Read it again! And then again!

[stephen w]

Originally Posted by Philidor

A Month in the Country by JL Carr. Carr is almost forgotten:



[It speaks] of a lost European countryside idol, one which I'm just old enough to remember, e.g. when I first went to France a few farmers still ploughed with white oxen. A countryside before stockbrokers and 'agro-businesses' and deep ploughing of ancient grasslands and coating the land with poison to kill butterflies and wild flowers and little rich girls on ponys and labourers' cottages bought up by north Londoners and village pubs converted into Jamie Oliver hell-holes.

A Month in the Country arrived this morning. Hurrah! I don't have to go back to work till Thursday so - having finished the wonderful Doris Lessing autobiography Under My Skin - I can get right into it. I like the frontispiece quote from Dr Johnson's Dictionary: Novel - a small tale, generally of love

[Despina41]

I've also read Stephen King's Misery a couple of times... I know, my taste in literature is almost as bad as my taste in music. But sorry, I find King's mix of hilarious detail and macabre scenarios to be almost as interesting as Hawthorne's.

[Mischa]

Another great novel remembering all these screenings of "Pride and Prejudice", "Sense and Sensibility" etc. in the 90's was this little gem (great summing up of these movies!):

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcyBaT8Wv4"]YouTube - Budweiser® Sin and Sentimentality 2001[/ame]

[stephen w]

Originally Posted by Mischa

Another great novel remembering all these screenings of "Pride and Prejudice", "Sense and Sensibility" etc. in the 90's was this little gem (great summing up of these movies!):

YouTube - Budweiser® Sin and Sentimentality 2001

[Despina41]

No, no, these are still the best Bud commercials:


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=380Juu4fZSA"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=380Juu4fZSA[/ame]



[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozSwUw2MifI&feature=related"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozSwUw2MifI&feature=related[/ame]

[Herzeleide]

Joyce's Ulysses was also a bit of an obsession of mine a few years back. Like all good modern art/literature/music, it contained enough beauty to make me keep coming back, and enough difficulty to make me try to attain a real understanding.

[stephen w]

Originally Posted by Philidor

A Month in the Country by JL Carr. Carr is almost forgotten:



[It] speaks of a lost European countryside idol, one which I'm just old enough to remember, e.g. when I first went to France a few farmers still ploughed with white oxen. A countryside before stockbrokers and 'agro-businesses' and deep ploughing of ancient grasslands and coating the land with poison to kill butterflies and wild flowers and little rich girls on ponys and labourers' cottages bought up by north Londoners and village pubs converted into Jamie Oliver hell-holes.

Enjoying this straightaway. I thought the entry in Wikipedia was interesting:

