Finished Reading

Just finished The Story of Lucy Gault by Wm. Trevor.

It was interesting to see how great writing can almost make you forget the
considerable shortcomings of the story.
A lesser prose writer than Trevor might never have the nerve to try to pull
this off. The characters are nicely drawn but the events that unfold are
just not believable, at least not on the basis of the facts that he reveals.

I concluded this about a third of the way through, but I was willing to
continue simply because his writing is just plain delicious.

Sam

From the past few days......

William James' 'Varieties of Religious Experience' where Tolstoy had the
biggest impact by saying that the way to avoid pessimism about life was to
look outside yourself.

William McIlvanney's 'Radical Burns' which opened my eyes to a totally
different and correct reading of the poetry.

Pekka Himanen's 'The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age'
which reinforces my feeling that life without passion aint worth living.


Tomorrow I start on A.N.Wilson's 'Iris Murdoch as I knew her' which should
be a corrective to the biography I read last year.

And for next weeekend I have Francis Pryor's 'Britain BC'. He is currently
on his TV programme 'Britain AD' and the book is of his previous series. He
was a maverick archaeologist with his belief in the continuity of British
culture over the past few thousand years to the present (and does that
include the Normans?) who is fast becoming the mainstream opinion. Tonight
on TV he emphasised the Romano-British continuity before and after the
relevant Roman period.



--
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
"