Tags
Anthony Burgess, Books, Bryher, Connie Willies, Dickens, Golding, Marguerite Yourcenar, Rereading, Robert Graves, Ronald Blythe, Selma Lagerloff
This began as part of one of those catching-up phone calls you do around the holidays: we started with the Plague, of course (who doesn’t, these days?) and at some point, mercifully enough, we found ourselves discussing To Read Lists instead.
And the sad fact that there is never enough time to read new things – never mind reread. And yet, the yearning is there – and, before we knew it, we were sharing two very different lists of rereading wishes.
And I thought, well, why not? So here is a very short version of my list: the books I’d love to read again, had I but world enough, and time… Continue reading
There is always at least one pupil like that.
Here in Italy Dante Alighieri is very much The Poet – the fellow who took it upon himself to describe in poetry a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
Yes, I’m a director now.
It’s a Dover Thrift paperback, thin, smallish, the pages rather yellowed at the edges, my initials embossed on the right hand corner of the frontispiece… and I can’t quite remember where I got it.
Nellie Bly was a remarkable character. She was sixteen when she wrote her first article, passionately denying that marriage and motherhood were the only option for girls. The article impressed the editors at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, enough to earn her her fist job as a journalist. At 21 she spent six months in Mexico, writing correspondences, and getting in trouble with the regime of Porfirio Dìaz for championing press freedom. At 23 she spent ten days undercover in an asylum to expose the appalling conditions of the mentally ill. At 25 she journeyed around the world to beat Phileas Fogg’s 80 days record – and she did it! 
Very brief. Flash excursions, in fact…
For the first time in ages, I’ve listened to an audiobook. No, really – audiobooks and I… I absolutely love the idea in principle, only I find myself easily distracted by details. I begin to wonder about the exact lie of the land, the pigments that would have been used to dye a particular kind of silk, the sort of face this or that character would have… and by the time I come back from my wanderings, the narrator has gone ahead.
A few months ago, as I was working on Road to Murder, I found trouble in the form of a French town called Montreuil sur Mer.* Well, for various reasons, my sleuth Tom Walsingham finds himself spending a night there, much against his inclination, and I needed to have a good idea of the place for that… 
Would you object very much to some more slight gloominess? Or perhaps it won’t be so terribly gloomy by the time we’re done – but let us talk of endings and beginnings, and Stevenson. I’ve always liked this thing that Stevenson wrote in a letter written from Samoa to J.M. Barrie: