Ersatz TLS discussion

Hello and welcome to the new thread.

The last days of August and here in France the last week of the school holidays. The concept of la rentrée is a big deal, not just for children and back to school time.

I hope everyone's busy enjoying their reading and with good books to share.

Gpfr wrote: "Hello and welcome to the new thread.

The last days of August and here in France the last week of the school holidays. The concept of la rentrée is a big deal, not just for children and back to sc..."

Thank you for this.

We worked as teachers in France, and absolutely hated the media obsession with 'la rentrée'. When your holidays are drawing to a close, the last thing you want is to be reminded of it every evening for weeks by reports on the main evening news discussing the cost of pencils, etc. In addition, it served as a reminder of the dreadful traffic jams to be faced getting into Paris, unless you were prepared to head off at 3am or something similar.

In the UK, not much is said about it at all. The papers over 'ere take much more interest in commenting on the exam results (GCSE and A levels), so that they can moan about standards (if the results are worse than the previous year, 'standards are slipping'; if they are better, then it's 'the exams are getting easier' or 'grade inflation'). But mainly they enjoy it as it provides an excuse to publish daft photos of groups of 'fruity girls' (as Private Eye calls them) jumping in the air and waving their result scripts!

PS - we will be off to France on 1 September, hoping that the traffic in a non-bank holiday period won't be too crazy.

scarletnoir wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "Hello and welcome to the new thread.

The last days of August and here in France the last week of the school holidays. The concept of la rentrée is a big deal, not just for children an..."
I did think that the GCSE results analysis was telling this year with respect to the attainment levels being so much better in the south than the north. A damning statistic.
Various reasons may be put forward to account for the discrepancy- some have validity - but there is evidence here that there is a problem to be addressed.

Treasures of Time. I'm continuing to explore Penelope Lively's short, incisive, beautifully written books.

In this one, the BBC wants to make a documentary about an archaeologist, Hugh Paxton, "one of those names known even to those who know nothing of their field of work", who died a few years ago.

Laura , his widow, was never very interested in archaeology but was beautiful, and met Paxton through her sister Nellie, herself an archaeologist.

Laura is particularly acutely drawn. When her daughter's fiancé first meets her,

He did not see how anyone could have so extraordinary a knack of instantly putting everyone else at a disadvantage. It is amazing, he thought, how is it done? You could go far, with a talent like that.

And we see this 'talent' given free rein.

However, the drawing has subtle touches. Nellie is living with her after having had a stroke. Laura insists on her disability and discourages her from trying to do things.

'... How's Aunt Nellie?'
Laura inspected her salad: the dressing looked doubtful. 'Well, darling, one does go on hoping for miracles ... She is going to be very dependent on me in the future, I'm afraid.'
'Do you mind?'
'Mind?' said Laura, startled. 'It's not a question of mind, or not mind, it's the way things have turned out.'

That little touch ...

Now I'm enjoying Kate Atkinson's latest: Shrines of Gaiety. London after WWI, nightclubs, drugs, corrupt police, girls running away from home to go on the stage ...

Gpfr wrote:Now I'm enjoying Kate Atkinson's latest: Shrines of Gaiety. London after WWI, nightclubs, drugs, corrupt police, girls running away from home ...

I have this in my TBR pile, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

Hi folks,

I missed the opportunity to reply back to some of the messages from the last discussion blog. I hope you are all well and that body aches and maladies are not getting the better of us.

I finished 'Dark Scared Night' by Michael Connelly. Harry Bosch is a firm reminder of what happens when when your job becomes all consuming - it becomes you.

I have borrowed other books in the series, but will have a break. I've just started 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides.

@Tam: I loved reading about your photon dream!

Thanks for the new thread G and have a good journey and a happy stay Scarletnoir.

Reading has been a bit slow this last week but I am working my way through The Civil War: An Illustrated History

It can be a bit confusing (or it might just be me!) but I am about ⅔ of the way through. My main impression so far is what a shambles a lot of it seemed to be and whyever was McClellan not at least relieved of his command, if not court martialled, is difficult to understand. He must have cost thousands of lives and prolonged the war. Talk about a legend in his own mind. I may be wrong and perhaps students of this era will enlighten me?

