h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't bothered with anything past the fourth HP book. But one of the reasons I don't like them is that JK Rowling is so damn rich .

Yes, but by that logic, you'd never buy a Robbie Willams album...ah. Fair enough.

I cant not read them! I just want book 7 to come out so i can read the finish of it

I know the feeling! I can't wait for the last HP book to come out just so that I can read it, and then everyone can stop going on about it!!

I've given up on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, for the fourth time! Far too many abstract coincidences!!

So I'm reading Bill Bryson's Notes from A Big Country, much more fun and interesting.

L x

Ulysses is a doddle. It's Finnegans Wake you have to worry about. The darned thing remains totally unread on the shelf, smug and confident in the knowledge that it has me well and truly beaten!

Finnegan's Wake:

...shall I tell you how it ends? (Or begins?)

From the Introduction:
The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable...


Actually I suppose it is worth the effort and even if it drives me bonkers I shall doubtless have a go at it one of these fine bogtrotting Irish days - it certainly tempts me with its 'moggies' duggies', its 'festering rubbages' and all its 'rotten witchawubbles'.

For me the HP series generally gets better as it goes along. The plots get darker and the boundaries between good guys and bad guys blur. They may get very long, but there's not many bits that I would like to dump.

Anthony Burgess wrote a companion to Finnegan's Wake ('Re: Joyce').

And called Ulysseus "the greatest novel of the century". Obviously a fan!

I found "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" hard enough going so "Ulysses" remains unread on my shelf (anyhow, I watched the cartoon version in the 80s! ) Shouldn't it be "Finnegans Wake"? I thought the point was that the lack of an apostrophe made it unclear as to the meaning of the title. Or have I watched too much Jonathan Creek?

This week, I have been mostly reading "The Confidential Agent" by Graham Greene.

Now reading La Morte D'Arther by Sir Thomas Mallory, a translation in modern idiom. I forget the name of the translator, but the idiom is actually slightly old-fashioned, which proably benefits the text. I've always had some idea of Arthurian legend, but this is the first I've properly read of it, except for one of Gerald Morris's Squire's Tales (the one about Gawain and the Green Knight), which was pretty good, but a deliberate rewriting to show events in a different like.

Goodness! What a coincidence! I'm on the verge of compiling a list of my 'waiting to be read' books, and 'The Confidential Agent' will be on it. (Mind, I have to find them all first). I've read all the usual Greenes and some others besides. I'm a major fan.

'Portrait...' I rather like. I was captivated by the first page and a half which echoes the acquisition of speech in childhood. Dodie Smith pays tribute in Mortmain's experimental novel in 'I Capture The Castle'.

My 'Waiting To Be Read' pile grew this weekend, due to a library sale. I pounced on one particular book which is about an American woman who worked for 'die Rote Kapelle' (the Red Orchestra), the wartime German socialist resistance. (The Red Orchestra was the name the Gestapo gave to what they didn't realise was two separate organisations. One was a small KGB unit. The other was a much larger underground of communists, socialists and trade unionists). Sorry - I'm going on. The German Resistance is one of my Specialist Subjects.

My first post

Reading a history on the spanish civil war and a biography on Marx, Harpo that is. Tried reading Morte de Arthur by Malory but was a but too long winded for me. May go back to it some time

Glad I got that over with

Grapes of Wrath doesn't really have a conclusion, does it? It just stops. Perhaps I should read it again. It was some time ago.

I flitched The Amulet of Samarkand, the first of Jonathon Strood's Bartimaeus trilogy, from a friend's shelves. It's a kids book, but excellent reading. It has a wonderful contrast of styles between the third-person narration of the Nathaniel sections and the cynical but witty first-person account of the Bartimaeus sections. I want to read the next two now.

I've taken to buying books again. I picked up Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and the first of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency for a euro each in a charity shop, Torn Water by John Lynch in a bookshop (just browsing, and it appealed), and three books (Come home, Robbie, by Michael G. Casey, This Is Not a Novel, by Jennifer Johnston, and Man and Boy, by Tony Parsons) in the secondhand section of another bookshop.

Of that lot, I've so far read only Good Omens (excellent, naturally) and most of Robbie, which is about a teenager and a mind-control sect.

TRiG.

Hi Aurora. Arthur Ransome has to be one of my all-time favourite authors. I have no idea how many times I've reread his books.

TRiG.

I'm just starting the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett

I read a few Greene books and really liked them. Last year, my brother-in-law gave me an almost complete set of GG paperbacks so I've started to read them in order. Am also (like you, Edward the Bonobo) a big fan.

Normally, I have a reading list with a target of 52 books a year (somewhat arbitrary but the original idea, several years back, was to average one a week). This year, most of my reading has involved health & social care because I've started an OU degree but, because I can't give up fiction, I'm mostly reading 'shorter' books.

So loads of Agatha Christie, Greene, Steinbeck, (will re-read Harry Potter series before July 21st), Simenon, Fleming, Shakespeare, the odd play and I have an unread Edmund Crispin that is burning a hole on my shelf! Am sad to miss out on Hardy this year (had Return of the Native pencilled in) but I get 'time off' Oct-Dec, so you never know.

Just so that I can 'keep to the thread', Robert Graves' Greek Myths vol 1 is now my 'toilet book'

P.S. The Grapes of Wrath does kinda stop abruptly but it does have one of the most moving endings in literature.

Morte Darthur is worth persevering with, as is Don Quixote.