Remembrance Day

One of my daughters accompanied me to church this morning for the Remembrance Day service and parade.  I would have liked to have taken all three, but good sense prevailed.   After our visit to the National Memorial at Alrewas, earlier in the year, I expected that the girls would be pretty clued up about the significance of the day.   Disappointingly, they recalled very little.  I’m amazed that they don’t seem to have learnt anything pertaining to this subject at school.

As the number of surviving World War veterans dwindles, and the focus shifts to combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan, I hope we, and our children, won’t lose sight of the earlier sacrifices, and the lessons learnt.

My kids don’t know it yet, but their future is going to hold some serious Michael Morpurgo.   Adolphus Tips is a good place to start, and Private Peaceful and Escape from Shangri-La can continue the lesson.  I am also going to get hold of my own copy of Sandi Toksvig’s Hitler’s Canary, a moving and uplifting account of how the Holocaust was largely thwarted in Denmark; by the concerted actions of a united citizenry.

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The Music of Chance – Paul Auster

The Music of Chance has been my introduction to Paul Auster. I initially came across him at Some Books What I Have Read, where Random Reflections had just reviewed Man in the Dark. I was immediately interested, but sought her advice. Unusually I actually took the advice, hence The Music of Chance.

In the longish interim between reading resolution and reading realisation, quite a lot more Auster stuff came my way. Newspaper articles, radio discussions, further blogs. The emphasis on post modernism became increasingly worrying; it is a style which sometimes passes me by…

George’s Marvellous Medicine – Roald Dahl

OK, so it’s a cop-out. I finished my Paul Auster, followed closely by a short story by Shirley Jackson that stopped me dead in my tracks… These are coming soon, but not tonight! Roald Dahl likes to play with the dark and macabre too, but if my youngest daughter can handle it, then so can I.

George’s Marvellous Medicine is the story of a small boy seeking revenge on a wicked relative, by dint of creating a ‘medicine’ from a miscellany of largely dangerous household items.

Booking Through Thursday – It’s all About Me

An interesting meme:

Which do you prefer? Biographies written about someone? Or autobiographies written by the actual person (and/or ghost-writer)?

I have to admit to a wariness wrt biographies, auto or otherwise. To date the few autobiographies which I have ventured to read were ghost-written and, not to put too fine a point on it, uniformly dire.

Dracula – Bram Stoker

I read Dracula slowly over the month of October, originally as the Infinite Summer group read for Hallowe’en. Except that it didn’t work out quite like that.

The concept of Dracula is one with which very few people can be unfamiliar, and it is hard not to come to the book without a great many preconceptions. Both the pop culture it has spawned, and the off-hand lit crit which is bandied around on the subject (I have always thought that it was about syphilis.) However, ultimately, my own preconceptions were the major sticking point.

And a Happy Halloween to All

A literary pumpkin, from several years back. Anyone guess the literary reference? Clue: Not Guy Fawkes although this looks (a bit?) like him…

This year I am struggling for pumpkin related inspiration. Considering ‘Dracula,’ but have rather shot myself in the foot by protesting the popular culture hijacking and dumbing down of Bram Stoker’s creation…

Gravity’s Rainbow – Bites the Dust

Given that I haven’t picked up Gravity’s Rainbow in over a week it must be time to throw in the towel.  Over the last week I have picked up some advice from a variety of sources.  Advice no.1 is to not make Gravity’s Rainbow your first ever Pynchon.  Oops.  Advice no. 2 is not to worry about anything on the first read through, things are more likely to work out second time round.  Huh?  Read it twice?  God forbid!

As I beat a hasty and thankful retreat I reflect that to Gravity’s Rainbow falls the singular, and dubious, honour of being the book to most nearly cause me to throw up (in public!)  Yeah, that was the clinching moment.

However, I also recall that “All the radii of the room are hers”  (love that), there were lyrical bananas, a hilarious take on English “candy” and everything with an octopus is good.

There is a plan.  Read some shorter offerings from Pynchon, and then, I’ll be back…

Another Bookish Birthday

It was my husband’s birthday today.  He provided a book list and it was no less fun choosing for him than it is for myself.   More so in some ways, because not necessarily titles of which I would have thought.  His TBR pile is now burgeoning in a most respectable way, and I am wondering why the TBR is always greener on the other side?