Another thought that comes to me is the difference between Britain abolishing the slave trade and it happening in the US. From an immediate prospect, the thought that we compensated slave owners in this country for the "loss" of their slaves seems absolutely abhorrent (as was the trade itself, of course). But compared to the over 600,000 lives lost, and innumerable people maimed and ruined over the four years of the Civil War some 30 years after the abolition here, it makes me think that perhaps our approach was the better one, even if it left/ still leaves, a bad taste in the mouth. And, of course, the hatred and bitterness between north and south must have lasted for decades.

All opinions, information welcome please!

An afterthought - McClellan reminded me a little of Lord Stanley in the Wars of the Roses. As one author said, he always arrived late to the battle, either he got held up in traffic, was ill, or didn't get the message in time. Although the motives were entirely different I think.

Pleasent but on the cooler side in the shires now

The novel of Jozef Wittlin has led me down a wonderful rabbit burrow of Ukraine themed stats from the 1897-1900 era. Wittlin sets his 1935 WW1 novel The Salt of the Earth in Pokuttia, a region in the far east of Austrian Galicia, on the border with Imperial Russia.

Ruthenes were the Ukrainian inhabitants of Galicia and were a majority in the eastern half of the kingdom and also on the Imperial Russian side. (these areas are now Western Ukraine). The stats from the census of 1897(Russia) and 1900 (Austro-Hungary) reveal a stark contrast between where the majority and minority populations live.

The rural Pokuttia region is majority Ruthene, however the towns(none of them that large) are all Polish-Jewish majorities. Same story in Volyn, accross the Russian border but even more rural, with Russian, Poles and German majority in the even smaller towns

As part of my general interest in the embattled brave nation of Ukraine, i am trying to think of another major European state at the same time (1900) where the majority population were almost unseen in the urban centres. Ireland comes to mind but in no centres of Irish urban concentrations were the Irish a minority, at any tim during occupation.

The novel is simply a joy, slow moving, witty, reflective and focused on the way a few weeks of war can shatter decades of peace and progress. Our hero, Piotr, railway signlman has finally been called up, half way through the novel and i sense we are moving far from Pokuttia and into Hungary, maybe....Wittlin is a master of the slow tale

The Malabar House series by Vaseem Khan.

Following much praise for this series, I took the plunge when a heavily discounted ebook of the third in the series - 'The Lost Man of Bombay' - appeared. I enjoyed it, though it had weaknesses... but obviously it was good enough for me to carry on. The others have been very good so far...

Midnight at Malabar House is set a year after partition in India. An Englishman is murdered at his house during a party at which many of the great and good in Bombay are in attendance... whodunit? Khan is a fluent writer who also knows his way around a plot: we get plenty of suspects and possible motives. His main protagonist is 'India's first female detective' Persis Wadia, who works out of Malabar House...

Here, aficionados of Mick Herron's 'Slough House' series might feel a sense of déjà vu... Malabar House is a station where misfits are sent - those in some degree of disgrace for one reason or another - and Persis, who is there just because she is a woman. I think Khan does fairly well (for a man) to portray the prejudices Persis faces, though it must be said that his ability to do so lacks the personal understanding and knowledge brought to that aspect by Sujata Massey in her Perveen Mistry series - a much more comprehensive and subtle portrayal of that issue.

Khan does provide a good background to issues arising preceding and in the aftermath of Partition - at one point, I did think it odd that little had been said about this, but it is covered from about halfway onwards. Summaries of some key events, but well done overall.

One aspect we get in all the books I've read so far is the existence of cryptic clues - codes, puzzles, and/or riddles. This will appeal to many of you. (I'm more for the character building and police procedural descriptions.) I guessed who the instigator of the murder was some way before the end...

The Dying Day... I am currently reading this, and enjoying it very much. An early and valuable copy of Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' has gone missing from Bombay's Asiatic Society, and the man responsible for researching the volume has disappeared. Once again, Pervis is tasked with finding the lost treasure, and is faced with a number of strange clues left by the presumed thief. Great fun... and:

The Lost Man of Bombay - the first I read, and the weakest. The plot is very far fetched here, and Khan seems to have gone a bit overboard with his writing - always fluent, but here tipping into purple prose on occasion, plus an excessive use of abstruse terms from architecture and the decorative arts. We get some of this in the other books - fine, I like to learn new words or revise meanings I have forgotten - but it's overdone in this story. Despite that, it was entertaining.

