A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The first book I have ever read on the Kindle, and the first by Charles Dickens that I have ever read! My friend (who has read every single classic known to man, but nothing else apart from Harry Potter and a few vampire books) said that I wasn't a proper Lit student until I'd read him, so I thought I better get a move on...and I absolutely loved this book.

In case you haven't read this particular book (or like me, are new to Dickens...I know...I feel rather embarassed admitting it) it is a historical novel, set in the 1780's - 90's, in the lead up and height of the French Revolution. The narrative is split between England and France, and follows a series of characters whose lives have intermingled - and mingled with the rise of the Revolution - over generations.

In the first part of the novel, (which opens with a delicious description of the turbulent social and political situations on both sides of the channel during the late 18thC) the wrongfully imprisoned Dr Manette is 'recalled to life' after confinement in the Bastille for eighteen years. He is reunited with his daughter Lucie, and goes with her to England to recover, accompanied by her and by Mr. Lorry, a banker and loyal friend. As the book continues, we learn about their life in London - Dr Manette's recovery, and the happy family life they lead. However, the build-up to the Revolution casts a grim shadow, and eventually Lucie's husband Charles makes his way to France in secret, to try and save a faithful servant from the Guillotine...

I loved this book. It took me a while to really get into it, but from the start I was carried along by Dickens' absolutely wondrous descriptions of the turbulent times, and the perfectly-conjured characters. I think perhaps the strength of his descriptive writing was the detail, but also the scope of the writer's view: suitably elaborate scenes of the wealth of the royal court in France, for example, contrasted with emotional, pitiful but unflinching details about the life of the peasantry; the comfortable old 'man of business' Mr Lorry, and the gentle respectability of the Manettes is juxtaposed with the character of Jerry Cruncher, an odd-jobsman who treats his poor wife appallingly, continuously suspecting her of 'flopping'; the character of Sidney Carton encompasses both the pathetic and the heroic. Dickens' pity for the peasantry of countryside and underfed, underprivileged poor of the city is palpable (and obviously informed by the social conditions at the time of writing), and yet the bloodthirstiness of the Revolution itself is recounted sensitively but horrifically. The great strength of the book - along with the lovely language and turn of phrase - is the way that it encompasses absolute opposites, and shows them in a pitying but balanced light.

In terms of the turn of phrase, Dickens writes beautifully, and I loved the touches of humour throughout the book. He writes sharply, critically, observantly, and touchingly. I also really enjoyed reading this on the Kindle. Although the free version that I downloaded had a few typos in it (less than 10, I reckon - not too bad), it was really useful to be able to look up unknown words immediately, without interrupting my reading of the text. I now know what a blunderbuss is, without having to go online or dig out a big fat dictionary.

I loved 'A Tale of Two Cities' so much, I want to read it again straight away, but am forcing myself onto pastures new. I read the final chapter again, however, and it affected me even more the second time. There are several famous quotes from this book that most people will know ('it was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'; 'it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...') but reading them in context turned these oft-quoted lines into some of the most emotional I can remember ever having read.

D. H. Lawrence's 'The Rainbow' and 'La Cle Sur La Porte' de Christiane Rochefort

I'm struggling through 'The Rainbow' by D H Lawrence at the mo. It's a good book. I'm about a third of the way through. He writes beautifully, descriptively and very romantically. But he doesn't half waffle on!

I love Thomas Hardy, despite his 'wordiness' and instrusive narration, but Lawrence seems to take this to a whole new level! In Chapter 2 'They Live At The Marsh', about 40000000 paragraphs in a row described Tom and Lydia's distance peppered with brief flashes of carnal-caused closeness. THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH YOU CAN SAY ABOUT THIS, SURELY. By about the 2nd paragraph I'd got the idea but no, there were another 39999998 left to go on the subject.

It's a good book. I'm enjoying it. I like the way Lawrence writes. Apart from his waffle. It's a frustrating book. I'm avoiding it at present. It is lurking at the bottom of my handbag and only comes out after I've had a stiff drink and have mentally prepared myself. It's a good book. It's a frustrating book. I'm enjoying it. I can't wait to get through it.

So as part of my avoidance strategy I am reading a simplified version of 'La Cle Sur La Porte' by Christiane Rochefort.

Pour eviter D. H. Lawrence alors, je lis une edition simplifiee de 'La Cle Sur La Porte' de Christiane Rochefort. Ce livre s'agit d'une femme de vers quarante ans qui raconte la jeunesse de ses trois enfants et leurs amis, a qui elle ouvrait son appartement tout le temps. Elle raconte les epreuves des vies des ados ce qu'elle connait. Je l'ai commence hier soir et je trouve que c'est un bon livre, l'edition simplifiee est facile pour moi a comprendre pourtant j'apprends plus de la langue en le lisant aussi. Une progression parfaite apres 'Le Petit Prince', je me sens de plus en plus confiante en lisant les livres francais.

