I have availed myself of a few. One of them is The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope which I wanted to read as it was mentioned in an article on The Business Case for…
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I’ve not read many classics this year, due to a perception that they take longer to read that modern novels of the same length, and I’ve been conscious of having a target. Towards the end of the year I stopped picking short books in order to meet the target because I wanted to read books I…
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I do like lists. From the Huffington Post, here’s a list of books that apparently people claim to have read but haven’t. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer – I read the Knight’s Tale at school, and it’s on book mountain, but I haven’t read any more tales. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville –…
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Last year, there was a television adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and thus there followed much discussion of its horror and psychological twists. Well, what more reason do you need to read a book? I struggled with the language. This was a surprise. I read the odd classic and although…
Boudica Marginalia 