I'll come back to Khan when I have read a bit more, but he's technically very proficient and good fun. He does seem to borrow some ideas from other writers, though:

1. Malabar House = Slough House
2. Persis Wadia = Perveen Mistry

The whole notion of using a historical setting for crime fiction is now well established, and you can't say that Khan has 'borrowed' that more than any number of other writers. I'll come back to a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of Khan compared to other practitioners at a later date.

Well worth a read if you like this stuff, though - as I do.

If anyone is a Melvin Bragg fan, he’s currently on R4, This Cultural Life.

With respect to Midnight at Malabar House, I'd just like to share part of an excellent review from Amazon by one 'Boingboing', which focuses on some of my reservations:

I am concerned about coincidences between this book and Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry series of novels which were published a couple of years before Vaseem Khan's.

Perveen is 'India's first woman lawyer'. Persis Wadia is 'India's first woman detective'.
Perveen and Persis are both based in Bombay.
Both are Parsee women - a convenient way to explain away their willingness to be so unconventional it would seem; a part of local society but also apart from local society.
Both fight the sexism and prejudices of their colleagues.
Both are tenacious in their determination to find justice.
Both have unfortunate past love affairs.
The only key difference is that Perveen's stories predate Persis Wadia's by around 30 years.

I know that trends in writing are not unusual but the coincidences between these two series are more striking than most.

I think those are fair comments, but the books are hugely entertaining and - for those of us not well versed in Indian history - educational. I'll go on reading them, in parallel with the Sujata Massey series and that Abir Mukherjee's 'Wyndham and Banerjee' series set in Calcutta.

For the science minded - CCC? - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/sc...

The ideas that shaped post-war Britain is a very interesting study of the 1945-1995 period(the book was written in 1996)

I found it on a BWB browse, it was exactly what i was keen to find, essays on the ideas of the post war period, rather than a 600 page study of a decade or a few years, which have been of mixed standards in the UK:
Kynaston and Beckett-good Hennessy-middling Sandbrook-lowbrow and overlong

The mind needed a refocus when i commenced reading as rather than a book from this disastrous brexit stained last 13 Tory years, the book was printed as the Major govt limped towards the electoral annihilation of 1997

Skidelsky and Marquand essays were very good indeed, looking at the state of england that led to the Thatcher change(Marquand) and the fall of Keyneisian (Skidelsky). Marquand notes correctly that in Europe the swing to the right was not matched in many other Western European nations from 1979, the state proved durable and an essential part of these economies. Skidelsky blames the economists advising politicians in the 1960s and 70s, leading them to make ever poorer decisions, as the post war consensus unravelled

Marquand's point interested me a lot, certainly the state is a stronger player in almost every European nation, than in the UK(thanks to Thatchers neo-liberalism) but even in 1996 the creepage of Blair style politics was changing the EU member states and by 2010 was becoming rather well established

Thankfully for the EU states, nothing as rotten as the UK political ystem has emerged for making bad decisions(Brexit) and failing to see alternatives to a neo-liberal world of 51st state decay.

giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for the new thread G and have a good journey and a happy stay Scarletnoir.

Reading has been a bit slow this last week but I am working my way through The Civil War: An Illustrated His..."

Just last weekend there was another killing of blacks - just because of their skin color - in Jacksonville, Florida. Of course the 2nd amendment needs to be corralled in, but at the same time I continue to wonder if the USA will ever get over slavery. (It's the 60th anniversary of the 'I have a dream speech' today.)

About McClellan - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA280735#:~:text=The%20President%20delayed%20his%20eventual,Confederate%20Potential%20and%20a%20McClellan

There must be a zillion books written about our Civil War and half of them are about Lincoln.

If you want to read about the war away from Virginia, I suggest [author:Ron Chernow's . About that, though, there were several times during my read that i wanted to hit Grant 'upside the head' as he never learned during his lifetime to be on guard from those who will bamboozle just because they can and you let them.

