never growing older, never growing wiser

Deeply enjoying the pace and prose of David Copperfield, this is a favourite....


To live among the trees, never growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand in hand through sunshine and among flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night.


Such beautiful imagery, so richly evocative.

Progress

I am enjoying Dickens's David Copperfield so much more than expected it's witty, beautiful & moving 

200th Birthday Celebrations

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.  This morning I finished reading The Catcher In The Rye, and instead of rolling a dice or sticking a pin into the list to choose the next book I decided to read the first Dickens book on the list I that came across, to honour his birthday.


And the first book I discovered as I perused the list was David Copperfield, so the decision has been made, this is the next book for me to explore and discover on my voyage through the greatest literature in the canon.

Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. 


Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them."


"The most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
--Virginia Woolf

Fan fiction

I read this interesting thing about the Catcher in The Rye recently. 


In 2009 author J D Salinger successfully sued to stop the U.S. publication of a novel that presents Holden Caulfield as an old man.


The novel's author, Fredrik Colting, commented, "call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books." 


The issue is complicated by the nature of Colting's book, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which has been compared to fan fiction. Although commonly not authorized by writers, no legal action is usually taken against fan fiction since it is rarely published commercially and thus involves no profit. Colting, however, has published his book commercially. Unauthorized fan fiction on The Catcher in the Rye existed on the Internet for years without any legal action taken by Salinger before his death.

The necessary society of clever women

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women."”  


Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Book I, Chapter IV

Kicking off with Tolstoy

Time to start the fun bit - working down the list.  I thought I would start with a big one, an epic, to get the ball rolling.


Following the maxim "go large, or go home" I decided to kick off with Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'.


I already have a copy of the book, but it is currently in a cardboard box along with everything else in my bookshelf, as we bought a house in June and we move house in 2 days time.  I realise that I may not have mountains of free time for reading and bubble baths (my absolute favourite place to unwind with a good book) in the foreseeable future, so I have also made use of my audible account to buy the unabridged audiobook too, narrated by Frederick Davidson and published by Blackstone Audio Inc.  The translation of this version is by Louise and Aylmer Maude.  I know that there is always furious debate about which translations give the most authentic interpretation of Tolstoy's own nuances and connotations, so I will use my book (when it get's unpacked) as a cross reference for my own benefit.


The audiobook weighs in at 10 mins shy of 61 hours of listening time, so this should keep me occupied in the coming weeks as I pack up my life into boxes, clean the rented house from top to bottom, make umpteen trips back and forth between my old place and the new place (40 minutes in the car each way).


I will be starting tonight as I cook, I will dock my ipod n the kitchen and get started on the journey into Tolstoy's story about the French invasion of Russia in the 1800's and effect that the Napoleonic era had on Tsarist Russian society.  Really looking forward to it!

The Lit List

My Book List so far....

1.    Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

2.    Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier

3.    Iliad – Homer

4.    War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

5.    Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

6.    1984 – George Orwell

7.    Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

8.    Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

9.    Lord Of The Flies  - William Golding

10. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

11. Tess of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

12. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

13. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

15. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

16. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  - Philip K. Dick

18. Murders In The Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe

19. Middlemarch – George Elliot

20. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

21. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

23. The Time Machine – HG Wells

24. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

25. Foundation – Isaac Asimov

26. Ulysses – James Joyce

27. Paradise Lost – Milton

28. The Pearl – John Steinbeck

29. Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne

30. I Claudius – Robert Graves

31. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

32. East Of Eden - John Steinbeck

33. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

34. Odyssey – Homer

35. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

36. Diceman - George Cockcroft

37. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Berniéres

39. Persuasion – Jane Austen

40. Animal Farm – George Orwell

41. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

42. Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

43. Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

44. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré

45. Neuromancer – William Gibson

46. A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

47. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

48. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

49. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

50. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee

51. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
52. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
53. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald