Classics Club Spin #19

The Classics Club has announced a spin for the end of this month. If you post a numbered list of 20 of your Classics Club books by November 27th, the club will spin to pick the number of your next read for the club. The deadline for reading the book and posting a review is January 31, 2019, so the club has challenged us all to put our biggest tomes on the list because of the extra reading time.

So, with no further ado, here is my list. I will say ahead of time that I have no idea whether some of these books are tomes are not:

1. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
3. Challenge by Vita Sackville-West
4. Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
5. The Viscount de Braggalone by Alexandre Dumas
6. Madame de Treymes by Edith Wharton
7. The Old Man’s Birthday by Richmal Crompton
8. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
9. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
10. Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame
11. Evelina by Frances Burney
12. The Lady and the Unicorn by Rumer Godden
13. Joanna Godden by Sheila Kay-Smith
14. Mary Lavelle by Kate O’Brien
15. Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott
16. The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
17. The Prince by Machievelli
18. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
19. Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi
20. The Winged Horse by Pamela Frankau

Happy reading to everyone, and I hope the spin selects a good book for you.

As it is Thanksgiving Day here in the U. S., Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

 

 

 

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Day 1269: Greenery Street

The way I work my blog is that, as I finish a novel, I write up my notes in a book diary. Every five reviews, I pick out my next five books from those notes, and generally speaking, I run about six months behind what I have read.

Obviously, there’s room for error in this system, and I have made one with Greenery Street. I kept expecting my review to turn up, and finally, the other day, I looked the novel up on Goodreads to see when I finished reading it. More than a year ago! I looked back in my journals to see if I inadvertently skipped it, only to find that I apparently forgot to write it up. What a shame for this delightful novel!

Greenery Street is a story of ordinary life in a couple’s first home, written in 1925. It begins on a day in April when newly engaged Felicity Hamilton and Ian Foster wander into Greenery Street in search of a house and find a very small and pleasant one. Then it jumps back to cover their meeting and engagement.

The novel details the everyday life of this newly married couple. There is nothing particularly unusual about their lives (well, not for their time—not too many young wives spend their days shopping, socializing, and supervising the help anymore), but they are rendered in interesting detail and humor, small disagreements and the normal ups and downs of a new marriage. The end of the book is telegraphed from the beginning, when we’re told the house would be too small for three. However, the journey is delightful.

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Day 1258: Classics Club Spin #18! The Heir of Redclyffe

It’s a quirk of mine that, while I research the books for my Classics Club list, when I finally get to them, I don’t remind myself what they are about before reading them. So, when I got The Heir of Redclyffe in the Classics Club spin, I vaguely guessed from the title that it might be a gothic thriller. Boy, was I wrong.

In fact, in tone and attention to right behavior and emphasis on everyday family life, the novel reminds me more of works by Jane Austen than anything else I’ve read, although it lacks the Austen humor and sense of the absurd. In addition, it perhaps doesn’t translate as well to modern times because of its sense of piety.

The Heir of Redclyffe is the story of two cousins, the branches of whose families have long held a feud. Guy Morville is the heir, at the beginning of the novel a 17-year-old who comes under the guardianship of Mr. Edmonstone. Guy is a stranger to the Edmonstone family when he comes to stay. He has been strictly brought up out of his grandfather’s fear of his family’s violent tendencies. The Edmonstones find him charismatic and full of the joy of life but quick to temper, always attempting to control his darker impulses.

Philip Morville, Guy’s cousin from the other side of the feud, is long a friend of the Edmonstone family. He is a captain in the army, and the young Edmonstones have been used to think of him as a pattern of well-bred, right behavior. Charlie Edmonstone, an invalid, thinks him patronizing and sententious, and Amabel, who is shy, is a little afraid of him, but Laura, the oldest daughter, thinks he can do no wrong, and her parents rely on his advice.

Unfortunately, Philip takes a dislike to Guy that he does not recognize himself. Instead, he thinks he is concerned for Guy’s welfare when he interferes in Guy’s life and misconstrues his actions. Although Guy forms an excellent relationship with the Edmonstones, Philip creates serious trouble for him by almost willfully assuming the worst about him.

The latter part of this novel is  full of sentimentality and pathos similar to Dickens at his “worst,” but the characters seem believable and interesting, and we care what happens to them. Perhaps modern readers won’t find the quiet and delicate but determined Amy to be the most interesting heroine, but in contemporary times she was considered a pattern of womanhood, as Guy was the epitome of the Romantic hero.

I was interested to read that in her time, Charlotte M. Yonge’s books were as popular as Dickens’s and she wrote to the service of the Oxford Movement, yet these days we don’t know her name. Like many other women writers, she was probably pushed aside by editors and academics as not as worthy to be remembered as her male counterparts.

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Day 1253: Because of the Lockwoods

Best of Five!
I just have to say, Dorothy Whipple keeps getting better and better. I am so thankful to Persephone Press for reprinting her books and am sorry that I only see a few more in their catalog.