(Looks like I have an italics issue, oh well.)

The Shrines of Gaiety is the flip side of the world of Bertie Wooster and I found it hard to put down

I have to 'fess up that Cliff Mass (Atomospheric Sciences Professor at the University of Washington) is my go-to weather guy. (He is originally from NY and has a 'speak your mind' gene that does not go over well in the 'buttoned up' Nordic heritage of Seattle. He holds the distinction of being fired from a weekend weather spot on both of our NPR stations (first for railing against a math book change in our public schools and second for not following the 'sky is falling' regarding climate change.)

Now that I've said all that, I recommend his piece about grass fires on his weather blog - https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/

It seems there is much more than thinning forest trees, not building your home in wild areas, etc., when it comes to fires.

MK wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for the new thread G and have a good journey and a happy stay Scarletnoir.

Reading has been a bit slow this last week but I am working my way through [book:The Civil War..."

Thanks MK will check on those.

Last night I was so damned achy that I thought I might have a touch of the flu, but, never fear, a night's sleep and I am 'right as rain.' I think my muscles were rebelling against all the reshelving I did over the weekend.

Yes, I finally stained the FINAL bookcase and subsequently filled it with biographies. I still have a biography shelf leftover and a couple of empty shelves to fill in another bookcase which means more shifting in the future. My goal is to not have any books shoved in at the edges of shelves because there is NO ROOM. But I will have to split up shelf themes which I am still working on how to do.

In my backyard I have a number of cedar pieces destined for a new alley fence. If there are a few pieces left over, I'm thinking about asking for a "Little Free Library" by the sidewalk - as you can imagine, I could easily fill it. https://littlefreelibrary.org/

Thank you MK.
Glad pointed me in this direction last week and I did a little reading around but could not locate the article.
Those little octopuses are grape sized . There are 300 odd species, some only live for 6 months, the larger for maybe five years. Once the male delivers his sperm to the female he dies and the female follows suit once she has protected the eggs.
For intelligent creatures who have been around for such a long time i was sutprised by the short life spans.

If you haven't seen it, you might like the article and comments about short books:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

Fuzzywuzz wrote: "Gpfr wrote:Now I'm enjoying Kate Atkinson's latest: Shrines of Gaiety. London after WWI, nightclubs, drugs, corrupt police, girls running away from home ..."

I have this in my TBR pile, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts..."

Greenfairy (#16) says, "The Shrines of Gaiety is the flip side of the world of Bertie Wooster" and this is a good comment.
However, although it's extremely readable and I enjoyed it well enough, I didn't really care about any of the characters and ultimately I was disappointed. I think it's a let down considering that it's Kate Atkinson who has written such marvellous books with much more originality than this one.
The ending is very perfunctory — I won't say more as you have yet to read it.

Greenfairy wrote: "The Shrines of Gaiety is the flip side of the world of Bertie Wooster and I found it hard to put down"

As I said in my post below, I like your comment.
Not wanting to give any spoilers to Fuzzywuzz or anyone else who is going to read it, what is the deal with Florence?!

Fuzzywuzz wrote: "Hi folks,

I missed the opportunity to reply back to some of the messages from the last discussion blog. I hope you are all well and that body aches and maladies are not getting the better of us.
..."

Thanks... I do have some very odd dreams. They are often more like fables or short stories, and are very visual. Might be my half Irish genes perhaps? My dad was known as being a good 'raconteur' . Though hearing him tell these stories, throughout my childhood, I was aware that he embellished them somewhat, over time!...

However, although it's extremely readable and I enjoyed it well enough, I didn't really care about any of the characters and ultimately I was disappointed. I think it's a let down considering that it's Kate Atkinson who has written such marvellous books with much more originality than this one.
The ending is very perfunctory — I won't say more as you have yet to read it.

Hi Gpfr,
Thanks for this. I haven't read anything by Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety was a suggested bookclub read. I had read the blurb on the back and whilst I wasn't overly keen, I am trying to broaden my horizons somewhat and read something other that crime fiction.

I will still read Shrines of Gaiety, maybe just not yet :)

Tam wrote: Thanks... I do have some very odd dreams. They are often more like fables or short stories, and are very visual.