Carr was born in Yorkshire, into a family of Wesleyan Methodists. His father Joseph was the eleventh son of a farmer, who rejected farming as a career and went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. Carr was given the same Christian name as his father and the middle name Lloyd, after David Lloyd George, a Liberal Welsh Prime Minster. [1] He adopted the names Jim and James in adulthood.
Carr's early life was shaped by failure. He attended the village school at Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire. He failed the scholarship exam denying him a grammar school education, and on finishing his school career he also failed to gain admission to teacher training college. Interviewed at Goldsmiths' College, London he was asked why he wanted to be a teacher. Carr answered: "Because it leaves so much time for other pursuits." He was not accepted. Over forty years later, after his novel The Harpole Report was a critical and popular success he was invited to give a talk at Goldsmiths'. He replied that the college once had its chance of being addressed by him.
He worked for a year as an unqualified teacher - one of the lowest of the low in English education - at South Milford Primary School, where he became involved in a local amateur football team which was startlingly successful that year. He then successfully applied to a teacher training college in Dudley. In 1938 he took a year out from his teaching career to work as an exchange teacher in Huron, South Dakota in the Great Plains. Much of the year was a struggle to survive in what was a strangely different culture to him, in which his British salary converted into dollars was pitifully inadequate to meet American costs of living.
At the end of the year Carr continued his journey westward, and found himself travelling through the Middle East and the Mediterranean as the Second World War loomed. He arrived in France in September 1939 and reached England where he volunteered for service in the Royal Air Force. He was trained as an RAF photographer and stationed in West Africa, later serving in Britain as an intelligence officer.
At the end of the War he married Sally (Hilda Gladys Sexton) and returned to teaching. He was appointed headmaster of Highfields Primary School in Kettering, a post he filled from 1952 to 1967 in a typically idiosyncratic way which earned the devotion of staff and pupils alike. He returned to Huron, South Dakota in 1957 to teach again on an exchange visit, when he wrote a social history of The Old Timers of Beadle County.
In 1967, having written two novels, he retired from teaching to devote himself to writing. He produced a series of 'small books' designed to fit into a pocket: some of them selections from English poets, others brief monographs about historical events, or works of reference. When larger publishers rejected or remaindered his own novels, he also published them himself. In 1980, he finally won critical acclaim for his novel, A Month in the Country.
In order to encourage children to read, each of the "small books" was given two prices, the lower of which applied only to children. As a result, Carr received several letters from adults in deliberately childish writing in an attempt to secure the discount.
He also carried on a single-handed campaign to preserve and restore the parish church of St Faith at Newton in the Willows, which had been vandalised and was threatened with redundancy. Carr, who appointed himself its guardian, came into conflict with the vicar of the benefice, and higher church authorities, in his attempts to save the church. The building was saved, but his crusade was also a failure in that redundancy was not averted and the building is now a scientific study centre.
In 1986 Carr was interviewed by Vogue magazine and, as a writer of dictionaries, was asked for a dictionary definition of himself. He answered: 'James Lloyd Carr, a back-bedroom publisher of large maps and small books who, in old age, unexpectedly wrote six novels which, although highly thought of by a small band of literary supporters and by himself, were properly disregarded by the Literary World'.[1]
Jim Carr died of leukaemia in Northamptonshire on 26 February 1994 aged 82 years.
[edit]

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by stephen wainman

He also carried on a single-handed campaign to preserve and restore the parish church of St Faith at Newton in the Willows

Glad you're enjoying it. There's a good website here but don't look yet cos it gives away the plot.

[stephen w]

Originally Posted by Philidor

Glad you're enjoying it. There's a good website here but don't look yet cos it gives away the plot.

Thanks - I seem to have spent my life (or part of it anyway) tiptoeing round Introductions to books avoiding potential plot revelations.

I like his prose. He's the sort of writer (Rose Tremain's another) with whom I often pause and maybe even re-read aloud a paragraph for sheer enjoyment of the writing. A bit I liked just now for instance -

That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early. In fact, I didn't sleep long after daybreak on any of the succeeding Oxgodby days. The work was tiring - I was on my feet most of each day, often eating whilst standing - and then, at night, up there in my loft high above the fields and away from the road, too far for voices to carry, there was nothing to disturb me. Sometimes, waking momentarily, I heard a vixen howling at the edge of some distant wood or the scream of some small creature set upon in the darkness. For the rest, only the sounds of an ancient building, a tremor on the bell-rope coming down and out through the hole in the floor, a stir in the roof timbers, stone still settling after five hundred years. . .

[Dame Hilda Tablet]

I read and re-read Owell. The essays, not the novels. The same goes for Samuel Johnson.
I read a lot of poetry again and again and have my grandmother's volume of the Oxford Book of Poetry edited by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. I am a bit of a poetry devourer. I have more poetry than modern fiction for instance.
I also love H H Munro (Saki), Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham and read and reread them. Along with Florestan a top favourite is Cold Comfort Farm.

As for Americans, Dorothy Parker and Damon Runyan.

I forgot Edward Lear!
His letters, limericks, paintings, everything. I wish I'd known him. His letters show him to be lovely, funny, kind and jolly, between the seizures and the depression that brought him.