The book is about the experience of a woman of about forty years of age, who tells the story of the teenagerhood of her three children and their friends, to whom she opens her flat 24/7. She recounts the challenges the teenagers face. I started this book yesterday evening and I think it's a good book (certainly light relief from Lawrence) and the simplified edition is easy for me to understand, although I am still learning loads of French from it too. It's a perfect progression from 'Le Petit Prince' and I'm beginning to feel more and more confident about reading French literature.

A Room With A View by E M Forster, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, & Le Petit Prince d'Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I have been doing lots of reading since my last blog!

First of all let's start with E M Forster's 'A Room With A View', written and set at the turn of the 20th century. It tells the story of Lucy Honeychurch, who meets a lower-class young man on holiday, finds he is attracted to her, and is then whisked off and eventually agrees to marry someone who she doesn't really love. Then George Emmerson, the young man she met in Italy, comes to live in the same village as Lucy. Mayhem ensues and she is torn between a marriage of convenience and love.

I quite enjoyed this book although I found it a struggle, which was strange, as it's written in very readable English. It wasn't a Chaucer-like battle with the words. I think it was that for me the characters were rather bland. I kept mixing them up. This probably wasn't helped by the fact that it took me over a week to get through this slim tome, but for me not a single character was inimitably themself. I read somewhere that Forster believed in writing well-rounded characters, but I think that in pursuing this ideal he failed to bring them to life. At least for this reader.

The story was also well-trodden. Forster was probably quite a pioneer when it was written, what with social class still being such an everyday necessity in those days. But so many people have copied him since then that for me, as a 21st century reader, it was, quite frankly, dull. However he writes beautifully, particularly the descriptions of the views that are so crucial to the novel (constant symbols of freedom, emancipation and the pursuit of true love) and the book is full of humour. I loved the bathing scene, with Freddy's cries of 'I've swalled a polly-wog' making me laugh out loud. All in all an interesting presentation of Edwardian Englishness.

Jeanette Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' on the other hand was an absolute joy to read. Written in the 80's, from what I can interpret set a couple of decades or so earlier. From the first page I was laughing. Winterson writes in a gloriously light, playful way, despite the book's darker themes of oppressive religious dogma, forbidden (homosexual) love and the diffiulties of being an outsider. It is told from the view of Jeanette - I think half autobiographical but half fictional - as she grows up and starts a love affair with a girl called Melanie. One section that had me in hysterics was Jeanette-the-little-girl's daydream about the just and noble king Tetrahoedron and his nemesis Iscoseles. The book seems to become more abstract as it continues, through the inclusion of fairy tale style stories that intersperse grown-up-Jeanette's adolescent troubles. But for me it was a lively book, with deftly-painted characters who really came alive, especially Jeanette's frustrating, hypocritical, lovelorn mother, and I thought that Jeanette's self-discovery and the backdrop of oppressed lesbianism was very sensitively written. I will be coming back to this book again and again. It is completely different in genre to anything I have ever read before but Winterson writes in just the style I like. Top marks.

Finalement, ce soir j'ai fini Le Petit Prince, d'Antoigne de St-Exupery (pardon, je ne sais pas comment faire des accents sur ce clavier). C'est le premier roman francais que j'ai lu. Il m'a surprisee que je pouvait le lire et, la plupart de temps, le comprendre parfaitement - en suite, j'essayerai quelquechose un peu plus avancee! Pourtant j'ai trouve Le Petit Prince une introduction inspiratrice a la litterature francaise. J'ai adore l'usage de fantaisie, et je me suis tres bien amusee en me replongeant dans le monde de l'enfance. C'etait une aventure nostalgique, pour moi. Une histoire imaginative et charmante. Alors, je vais trouver un peu de Camus...

Finally, this evening I finished The Little Prince (in French), by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (a classic French children's book with beautiful illustrations). It's the first French-language book I have ever read. I was surprised by the fact I could read it and how much of it I understood! Next I'm going to try something a bit more advanced. However I found The Little Prince an inspiring introduction to French literature. I loved Exupery's use of fantasy, and I really enjoyed plunging myself back into a child's world for a little while. For me The Little Prince was a nostalgic adventure, and an imaginative and charming story. Right, now I'm off to dig out the Camus...

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

It isn't often that I read plays. Really I only do it when I have to, for study, although I love the theatre and I always enjoy them when I do read them, so I don't know why I hardly ever read them. This play is of course a classic, but until I read this I had never read any of Oscar Wilde's work, and neither have I ever seen any film adaptations of any of his work. So I came to this wondering what to expect, with only vague ideas about the writer's life and no idea about what it was he actually wrote.