Wow, I'd love to have dreams like those. Bizarrely, most of my dreams feature work colleagues doing work stuff (very boring). This morning, I dreamt that I was with work colleagues, except I was in a classroom and I was crossing items off a paper list. What those items were, I have no idea now, as the memory has faded.

Not strictly book related but have watched two documentaries on Oppenheimer in the last 3 weeks (still havent seen the film)

One was on Sky Documentaries, was horribly biased, subjective and oddly reverential, it felt like something that Hollywood had sponsored and dissapointed me. The other was a BBC Storyville documentary, which was sharper, deeper and much more objective.

I have to say i have rarely come accross such a mannered, awkward and self important figure as Oppenheimer. It seems he could not speak without labouring his words and sounding portentous, at times i wondered if he was simply hamming for the cameras but no , this was who he was

Having read a book on the Fuchs situation in January Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History, its all fascinating and relevant to my 2023 reading.

AB76 wrote: "Not strictly book related but have watched two documentaries on Oppenheimer in the last 3 weeks (still havent seen the film)

One was on Sky Documentaries, was horribly biased, subjective and oddly..."

I have seen the film, but not read anything about Oppenheimer. Did you come to any strong impression about Fuchs. Someone said to me that it was the Americans, as the project developed, who wanted to keep Britain out of gaining their own ability of developing their own nuclear weapons, and that, when it became clear that the US was not looking at the UK as being, in any way, equal partners in their nuclear ambitions, that Britain was miffed, and not that concerned about Fuchs handing over stuff to the USSR. Do any of the books that you have read enlighten us on that particular point, I wonder?

Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Not strictly book related but have watched two documentaries on Oppenheimer in the last 3 weeks (still havent seen the film)

One was on Sky Documentaries, was horribly biased, subject..."

Certainly the Brits were a much bigger player in the atomic project up to around 1940-41. The author makes a point that after that the actual British(including exiled European scientists working for the UK) involvement was reduced more and more, so even if a good number of people at Los Alamos were british, they had less power and were consulted less and less

As regards Fuchs in particular, its quite amazing how shabby his security clearences were when he went to the USA. He was already involved with communist agents and of the idealistic bent that blinded him to what he was doing. Rather than the Brits not being that concerned, they seemed to have failed with the basics of joining the dots with the quiet, donnish and reclusive Fuchs. By the time they did, it was all too late really, they got Fuchs but he had done his damage

There are similarities in personality between Oppenheimer and Fuchs. While the former was far more important than the latter, and was not a refugee emigre, they were both awkward, shy and quiet men, who had affairs with women that compromised them. Of course Oppenheimer was no spy and Fuchs was.

In the book Close is brilliant with the slow build up to Fuchs treachery and the complex man he was. Naive in some ways, the damage he caused was immense. It amused me to see that J Edgar Hoover was furious he didnt get more vetting investigations into Fuchs , although in Hoovers defence, the Brits were shabby in passing on information to the Yanks

My lasting impression of Fuchs was a rather naive, shy, awkward genius, who like the Cambridge spies had a deep idealistic faith in the communist ideal. Unlike the spies, he was not a unlikeable character or a determined deciever, he seems to have been almost like a child amongst adults, staggering from situation to situation, without seeing the fuller picture. I wonder if any of these men, if they knew what communism in Stalinist form was really about would ever have behaved as they did. Blind faith is a dangerous thing if it causes other people harm, rather than being a private devotion

CCCubbon wrote: "Thank you MK.
Glad pointed me in this direction last week and I did a little reading around but could not locate the article.
Those little octopuses are grape sized . There are 300 odd species, som..."

Not much of a life span. But it got me interested in salmon as we are having a decent return through the Ballard Locks this year. There is a viewing room at the fish ladder. Sorry to say there is only a canned video on youtube. And their life span isn't so hot either.

Of course the irony is that the salmon going through the Locks end up at their home which is a hatchery in Issaquah - not that far from Seattle. Just wild-ish salmon.

Fuzzywuzz wrote: "I haven't read anything by Kate Atkinson ..."