Because of the Lockwoods is about the complex relationships between two families, the Hunters and the Lockwoods. The families used to be neighbors and social equals, but Mr. Hunter died unexpectedly, leaving the Hunters in financial straits. When the novel opens, Mrs. Lockwood is preparing to patronize the Hunters by inviting them on New Year’s Eve to witness a production by her girls that she would not inflict on more important people and to dine on leftover treats from Christmas Day.

The youngest Hunter, Thea, has grown to hate the Lockwoods for the way they treat her mother—Mrs. Lockwood patronizing her and Mr. Lockwood being irritable when Mrs. Hunter turns to him for advice. The Lockwood twins are bullies who continually ridicule Thea. What the Hunters don’t know, though, is that Mr. Lockwood cheated Mrs. Hunter just days into her widowhood.

The Lockwoods are not without their good qualities, just as Thea is not without bad ones, and it is this nuanced approach that makes the novel interesting. Mr. Lockwood adores his family, and Mrs. Lockwood is one of the few old friends who continues to visit Mrs. Hunter after the family’s move to a less salubrious neighborhood. Thea, on the other hand, is difficult, stubborn, and unforgiving. While despising the Lockwoods’ middle class values, she has adopted some of them herself, and is at first snobbish when she meets a new neighbor, Oliver Reade.

This novel is a long one, but it swept me up. I watched Thea suffer one humiliation after another at the hands of the Lockwood family and was interested to see how she handles her opportunity for comeuppance.

One feature of Whipple’s novels is how readable they are. Once you start reading, you don’t want to stop.

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Another Classics Club Spin!

The Classics Club has just announced spin #18, where club members post a list of 20 classics and the spin chooses a number. You then pledge to read and post a review of that book by August 31.

So, with no further ado, here is my list:

1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë
2. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
3. My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
4. Madame de Treymes by Edith Wharton
5. Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson
6. Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
7. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
8. Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott
9. The Heir of Redclyff by Charlotte M. Yonge
10. The Old Man’s Birthday by Richmal Crompton
11. Greenery Street by Denis MacKail
12. Mary Lavelle by Kate O’Brien
13. Challenge by Vita Sackville-West
14. I Go by Land, I Go by Sea by P. L. Travers
15. The Viscounte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas
16. The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins
17. Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
18. The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
19. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Day 1210: Le Morte D’Arthur

It’s time for my review for the latest Classics Club Spin, and the spin assigned me Le Morte D’Arthur to read by the end of April.

If I’d been aware of how long this book is, I might have thought twice about putting it on my Classics Club list. It’s not the length that made it so difficult to read, though, but the repetitiveness of one knight after another getting into a joust and smiting right and left.

I tried hard to finish this book, but after a month of reading it (interrupted by a few other books), I decided to skip to the last two books (out of twenty-one), which deal with Lancelot’s break with Arthur and the end of Arthur’s kingdom. All told, I read about 400 pages.

I actually began eager to read the original of the Arthurian legends or at least as original as we have. The introduction to Cassell’s unabridged edition says that we don’t know the source of the book, although Malory makes many references to “the French book.” The structure of the book suggests that it may be a compilation of every Arthurian story known to Malory, as it is full of chapters about fight after fight. In fact, after a while I pictured Britain, particularly Cornwall and Wales, as seething with wandering knights, who, when they encounter one another, go immediately into battle. I was also struck by how often they don’t recognize each other even when in the same room and presumably out of armor.

There are some sustained story lines, such as the tale of Tristram and La Beale Isoud, and they are interesting, but they’re broken up and sprinkled in among the fights, and of course they too involve fights.

Women are fairly negligibly treated, not surprising for the time despite the patina of chivalry, which is supposed to suggest otherwise. We don’t see much of them or learn what they are like. In fact, Arthur says at the end of the book that he isn’t as upset about losing Guenever as the loss of his knights “. . . for queens I might have enow, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company.” Which might give us a clue why Guenever preferred Lancelot. In any event, characterization isn’t a strong suit of medieval literature.

I would say that this book is best for dipping into rather than trying to read all at once. It is an important work of literature, and sometimes the language is quite charming. However, its form is very foreign to us now and shows us just how far literature has come. (There is a glossary in the back of the version I read, which unfortunately I didn’t discover until the end.)

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Time for Another Classics Club Spin

Classics Club announced its 17th spin on Thursday. If you want to participate, you must post a list of 20 books from your Classics Club list by March 9. The spin will select a number corresponding to one of those books, which they challenge you to read and post a review by the end of April. Here is my list of 20 books:

1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
2. August Folly by Angela Thirkell
3. La Morte D’arthur by Thomas Malory
4. The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
5. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
6. I Go by Land, I Go by Sea by P. L. Travers
7. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
8. Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
9. Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott
10. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
11. Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame
12. The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins
13. Mary Lavelle by Kate O’Brien
14. The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollet
15. Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn
16. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Madame de Treymes by Edith Wharton
18. My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
19. The Viscounte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas
20. The Heir of Redclyff by Charlotte M. Yonge

There are lots of books on this list that I know nothing about, and only three that I have read before, so it should be an exciting spin.