What are you reading now?

[Pulcinella]

This author, pianist, and retired (English) teacher has just finished Our Mutual Friend, and found it a much, much better novel than he first thought!

We have nicknamed the region under the pergola Boffin's Bower!

[cria]

No Free Parking (Boys Smith). The curious history of London's Monopoly streets. R Morrison enjoyed it, so did I.Wd suit Vinty

[Tevot]

"Of Ants and Dinosaurs" by Liu Cixin. Just started it yesterday - it is a brief book. a novella essentially. Strange, quirky with elements of jet black humour.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15159960-of-ants-and-dinosaurs

[smittims]

And yesterday on 'Woman's Hour ' I was told some MPs had 'authored' a letter to the Prime Minister.

[Bryn]

Not read by me, as yet, but this looks to be of interest:

https://www.routledge.com/Aural-Diversity/Drever-Hugill/p/book/9781032024998

[jayne lee wilson]

Still enthralled by Kenneth Hamilton's book on Romantic Pianists and Modern Performance, how concepts of the solo recital developed and changed through the centuries... very insightful about audience behaviour too....

The best thing to come out of the Chopin BaL for me, discovered by chance looking up the reviewer...Terrific read!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0195178262?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

[Master Jacques]

Just finished 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes', Angus Wilson (1956). I thought it was marvellous but, considering the central character is a medieval historian, I was probably pre-disposed to enjoy this work. Read 'Hemlock and After' (his first novel, 1953) a few months ago and enjoyed that, so will keep an eye out for his others as I had never read anything of his previously.

Curiously, my wife and I have just finished Anglo-Saxon Attitudes as our bedtime reading. I was revisiting it after about fifty years, and was charmed anew by Wilson's humour, sourness and perspicacity. It's sad that his considerable body of novels is now more or less forgotten, and I was very glad to read that we're not alone in finding it so vital and enjoyable. (As somebody currently shepherding a large team of academics, for a substantial music history, I had fellow-feeling for Wilson's central character, doing likewise while coping with the egos of his dysfunctional family!)

We've slated his Late Call for future reading, and I'm looking forward to revisiting that one also.

[french frank]

It's sad that his considerable body of novels is now more or less forgotten, and I was very glad to read that we're not alone in finding it so vital and enjoyable.

We might have had a thread about this? Wilson perhaps is the post war generation of writers (Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Bradbury would be others) who join people like (substantially/transitionally) pre-war novelists as JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham: much read for a generation, then the new generation takes over.

[smittims]

Yes, and O Henry and Hugh Walpole. Much depends on availablility in print. I became a CP Snow fan after hearing Radio 4 broadcasts of his novels, but could find none in print. I've since assembled a collection from second-hand and charity shops. Vita Sackville-West and Edith Wharton are others: Out of print for years, then a film or Radio 4 adaptation brings them back into fashion.

[french frank]

I became a CP Snow fan after hearing Radio 4 broadcasts of his novels, but could find none in print.

I bought the Penguin editions about the time of the BBC's Strangers and Brothers. Snow missed out as a novelist who became widely 'well thought of' in his time; in fact he was pretty much slated by many of the critics. I found all the novels I read interesting and readable, especially The Conscience of the Rich. But I think he may have missed the bus for any kind of reevaluation.

I'm not sure what people are reading now that come into the category of widely read literary fiction: Ishiguro, certainly, Ian McEwan. That maybe even skips a 'generation'. What was there in the 1990s?

[smittims]

I can't say as I've always had a problem with modern (20th cent.) novels, apart from a few writers who appeal to me such as Patrick Hamilton and , more recently, Julian Barnes and, when I'm in the mod for him, Mordecai Richler.

I looked for a long time to find a 20th-cent. equivalent of 'literature', e.g. Trollope, Thackeray, Austen, but those on offer I found uninteresting to me. So I'm content to spend my remaining years re-reading evergreen favourites.

[Padraig]

I looked for a long time to find a 20th-cent. equivalent of 'literature', e.g. Trollope, Thackeray, Austen, but those on offer I found uninteresting to me. So I'm content to spend my remaining years re-reading evergreen favourites.

smittims, talking of evergreen favourites, my next novel will be Bleak House (again), as recommended by Donna Tartt. I am reading her novel The Goldfinch currently, discussed recently in this thread. In your quest for 'modern' writers may I suggest Tartt's trilogy, for her Dickension approach where ' she pulls all her remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the impressive stay-up-all night pleasure of reading'. I would add that I don't stay up all night because I prefer the 'wish-it-would-never-end' quality of her writing.

[HighlandDougie]

Alan Hollinghurst, for one, springs to mind. The Angus Wilson de ses jours. Graham Swift? Colm Toíbín. David Mitchell is 2000's so doesn't count.

[french frank]

Alan Hollinghurst, for one, springs to mind. The Angus Wilson de ses jours. Graham Swift? Colm Toíbín. David Mitchell is 2000's so doesn't count.

Looks as if I might have given up on novels at some point as those names mean little (as in 'I have heard of them') to me. Thinking of the legacy of Austen, Eliot and the Brontes I did have a blitz on women novelists a few years ago, but without checking on their dates I'm not sure where they fit in: Iris Murdoch, Edna O'Brien, Brigid Brophy, Susan Hill?

[HighlandDougie]

I'm not often taken aback but I am just a touch shocked! On women writers, I would add Doris Lessing (and probably subtract Susan Hill). And what about Hilary Mantel? Not the Thomas Cromwell trilogy but her oeuvre before that. George Eliot would, I'm sure, have approved.