I would recommend starting with one of her other books, her first Behind the Scenes at the Museum or Life After Life, for example.
And while they are still crime fiction, 😉, her series of crime novels featuring private investigator Jackson Brodie and starting with Case Histories, is excellent.

AB76 wrote: "Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Not strictly book related but have watched two documentaries on Oppenheimer in the last 3 weeks (still havent seen the film)

One was on Sky Documentaries, was horribly bia..."

Perhaps the Brits were running a 'slow horses' operation, in terms of distorting the facts that were known about Fuchs, in order to avenge the perceived slight of being edged out of the 'nuclear bomb' project?... 'Slow horses for slow courses'!...

Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Not strictly book related but have watched two documentaries on Oppenheimer in the last 3 weeks (still havent seen the film)

One was on Sky Documentaries, was..."

i like that theory!

World War one in Austro-Hungarian literature

The collapse of centuries long melding of various cultures, faiths and races between 1914 and 1918 was shocking and fast. The lamentable Austro-Hungarian military defeats to the Russians in August 1914 led to constant problems and confidence dented throughout the war. An empire that seemed united, was impossibly divided within 18 months and ceased to exist by the end of the war

I'm no expert on the weight of novels published in the wake of the war but i have always been tracking the number of translated novels and can highlight four of these to you all. The four novels all come from rather different backgrounds and languages but are essential reading to understand the situation in the empire as war descended.

The Good Soldier Svejk(1922 by Jaroslav Hasek )
This humorous but cutting Czech classic follows an everyman soldier and his plight, it is damning indictment of the flaws of the empire and the chaos of war. Czech humour is possibly the richest in the slav canon and this is a novel that deserves to be read.

The Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu (1922)
From Romania comes this novel of the same wartime period but a darker and more thoughtful, introspective read, based on the authors brothers experience in WW1. The Romanians in the empire, like the Czechs were fighting for more representation in Vienna, the war exposed the state of the army and its German-Hungarian domination

The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth (1932)
Possibly the most lyrical of the four novels and the most well known, this is a German language tale of families and their lives as the Imperial dream starts to fade. It is haunting as the novel drifts towards summer 1914 and the collapse of all that its people held dear. Roth was born in the border city of Brody, on the Russian frontier and served in WW1

The Salt of the Earth by Josef Wittlin (1935)
This novel is the one i am currently reading, written in Polish but focused on the Ruthene(aka Ukrainian) border people of Eastern Galicia and their experiences as war sweeps over them. Slow and understated, it is matching the other three as a great novel on so many levels. Wittlin was a friend of Joseph Roth's and grew up in the same borderland regions, serving in WW1

AB76 wrote: "World War one in Austro-Hungarian literature.."

As you know, I am happy to 'agree to disagree' with anyone, since we all have such different and diverse tastes... so without in any way expecting to change or influence your opinion, I'll just say that we differ on:

The Good Soldier Schweik - a one joke book of interminable length - and the joke isn't even funny to begin with. Full of dated attitudes. I was very disappointed by this 'classic' and gave up after 100 pages or so. I should have stopped sooner! And

The Radetzky March - this book opens with such a ludicrous description of derring-do on a battlefield, and is written in such an OTT style, that I assumed for a while that it was meant as a parody. But apparently not. I stopped reading when I realised...

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "World War one in Austro-Hungarian literature.."

As you know, I am happy to 'agree to disagree' with anyone, since we all have such different and diverse tastes... so without in any wa..."

interesting, we completely differ on these novels then hahaha!

maybe war novels arent your thing?

Svejk is so good, i just wish it had been longer!

Gpfr wrote: "If you haven't seen it, you might like the article and comments about short books:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202......"

Thanks for that link, GP. I think I would have missed it. What a trove of pleasure for winter evenings.

I’ve been trying the plays of Terence, who was a manumitted slave of African origin. He wrote six by the age of 25, at which point he left Rome and was never seen again. Each is essentially a one-act social comedy of 40-50 pages.

The plots are nicely complicated, with elements of the ludicrous, often arising from false or mistaken identities. There are no diverting sub-plots - he just gets on with the story. The individual scenes are well worked too, all of them set in a street somewhere in Athens, in front of a pair of houses, with the characters constantly going in and out.

