What book(s) are you reading currently?

[ErnestoGuevara]

Sometimes when I look at my bookshelves, I think that I'm quite a well-read type and then I think of all the stuff I've never read and come back down to earth. Take Canterbury Tales, for example. It was never on my school curriculum and my later studies involved 19th century work. So it's time for a bit of Chaucer.

[Sir Honkers]

Originally Posted by ErnestoGuevara

Sometimes when I look at my bookshelves, I think that I'm quite a well-read type and then I think of all the stuff I've never read and come back down to earth. Take Canterbury Tales, for example. It was never on my school curriculum and my later studies involved 19th century work. So it's time for a bit of Chaucer.

If you've never read it, you're in for a treat. Mister Chaucer was every bit Bill's equal.

[victor meldrew]

My wife purchased MOD 50th Anniversary for me and decided to read the previous two again. for me the first book Imo is by far the best.



As this is BBC related it is possible this post will be removed, never sure why though.

[mizlaplan]

I read Terry Pratchett's "Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook to Travelling upon the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway" a week ago.
Hilarious and informative, as usual. A p*ss-take on George Bradshaw's "Railway Guides" as beloved by Michael Portillo.
***spoiler alert***
the section on Monsieur Bidet's excellent "footbaths".....

I bought Stephen King's "Revival" in Cardiff yesterday and finished it today.
'nuff said really, but if you're interested, it's one of his best.
After that, I'm going to try reading "Under the Dome" again.
Wish me luck.

[Slipaki]

I recently (re)finished The Beach by Alex Garland. It is as brilliant as I remembered it. Very-much recommended to anyone who haven't read it yet.
It is an adventure thriller involving a paradise beach. There's a chance you've seen the movie but it's best to erase it from your memory before reading the book!

[scoundrel]

To Serve Them All My Days by RF Delderfield




Its a very old fashioned book, in the tradition of Goodbye Mister Chips or even Tom Brown's Schooldays; but brought forward a little bit to span the period March 1918 to July 1940. As a fictionalised commentary on the huge social changes which occurred in Britain during this period it works extremely well. I think it also works as a comment on British national identity, the extremely low key but deadly-if-crossed belief in a shared identity to which all levels of the class system are required to bear allegiance. It is that shared identity which prevents revolution or riotous unrest at critical moments, such as the Dunkirk defeat, or earlier, during the General Strike of 1926; but which also forces the ruling classes to make concessions whenever the case for social justice is conclusive.

The protagonist of the story is well depicted and also carefully chosen to be a bridge between the social divisions, a man with feet in several different camps. He is a man with strong working class roots and very proud of these roots, born into a Welsh mining family from the Valleys (American members, think "West Virginia"). However, he did better at school than his brothers and managed to reach and pass through grammar school, thanks as well to the efforts of his family to pay for this. Had it not been for the Great War, he would have joined the ranks of his local lower middle class as a junior civil servant or trade union official or similar; jobs which were open to educated working class men. But of course he joins up, lying about his age to do it, as so many did.

We meet David Powlett Jones in the waiting room of a tiny rural railway halt, at a big moment in his life. He is just properly remembering who he is and everything he has experienced and why he is there in that waiting room, on his way to meet the headmaster of a very isolated baording school near Exmoor and apply for a job. He is breaking the surface again, after physically recovering from a severe schrapnel head wound; the process of recovering from shell shock (post traumatic stress disorder we call it now) is really only beginning.

It turns out that the headmaster badly needs a man who can teach humanities subjects, the subjects David particularly did well in academically, and in March 1918 the human resources cupboard is bare, so David really only has to turn up in order to land the job. This is particularly true because David was promoted in the field, and was a ranker-officer, a 2nd Lieutenant, which technically makes him a gentleman and eligible to teach the sons of gentlemen. What follows is a very interesting process in which the relatively "posh" staff and pupils adjust to the fiercely proud and left wing miner's son teacher and he adjusts to them, and bye and large they are mutually surprised to discover that they quite like each other.

David does not sell out, but does find his own sense of fair play very awkward as he grasps that these dyed-in-the-wool reactionary Tories do have a point of view. Also, they just naturally adopt him as part of the school family without thinking about it, and he has a loyal nature, so he quickly learns to tolerate things which would once have got right up his nose; in most cases they can't help it and its not their fault that they are Tories. But tolerating is not the same as accepting, and just occasionally there are memorable scenes where the two sides openly collide. One of these happens when a Sixth Form History class misguidedly provokes him for his known support of the General Strike, attaching a newspaper cartoon which alleges that the unions are being funded by the Bolsheviks from Russia. David Powlett Jones fought and nearly died for Great Britain and he doesn't find this suggestion of national disloyalty at all amusing.

The flame of anger that had stirred in him subsided, but the ember glowed. He waited, getting himself in hand, before crumpling the cartoon and throwing it in the waste paper basket.
"Right. I don't find it all that much of a joke, but I suppose I am expected to make allowances for the Sixth, so I will. However, while we are on this subject, lets jump a couple of generations from the Reform Bill and I'll tell you something you might not know. As far as I am concerned, very few people here do know. I've never made a parade of it and I wouldn't now if you hadn't sat up and begged for it. I am a miner's son. I was born and I grew up in a Welsh mining village. I know from first hand the kind of deal these chaps get and have been getting ever since the English moved in and made a midden out of their valleys. Most of them take home fifty shilling a week for a five and a half day week underground, where they might die at any moment. From a roof fall, from fire damp, from flooding. There are no pithead baths in most of the pits. The absentee owners drawing royalties on seams thousands of feet underground are too miserly to install them. So the men wash in tin baths in front of the fire scrubbed by their women folk. Think about that. Fifty shillings a week for a man and his family, when it costs around four-ten a week to keep most of you chaps here for eight months a year. But that isn't all; not by a long chalk. When I was a kid younger than anyone here, I went off to school one morning leaving behind a father and two brothers working early shift - 4am to midday. When I got home that same day my father and two brothers were dead. Their bodies were never recovered. Ewan, my other brother, was sixteen at the time.

Now; let's get back to the syllabus...

[rsabosc]

R.A Salvatorre's collection of books about Drizzt is outstanding if you like fantasy rpg genre.

[tsunamiSD]

Got this delivered yesterday and spent several enjoyable hours with it. Kim was the still photographer for Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, Halloween II, and Christine. Besides the photos, there are paragraph long comments from those who were on the set, actors and crew alike. Many anecdotes that I hadn't heard before (written or filmed)

Just Google the title of the book and you can see a lot of the pictures taken, lots of great candid ones. One of the stories mentioned by several of the participants is how the late Debra Hill arranged things for Escape from New York such that many of the crew with able to get the qualification for the screen guilds (including the photographer herself.) Big thumbs up for this one!

[Sir Honkers]

Thy Kingdom Come DC comic series. Yeah, I know it's not Shakespeare, but....

[rlg118]

Full Force and Effect. Just came out.