What's with today, today?

I said in my previous post that I didn't understand E.M. Forster's books, and that's not entirely true. In fact, I found A Room With a View quite accessible, and really in many ways a straight-forward story. But I felt, as I did with Howards End , that I wasn't quite sure what he was getting at, that somehow Forster and I do not exactly get along. The Man Who Was Thursday , by G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, is quite straight-forwardly puzzling, starting, as it does, as a thriller, and progressing to farce, before unexpectedly turning into a religious allegory. I'm not really sure where to go with that, so I'll review A Room With A View instead, and hopefully get some thoughts in order. I'd love to hear what other people thought as well, and whether I should be so flummoxed. I'd like to talk about the ending too, so be warned! Unfortunately I left this a bit late to write, and late night blog posts are not my most considered blog posts. But it'...

Since I don't read much from the 1900s usually I thought I should make a list of options to make sure I found something to read, but then I couldn't choose so I read three (unfortunately two ended up being from the same year): The Man of Property by John Galsworthy (1906) The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton (1908) A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908) Basically I decided to use this challenge as an excuse to read some of the books I've been meaning to read for a long time but haven't gotten around to. It's taken me a while to get around to blogging about them because I just wasn't sure what to say. I said to a friend the other day that I used to judge whether books were good or not by whether I could understand them. If I had no idea what a book was about by the end of it, it must be very high literature indeed. By this token The Man Who Was Thursday is incredible, and E.M. Forster should be my favourite writer. On the other hand, reading Th...

Last year I wrote about reading The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, and how relevant it felt reading about Egypt's history in light of the Tahrir Square demonstrations and the revolution that was happening. I wondered how Ahdaf Soueif would feel about it, and whether she would write her book differently if she was writing today. Well, apparently she's written a new book about the revolution in Cairo (in which she was involved), and there are what I think are extracts from that book in the Guardian here . It's a very personal account of Egypt and revolution, interesting to read as Egypt's new Government holds its inaugral session , although the extracts end before the elections. And my reading around the world posts will come soon! I hope.