The plays generally have one or two young men crossed in love, a discontented father, and a wily slave or servant acting and speaking above his station. Unusually, from a modern perspective, the characters often give their own lengthy expositions of what they have done, why they are here, and what their options are.

The plays are comedies in the sense that no one dies, and all ends happily, with a marriage, and I can imagine a well-directed performance getting good laughs from an audience. Some aspects which Roman audiences in 160 BC might have taken in their stride (exposure of new-borns, servant torture, street rape) do make for uncomfortable reading today.

Montaigne has a remark about the refinement and charm of Terence’s works, which is what interested me to explore them. “I cannot read him so often as not to find in him some new beauty and grace.” As regards style, these qualities must appear more in the Latin, because the translations I read (by Betty Radice), while impressively smooth and pleasant, were prosaically conversational. As for substance, there are indeed passages of mature reflection (e.g. on father-son relations, in The Brothers). For the most part, though, the action is taken up with the ins and outs of the plot. Deeper thoughts and nuances are not really to the fore.

The funniest and best of the six, as a play, was Phormio, a classic of impudence.

Almost finished the superb WW1 novel The Salt of the Earth , the pace of this novel is wonderfully slow and the real war is always distant.

Wittlin, of Jewish descent but a Catholic convert in later life, focuses on the people and the movements behind the lines in this novel, centering around the path of a young Ukrainian towards recruitment into the Emperors army.

One gets a feel for the regions that Wittlin sets the novel in and the unsettling experiences for many in the far east of the empire as the Russians invade Galicia. Humour is a strong feature of the novel alongside a pacifist message and the horror of what WW1 was about to do to so many lives in August 1914

It seems Wittlin planned this as a series of novels but the mansuscripts for the later novels were lost as he got caught up in a greater calamity in 1940, escaping the German invasion of France. Wittlin served in WW1 and was from Eastern Galicia, which is now Western Ukraine but he wrote in Polish and identified as Polish

Just finished The Salt of the Earth best book i have read in last five years, so consistent over 300 pages

Next up is my first return to the three great DH Lawrence novels of the 1913-19 period, of which i loathed as a student, rebelling against the reverence shown by teachers and lecturers

Sons and Lovers may be a very different read for me at 47, rather than 17 and i remember very little which helps. I am intrigued by it and keen to persevere if i find it not to my taste, after the brilliant Wittlin novel it may be a comedown, lets see

On another note, its been very quiet in here indeed over last 2-3 weeks, hope everyone is ok?

summer holidays have quietened things down I think AB

The previous link I posted to the article on short books no longer works, and it's no longer tucked away under More Books. A search gave this link:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

I haven’t been posting because, since finishing The Faerie Queene, I’ve fallen back into devoting most of my time to musical pursuits, reading two books by Richard Taruskin and four by Robert Craft.

I really like the sharp-tongued but witty Taruskin, and wish that there were more critics like him in the arts, ever ready to take a hammer to conventional wisdom (not as an iconoclast, but rather in the Nietzschean, Twilight of the Idols, sense of tapping them to hear whether they are hollow). After finishing the two books I trawled through the JSTOR archives for more articles by Taruskin and found a number of them, including two that gave me particular delight: “Resisting the Ninth” and “Liszt and Bad Taste”.

I’ve kept a list of recordings Taruskin commented on in various articles and have been revisiting them over the past weeks as a result of his comments.
https://www.discogs.com/lists/CDs-rev...

For those who are not familiar, JSTOR is a large collection of archived academic journals. If you sign up with them, you can get to read up to 100 articles a month at no charge.
https://www.jstor.org/

Finally, on the musical / literary front, here’s a gift article of Michael Dirda’s latest, a review of Schoenberg: Why He Matters, a rather surprising title to come from Harvey Sachs, biographer (or is it hagiographer ?) of Toscanini. (Taruskin reviewed his Music in Fascist Italy),

Notoriously irritable and utterly convinced of his supreme artistic genius, Schoenberg responded to such criticism with disdain or his own verbal counterpunch. A well-known conductor once admitted that he couldn’t conduct the Austrian’s music because he simply didn’t understand it, to which the composer answered acidly: “I do not understand why you have to be truthful only where my music is concerned. After all, you perform the classics without understanding them.”

