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rocker
Old Love
USA
3606 Posts |
 Posted - 10/01/2009 : 17:59:28
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Right now, I'm into "Quarrel With the King". A look at a family's relationship with power and loyalty to the King of England through the centuries. Now I know why you guys over in England had a Civil War!.... ..have to say you guys have some great history... |
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bob f.
Old Love
USA
1308 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 23:57:32
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right now, we still have King George for a few more days!
and not to mention the Illuminati and cival war and dark days ahead, and so i won't mention that stuff.
"THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE" is a very entertaining movie from 1994.
oscar winner for art direction, about 18th century England's benevolent King George ( Nigel Hawthorne), with Helen Mirren !
...what the world needs now... |
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bob f.
Old Love
USA
1308 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 23:59:48
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i apologise for my movie review on a book topic page. i erred.
...what the world needs now... |
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John9
Old Love
United Kingdom
2154 Posts |
Posted - 11/01/2009 : 12:34:45
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Hi Rocker - yes the Civil War is a defining moment in our history. It was the time when the sovereignty of Parliament was asserted for the first time....and even today, the House of Commons is the one part of her realm in which Her Majesty is not allowed to set foot. John Locke (who was claimed as an ancestor by Spirit's keyboardist of the same name) was inspired by what had happened to devise, by about 1690, the idea of the separation of the powers - which of course had such an influence on the Founding Fathers who gathered in Philadelphia nearly a century later. There has recently concluded over here an excellent Civil War TV drama series entitled The Devil's Whore.
Just at present, I'm still making why way through Barbara Vine's recent The Birthday Present - a fictional but highly plausible story of a sexual scandal near the heart of the 1990s Conservative government.......but of course we don't have anything like that now! |
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lemonade kid
Old Love
USA
9876 Posts |
Posted - 11/01/2009 : 19:28:10
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Soon will revisit Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America.......a little bit of parody, black comedy, satire and Zen Buddhism. An fine and enjoyable read. A true Hippie in the best sense of the word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan#Novels_and_novellas
After that.... Peter S. Beagle's A Fine and Private Place...a modern classic written by a 19 year old Peter S. Quite an important book on many levels...fantasy, ghost story, love story, affirmation of life, an outcast & cemetery caretaker and a talking raven.
After that, maybe The Last Unicorn.
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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. ---- William Saroyan |
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rocker
Old Love
USA
3606 Posts |
Posted - 12/01/2009 : 18:05:06
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john...I don't know why but I find your Civil war fascinating.May have something to do with two "houses" trying to get over on each other for big stakes. Now Charles I gets my imagination. After seeing "To Kill a King", I then went to the books on the era. If there was anybody who stood up for what he thought was "right", er divine right, it was Charles. His concept of kingship was immutable and for that he literally lost his head. What i find also intriguing was the revenge that his son got on all those who signed his death warrant. Man, they tracked everyone down and believe me you don't want to know what they did to them.
lk...I think Brautigan's book was one in my English class back when....In between The Brothers Karamazov, Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5...etc etc..And I remember one of my professors going knee deep into Eliot's Wasteland, heck I even remember some of the stuff...
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rocker
Old Love
USA
3606 Posts |
Posted - 12/01/2009 : 18:06:43
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hey bob..now that's a film I think I need to see!...
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boombox
Old Love
United Kingdom
548 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 14:25:59
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Just resurrecting this one, especially as many of us may have had books for Christmas.
Been reading Gong Dreaming Vols 1 & 2 by Daevid Allen. Vol 1, covering the Trio and Soft machine years was interesting: where might the Softs have gone, but for b****y immigration banning the Alien from entering Blighty? They might have stayed an interesting band, rather than disappearing up their own proverbials in the 70s. Am three quarters of the way through Vol 2 and Tim Blake is being a disruptive plonker and Daevid has given up dope (shock horror!). Until I read this, I have never really thought about just how many drummers Gong went through - Spinal Tap eat your heart out. |
Edited by - boombox on 04/01/2010 14:26:36 |
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caryne
Old Love
United Kingdom
1520 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 15:00:22
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I read, just before Xmas, 'Leviathan' by Philip Hoare, a non-fiction book about the authors fascination with whales, it's really a very interesting book and one I'd recommend.
