Should have read classics discussion

This is the group read for March. Please remember to post spoilers if the discussion is fairly new and early in the read. I hope the you enjoy this one and happy reading!

Read this a few years ago because the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey was performing an adaptation of the book. Don't really consider this a classic, but hope everyone enjoys it.

I don't know that it is a classic, but it should have been, and that makes it fair game for the "should have read classics" group.

Oh, I don't think it is a classic; just a good read. Maybe others who read it will convince me that it is a classic by giving me great reasons!

On my to-read list!

I have my copy and hope to start within the next few days.

I have my copy, and I am about 3 pages in. The narration is as delightful as I remembered. For those with more time to listen than read, Audible has a version of this that is very well-read.

I read this probably fifty years ago, and have very fond memories of it, though I recall almost nothing about what happens in it.

I read the first section tonight, and I can see why it appealed to me as an Anglophile teenager in love with Austen, Bronte, et al., but on this reading, while I'm enjoying it, I have to agree with her father that she tries too hard at her humor. Granted that she is only 17, but the single speed, always moving at this frenetic pace with no breathers, is getting to me.

I'm glad we picked it, though, giving me a chance to revisit my innocent youth and see what appealed to me so back then.

I am half way in to the book, and I am surprised to find how much I enjoy it. In fact, I love it. Cassandra pretty much had me wrapped around her finger by page 3, very unusual for me I must say, because I was almost prepared to be annoyed by her. Smart teenagers, aspiring to be a writer, contemplating their Self a lot while narrating the story sometimes have that effect on me.
Instead I find it to be almost therapeutic. It talked me out of my winter-grumpiness (possibly fed by too many bleak books, which I have a soft-spot for) within the first ten pages, so apart from the fact that this is a very well written book, I am impressed with Dodie Smith's ability to create such lifely and amiable characters, so lifely infact that I feel inclined to adapt Cassandra's way of looking at things for the time of being (and abandon my own grumpy winter-lens)

I just made it to the part where the Americans enter the scene. The book is really fun and quirky. Some of my favorite quotes so far:
"Rose doesn't like the flat country but I always did-flat country seems to give the sky such a chance."
"Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression."

A bit further on than Lisa was at here last post. The one I feel really sorry for at this point is Stephen. He's such a vulnerable person, and so totally devoted. I hope things get better for him. But I fear that Cassandra will never love him back.

Everyman wrote: "A bit further on than Lisa was at here last post. The one I feel really sorry for at this point is Stephen. He's such a vulnerable person, and so totally devoted. I hope things get better for hi..."

I would have to agree with you Everyman. I'm interested to see where this goes from here.

I'm having a hard time with the Cotton brothers. I tend to get them confused for one and they just bother me, but I can't explain why.

Everyman wrote: "A bit further on than Lisa was at here last post. The one I feel really sorry for at this point is Stephen. He's such a vulnerable person, and so totally devoted. I hope things get better for hi..."

I'm about 30 pgs from the end of the book and feel similarly toward him. Though not the innocent I thought he was in the beginning, you have to feel for his seeming allegiance to solitude and to this rather self-absorbed family. Unlike the rest of them, he has no one but himself to rely on; his one rainbow, just the hope of having Cassandra who does not return his affections. I feel distraught for him.

Lisa wrote: "I'm having a hard time with the Cotton brothers. I tend to get them confused for one and they just bother me, but I can't explain why."

The way I differentiate is that Neil is less artistic in his interests; he's more aggressive, and less dreamy - more daring - than Simon. Simon also tends to hang around their mother, Mrs. Cotton, more which, IMO , makes sense of his attraction to Rose's more bossy way of dealing with him.

I just put this book on hold at my library! My spring break's coming up in a week, so that'll be the perfect time to start reading it. I really hope I find this book fun and quirky as Lisa described and that it won't leave me with much of a melancholy feeling like I've read about in some reviews. After having read a few slow-moving books this past month, I'm really in the mood for something light and fun.

I just started yesterday and am really motivated by all of your comments. I'd never even heard of this book before, so I'm eager to see if I find it as charming as so many of you do.

I just finished the book last night and I enjoyed it,but it seemed to bog down at the end. Kayla and Mo, I hope that you enjoy this one. I will wait to comment until later.

I agree that the beginning sections were faster paced and, for me, more interesting than the end. But I'll wait to say more until more people have finished it.

Finished it yesterday. Since we have only one thread for the discussion, I'll put my comments in a spoiler protection so those who haven't finished the book yet can avoid them.

(view spoiler)[ I was a bit disappointed, coming back to this book after reading it so long ago. My memory of it was of a charming and happy book, and it is that in many places, but on my first read I either hadn't noticed or had forgotten its weaknesses.

I never got a very good sense of the characters as people. They seemed to me to be semi-wooden, even Cassandra who for me never developed much. Thomas, for just one example, is still mostly a shadow for me. And surely there must have been more to Rose's character than just desperation for money. Had she no other interests, no roundness to her life?

Topaz was for me the most believable character as a real person, and along with Father the most interesting, but being in the middle of re-reading Bleak House, the contrast in how Dickens is able to create a fully rounded character in a few lines with Smith's inability to do that, for me at least, in several hundred pages was startling. Though I also admit it's a bit unfair to hold somebody up to Dickens as a model.

I was not that surprised by Rose switching from Simon to Neil, but I was a bit surprised that Simon left without what I felt was any closure in his relationship with Cassandra. Perhaps Smith was thinking of the possibility of a sequel, so left it a bit open-ended?

