What's with today, today?

Slowly slowly working on my reading challenge this year- reading more books written before the 20th century. It looks like we're slowly going further back in time, from the 19th Century (The Moonstone) to the 18th, with The Castle of Otranto  by Horace Walpole, and sticking with genre fiction so far, from the detective story to the Gothic. As The Moonstone  is known as one of the earliest examples of detective fiction, so The Castle of Otranto is an early Gothic novel. And how! A brief summary: the prince of Otranto (Manfred) is obsessed with carrying on the male line, and when his son dies unexpectedly just before his wedding to Isabella, best friend of Manfred's daughter Matilda, this obsession grows, as he tries to avoid the family curse. He is clearly concealing a family secret, and is horrified at the giant coat of armour which appears to haunt the library. I thought what would stand out about this book is its part in the history of the Gothic, but what really stood out...

Just some rambling thoughts on fairy tales and folk ballads today! I recently found some great fairytale related links- so I thought I would share them with the internet. They are all from D.L. Ashliman at the University of Pittsburgh, and you could get lost for ages wandering through them. Among other things you can find in this linked set of pages are a directory of tale types, comparisons of different editions of Grimm (for selected fairy tales) and links to other folk- and fairy-tale sites. Here are the pages: Directory of folktales Links and overview Brothers Grimm  Recently though I've been most interested in the story of Tam Lin, which has gotten me interested in other Scottish ballads (or other British ballads generally as well). There's an online version of the Child Ballads  which is interesting, since Child collected some variants of common ballads as well, and I've had a look at some of the versions of Tam Lin, which is interesting. I love Tam Lin, but I...

The other day at work I was telling a co-worker that I didn't have anything to read, and asked her to recommend me something. "What do you like?" she asked. I answered "Literary fiction, like A.S. Byatt, crime, like murder mysteries, and fantasy, like Kate Griffin..." And from there we got to urban fantasy (but not paranormal romance), and all the genres, sub-genres and genre traits that appeal or repel. It is like a secret handshake, finding someone else who enjoys the same genre as you do. Saying you like reading fantasy can be like asking someone to condescend to you or adopt an air of puzzlement, but being able to talk about the fantasy genre brings an air of freedom. Here, you think, is someone who understands! But this is not always so. After all, there is that multitude of subgenres and other preferences to face. There are large gaps in my knowledge of genre that could encompass someone's entire favourite reading matter- talking about genre is not alw...

Regular readers of this blog (if such an irregular blog can be said to have regular readers) may know that I am a big fan of A.S. Byatt- I've loved her books ever since I read Possession at the end of high school. Despite this, there are still a lot of her books that I haven't read, and I just recently read her first book, The Shadow of the Sun . The Shadow of the Sun is about a young girl, Anna, in her late teenage years and trying to figure out what she should be, while at the same time feeling overshadowed by her father, a famous author. Enter Oliver, a family friend and academic, who agrees to tutor Anna to help her get into university, and becomes increasingly convinced she needs to decide what she should do with her life, and that he knows best what that is. When Anna successfully gets into Cambridge she continues to (somewhat listlessly) wonder about her purpose in life. Eventually she runs into Oliver again and, almost accidentally, they start an affair. Image from ...

Today I was struck by a post over at a gallimaufry about reading things set in unfamiliar places- and how to visualise them- I wonder whether we can familiarise ourselves with different cultures by reading about them, or will we always miss something when we read about things we don't already know? Like when we figure out the meaning of words from their contexts, but sometimes find out years later that we've gotten them wrong (at least, I have done that). Then I came across this post on facebook, which is a piece of writing memories of childhood in South India, and I was reminded of that idea again. Because in the piece I can recognise the nostalgia, even if I can't recognise the things the writer is nostalgic for. This feeds into a lot of different ideas I guess, like the concept of the other, or maybe the subjectiveness of language and meaning sometimes, but I just thought maybe it was some interesting food for thought.

I've been reading Book Lust by Nancy Pearl recently and loving it- it's a collection of lists of books on different topics and to suit different moods put together by a booklover and librarian, and though it seems like an ideal book to dip in and out of I've pretty much been reading it cover to cover (it's helping with a small lack of reading inspiration as well). In the introduction she says: I love to read. And while I may not absolutely agree with the Anglo-American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith, who said, "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading," I come awfully close to subscribing to his sentiment. I was struck by this, and her dedication to her granddaughter "who I hope grows up loving to read, but not too much." It reminds me of the time a friend in high school told me that some day I would have to stop reading and start living. Of course, I immediately dismissed this, because isn't reading part of living (a vital...

The first word I can remember reading was in a fairy tale, and folk and fairy tales have long had a fascination for me. When I was growing up (or when I was a teenager even) we had a collection of books at home by Ruth Manning Sanders ( A Book of Dragons , A Book of Sorcerers and Spells  etc.) which rekindled that interest after fairy tales had become overly familiar and a little bit boring. These books had a selection of fairy tales from around the world on a specific theme (dragons or sorcerers for instance), which meant that it had a wider range of stories than I was used to and made me aware of the universality of fairy tales. Tales from all over the world were familiar, there are so many variations on Cinderella. And yet, they were not the same stories that I had read. There are dragons from all over the world, but Chinese dragons are very different from European dragons. I am not the first person to be fascinated by fairy tales, of course, or to notice that there...

A couple of days ago I bought the new album by Conor Oberst, the singer/songwriter from Bright Eyes. I am always impressed at how each of his albums has a sounds distinct from each of the others, and yet they all have a common thread, mostly due to Conor's voice and lyrics I think. I have four of his albums and this is true for all of them, including this latest one. The thing that first struck me about this latest one is how conventional it sounded, more tuneful I suppose. Getting further in I have revised my opinion, it is not conventional as such, it just has a style that seems very firmly rooted in the music of the '60s. This is where I feel a lack of musical knowledge, I'm sure that there are others who could tell me if this was correct and give me more precise information, but the drums and guitars just shout to me of some decade from the late 20th century. Conor Oberst's music has always struck me as somewhat 'old-fashioned' in this way, but while his pre...

I recently read 'White Noise' by Don DeLillo. Every time I would go to pick up the book, that line from 'Gold Mine Gutted' by Bright Eyes would pop into my head. Funnily enough, I always thought of it as "Don DeLillo whiskey", it just recently occured to me that it might be "DonDelillo, whiskey". I thought Don DeLillo liked to include whiskey in his books, or maybe was an alcoholic, and that his name was used as some sort of associative descriptor. Then it dawned on me that this was just a list. Commas make a difference people, but it's hard to hear them sometimes. If Don DeLillo and whiskey did not prove to have any great connections, then Don DeLillo and Bright Eyes certainly seem to. I was listening to the album 'Digital Ash in a Digital Urn', on which 'Gold Mine Gutted' is found while reading 'White Noise', because getting the song in my head was bugging me, and for a sense of symmetry. Doing this was like a revelation...