In the 1920s, Schoenberg’s atonality grew even more radical, as he began to evolve a new system of composition: Sachs spends several pages patiently explaining how 12-tone music works, but I suspect you need to be a musician to truly understand it. In effect, though, its laws lead to the further abandonment of sonority and all the pleasing pattern-making and expected cadences of older music. Schoenberg’s “Cello Concerto” (composed in 1932-1933) proved so forbidding that Pablo Casals refused to perform it — even though he was its dedicatee. Jascha Heifetz insisted that one would need a sixth finger just to attempt the “Violin Concerto” (1936). To play that piece, Hilary Hahn spent two years preparing for her fabulous 2008 recording of this weirdly fabulous music.

https://wapo.st/3OZr15d

Like John Adams’ earlier review in the NY Times, Dirda’s piece says a lot more about Schoenberg’s biography and reputation than it does about Sachs’ book, about which I haven’t yet gotten enough information to decide whether I want to seek it out.

Greenfairy wrote: "summer holidays have quietened things down I think AB"

i guess so, though expected that more at the beginning and middle of August, not the last 10 days, interesting.

Greenfairy wrote: "summer holidays have quietened things down I think AB"

I, for one, am at the library as my internet has gone on holiday and won't return until the Tech comes next Thursday. I like at library because there are PCs with decent-sized screens.

Meanwhile, I've just finished the British Library reissue of Crook o' Lune: A Lancashire Mystery. I recommend it - in hindsight there were lots of author hints that I completely missed.

On the non-fiction front it's Eric Ambler's autobiography Here Lies: Eric Ambler. While not far into it, I am enjoying so far. More on that later.

I am also happy to report that I continue reshelving. It's a piecemeal operation as my back complains if I get too ambitious. I doubt there will be much in the way of empty spaces when I am done, but there should be no books pushed in at shelf ends due to lack of room.

By the way, I did last one whole month without buying a book. However, Better World has a sale on through our holiday Monday, so I plan on emptying my basket.

MK wrote: "On the non-fiction front it's Eric Ambler's autobiography Here Lies: Eric Ambler. While not far into it, I am enjoying so far. More on that later."

I haven't read the Ambler, but think Here Lies is one of the great memoir / autobiography titles, along with Lord Berners' First Childhood.

Bill wrote: "...Finally, on the musical / literary front, here’s a gift article of Michael Dirda’s latest, a review of Schoenberg: Why He Matters ..."

Thanks for that link. I went and hunted out the Hilary Hahn recording of the Violin Concerto. It is very strangely beautiful.

Au Bon Beurre: Scènes de la vie sous l’occupation – Jean Dutourd (trans. as Vi>The Best Butter)

A lively and horribly plausible picture of what it must have been like among the defeated French. There are two poles to the broad narrative. At one end, the husband-and-wife owners of a crêmerie in the 17e make their lives comfortable. They adulterate the milk and butter they sell over the counter to those who only have ration tickets, they do a roaring trade with those who have the money to buy quality products under the counter, and themselves eat like kings. They are barely conscious that what they do is wrong (we’re in business and this is what people in business do), never mind dangerously illegal. At the other end, there is a penniless young escaped soldier who is patriotically anti-Pétain and who in his wanderings comes into contact with some of a like mind, including an iron-hard member of the CP. Other strong characters fill out the tableau. The varying fates of the good-hearted and the heartless make for an all too believable coda.

A rewarding recommendation from Robert, thank you.

Russell wrote: "Au Bon Beurre: Scènes de la vie sous l’occupation – Jean Dutourd (trans. as Vi>The Best Butter)

A lively and horribly plausible picture of what it must have been like among the defeated French. Th..."

A wide variety of types. Glad you liked it. I appreciated your good summary of the story.

Does anyone know a novel about the Spanish Civil War called The Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas (2001)? It is mentioned with strong approval at the end of the Very Short Introduction to the War by Helen Graham. Bloomsbury brought out an English translation in 2003. She contrasts it with a piece of Francoist propaganda called The Myths of the Civil War by Pio Moa (2003), of which she strongly disapproves. Apparently the Moa was a huge commercial success but even so was massively outsold by the Cercas.