I didn't get any books for Xmas but, with some Xmas money, I've just purchased, from Amazon's sale, Bunny Munro by Nick Cave and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, both very different but both very much look forward to when they arrive. |
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lemonade kid
Old Love
USA
9876 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 16:45:21
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E.R.Eddison's masterworks--all four books..."The Worm Ouroboros", "Mistress of Mistresses",
"A Fish Dinner In Memison", and "The Mezentian Gate".
Again... First read them back in 1968-69.
ANYONE else read these? Rivals Tolkien in pure imagination
and scope.
... comparisons are fruitless, beyond the fact they are in the
"adult fantasy" genre...though, I've always felt that
description greatly diminishes their merit and literary importance.
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Everybody's got something to hide 'cept for me and my monkey. |
Edited by - lemonade kid on 04/01/2010 16:52:37 |
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John9
Old Love
United Kingdom
2154 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 16:51:45
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| Yes, I also have got hold of Wolf Hall....I've always had a kind of longing for the Tudor period. But I'm a painfuly slow reader of novels......I'm still trying to finish The Solitude of Prime Numbers which I started back in June! I've also invested in Robert Harris's latest Roman political epic, Lustrum as well as John le Carre's The Honorable Schoolboy......Heaven only knows when I'm going to get round to reading them all. |
Edited by - John9 on 04/01/2010 16:54:10 |
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rocker
Old Love
USA
3606 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 17:18:54
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lk ...Eddison and Tolkien...pretty good works there of the imagination by them..I read them too at the time and there are plenty of scenes stuck in my memory..
So for readers of Wolf Hall? How's the novel? May pick it up. Heard it's done very well and won the prestigious Booker prize.
For Xmas, I wanted and and got "The Fires Of Vesuvius" and "Every Man Dies Alone", the first a historian's take on Pompeii and the other a novel about what it meant to live in the Reich as the Nazis gained power. I also will get the "Vatican's Secret Archives" which shows the major collection the Vatican has on important historical documents that have never been published at all. History coming out of the dark!...
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caryne
Old Love
United Kingdom
1520 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 18:00:31
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I'll let you know what I think when I've read 'Wolf Hall', it's an interesting period of history but, so I've read, the novel is full of historical inaccuracies which is a bit of a pity. It did win the Booker prize and, for the first time in ages, when the finalists were announced I'd already read two of them, The Children's Book by A S Byatt and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Both these authors are real favourites of mine and both books make 'unputdownable' reading.
As for Eddison, I know it but find it a bit over-written and dense to enjoy. The 'Jacobean' style prose isn't exactly my cup of tea either. In that genre Tolkien is the master, imo. |
Edited by - caryne on 04/01/2010 23:15:01 |
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lemonade kid
Old Love
USA
9876 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2010 : 22:31:20
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quote:
Originally posted by caryne
I'll let you know what I think when I've read 'Wolf Hall', it's an interesting period of history but, so I've read, the novel is full of historical inaccuracies which is a bit of a pity. It did win the Booker prize and, for the first time in ages, when the finalists were announced I'd already read two of them, The Children's Book by A S Byatt and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Both these authors are real favourites of mine and both books make 'unputdownable' reading.
As for Eddison, I know if but find it a bit over-written and dense to enjoy. The 'Jacobean' style prose isn't exactly my cup of tea either. In that genre Tolkien is the master, imo.
I now skim over the long descriptions of palaces etc, but find the amazing imagery and adventure to be unparalleled.
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Everybody's got something to hide 'cept for me and my monkey. |
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Martin Pravda
Fourth Love
United Kingdom
104 Posts |
Posted - 05/01/2010 : 00:00:52
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I got Paul Drummond's "Eye Mind: the saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators" for christmas, looks good!
Just scroled up to some old posts, Richard Braughtigan is one of my all time favorite writers, and Trout Fishing is one of my favorite books. I find it quite rare to find people have read it, but shouldn't be too suprised that someone has from here  Similar ish sort of scene to Love after all!
I'm mainly having to read loads of W.H.Auden biographies at the moment for my dissertation...which is great, but starting to get a little repetitive after the third... |
Edited by - Martin Pravda on 05/01/2010 00:03:54 |
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rocker
Old Love
USA
3606 Posts |
Posted - 05/01/2010 : 15:10:30
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| Martin..I'd like to ask what's your "dissert" on ? |
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Like movies, let's share your reading......