All in all, though I'm glad to have gotten re-acquainted with the book, I think it read better to me as an adolescent about Cassandra's age than as an adult with much greater experience of literature and life. (hide spoiler)]

I first read this book at least a decade ago. Recently I listened to an audio version, which was very well done. I share some of Everyman's thoughts. I loved the book the first time I read it. The second time, it did not seem as brilliant as it had when I was younger, but I still enjoyed it a lot. (view spoiler)[ I particularly loved the part near the end, when the family took care of the father's writer's block by trapping him in the basement until he wrote something. I loved the idea that he created a new and brilliant novel by starting out with writing one sentence over and over until other things came to him. Does this explain a bit about post-modern writing, I wonder? (hide spoiler)]

I haven't read anything else by Dodie Smith, so looked her up. Turns out she was initially an actress and playwright, semi-successful. She had to move from England to the US (living quite close to where I was brought up, it turns out) in 1940 because of her husband's problems as a conscious objector in wartime England.

She was 44 at the time, and wrote her first novel in response to her homesickness for England: this was I Capture the Castle! That gives it, particularly Simon's feelings about England, a particularly poignant note, at least for me.

She is perhaps best known for 101 Dalmatians. (We had a dalmatian when I was growing up -- that's two links with her!) In a BBC poll, the British public voted ICTC number 82 of the 100 best loved novels. I would be surprised if it even appeared as a choice on a list of the 100 best loved novels by an American audience, though; seems not very well known or popular over here, or is it?

I had never heard of the book until recently. A few years ago, the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey presented the stage version of the book. I decided to read it before seeing the production. I remember the book being fun to read, but I don't think of it as a "classic."

This is what is on the dustcover of my book. "ICTC is finally back in print! Lovingly passed down from generation to generation and long unavailable in American stores, ICTC has become one of the most requested items of used book dealers. However, in the author's native England, the novel has vener been out of print." I don't know how true any of that is, but it might explain why the book has such different followings in both countries?

I was listening to ICTC on my walk today -- I get very different things out of books when I read them and when I listen to them -- and something I glossed over on reading struck me in the audio version. Shortly after they have moved to the tower, before Neil and Simon show up, Cassandra is bemoaning being so poor, talks about marrying some money -- "Rose, that is; for I would approach matrimony as cheerfully as I would the tomb and I cannot feel that I should give satisfaction."

Yet not many weeks later she is seriously considering it. That was a pretty quick turnaround.

I had never heard of this book either. I found it to be sweet, but very dated. Cassandra's innocent voice reminded me of Francie's from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.i think I'd have to say I enjoyed the book, but I didn't love it.

Mo wrote: "Cassandra's innocent voice..."

I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you're right. She is indeed innocent, in some ways even more so than the younger Thomas.

Rose is not as innocent in the same way, but is perhaps almost as innocent of the ways of the world.
She certainly jumps on the idea of marriage without seeming to have much of an understanding of what it really entails (with the example of Father and Topaz before her, and the bachelor Vicar and maiden Miss Marcy apparently the only other adults playing any significant role in her life, perhaps it's not surprising.)

How did Simon put it? Charmingly naive, or something like that? She was innocent, considering that Topaz apparently told the girls about sex. I guess Victorian books are not really ideal for courting in the 1930's. Although I did seem to forget the time period during much of the book, not sure why.
One of my favorite scenes was the description of the Midsummer Nights event. It is poignant to think about those moments that change from wonderful, childhood memories to forced, adult memories that seem to lack something when we try to relive them again.

Lisa wrote: " Although I did seem to forget the time period during much of the book, not sure why. "

Now that you mention it, so did I. It seems as though it could have happened even fairly recently. The few anachronisms, such as bathing in a portable tub, I kind of glossed over because that could easily have been happening today with a very poor family living in a semi-ruined castle. Sort of like the hippies in the 60s, living in their communes often without running water or electricity.

But that's probably just self-justification. I don't know why I didn't think myself into the 1930s as I read it, but I didn't.

That was an excellent observation, Lisa.

Mo wrote: "I had never heard of this book either. I found it to be sweet, but very dated. Cassandra's innocent voice reminded me of Francie's from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.i think I'd have to say I enjoyed th..."

I was just about to make that comparison myself between Cassandra and Francie. Those two really do seem to have a lot in common. I just started ICTC today, but I already feel that Cassandra is going to be just as special to me as Francie is and Mick Kelley from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

There are so many quotable lines in this book! I feel that the first line would have been listed right alongside the great openings of books like Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca if it was a better known novel. I actually first heard of this book when I read it's opening sentence in a thread for "great first lines" and I was instantly intrigued.

Everyman wrote: "Lisa wrote: " Although I did seem to forget the time period during much of the book, not sure why. "

Now that you mention it, so did I. It seems as though it could have happened even fairly recen..."

I was thinking about this and wondering since the book was written in England during the 30's the focus is not on the Depression. It seems that most books in America during that time period focus upon that and even though the family is very poor, it is based more upon his choice than outside factors.

Lisa wrote: "I was thinking about this and wondering since the book was written in England during the 30's the focus is not on the Depression. "

Great observation. Not only doesn't it ignore the depression, but there seems very little in it that is specific to the era -- perhaps the wind-up gramophone is the most "period" element I can recall.

It did mention a wireless radio that Stephen bought for Cassandra, although she liked the gramophone better. Speaking of the music, I really need to brush up on my classical. I had not heard of any of those pieces that were discussed.