Sometimes this is the best way to come to a piece of literature, as it allows you to enjoy it as it is without reading it through a blinkering lens. I don't care about Wilde's homosexuality and his being an outsider in Victorian society. I don't care about what the readers of today can draw from it. The only thing that matters is that I absolutely loved this play. It's short but packed full of wicked one-liners (of the sort you often wish you could snap back with in real life. If only!) and a plot with plenty of twists. It actually had me laughing out loud, something that only rarely happens when I read (what with being a serious student of literature, ahem) since I stopped reading the adventures of Captain Underpants when I was 12. But - dare I say it? - Wilde's infamous wit is funnier even than Captain Underpants. By miles. And easy to read and get into as well. He was clearly a writer who appreciated the pure unbridled enjoyment that a piece of literature or theatre can offer, as well as its ability to drive home a point. Both are entwined marvelously in Wilde's writing.

Also he has a wonderful ability to inspire hunger in his reader, or so I found. Reading about Algernon tucking into muffins uninvited made me crave muffins. Just one way in which a skilled writer can bring their story to life. Wilde was a very skilled writer.

I'll read this play again before I have to write about it, paying attention to the use of language and the writer's purpose etc. etc. but whether you read for work or pleasure, whether you read plays or avoid them like the plague, read this, and if you read it many moons ago, reread it, becuase it is a work of genius and British humour at its best.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I have never read Pride and Prej before. The only work of Austen's that I have read before is Sense and Sensibility, which I loved. I live just down the road from where Austen used to live even (Chawton in Hampshire, England) but for years I dismissed her as some unemancipated ancient writer of pathetic romances. The films of Pride and Prejudice (with Keira Knightly) and Becoming Jane (with Anne Hathaway) decidedly dumbed-down her work and her life. I am now an Austen convert, partly due to my enjoyment of S&S; a BBC production a few years ago called Miss Austen Regrets (showed her as an intelligent, fearless, mischevious real, living person) and my reading of P&P.

Jane Austen's style is fully formed in P&P, with all the wit and humour that wasn't quite always there in S&S. I found that things start hotting up around chapter 20. In the past I have never got past chapter 5. I found that I had to persevere with it, but by around chapter 20 I was hooked. Reading the book also reveals that Mr Collins, a character whom I have always found to be almost disturbing, is much more complex and harmless than he appears in the more recent film and 1990's BBC adaptation. He is a character whom I have found much more readable than watchable.

But for me the most interesting difference between the book and all its adaptations is the character of Elizabeth Bennet. She is always portrayed as a very sympathetic character in the TV/film adaptations. The book mostly follows her, but interestingly the narrative voice also reveals the experiences of other characters, and not just Mr Darcy. Elizabeth's aunt Mrs Gardiner, Miss Bingley and even Wickham's feelings and thoughts come through, which I found gave much greater depth to the story. However, I was surprised by what an uncomfortable heroine Eliza becomes. At the beginning of the book she is shown as lively, playful, young but also sharply intelligent and well-mannered. As the story progresses however, her manners remain but her intelligence becomes blunted by her prejudices. Of course, this is the whole point of the story, but I found her much less sympathetic and interesting as the book continued. She is almost irritatingly stubborn and unforgiving, which though an effective narrative tool in the book, hardly comes across in the adaptations for screen. In short, I think the characters of the book are much deeper and more complex than I had previously realised, and than are given credit in the screen adaptations.

I am glad that I am reading this book now, just a year younger than Elizabeth is in the book. Often I find that Jane Austen novels are recommended as excellent books for quite young female readers, but Austen's writing (or maybe her editors', as has recently been suggested) is so skilfull that had I read this book when I was younger, the wit, complexity and sharply observed humanity of the book would have completely passed me by.

Tess of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy

I've always been put off Thomas Hardy's work: the only work of his that I've ever read before is 'Channel Firing', a poem in the anthology 'Up the Line To Death', full of the best poetry the First World War produced. I don't know what put me off; maybe it was watching part of the depressing story of Tess on the BBC a couple of years ago, or my mum telling me that "Dickens does humour. Hardy doesn't". Whatever it was, I am absolutely loving this book.

It's a classic, and I know that everyone has already read it, but I am looking at it with newly converted eyes. It is truly amazing. Apart from the fact that it must have been very controversial at the time it was published, and that Hardy must have been quite a brave man to write and publish such work (insisting, in the sub heading, that Tess remains " a pure woman" even after her rape, murdering someone, etc) I find that it is beautifully written. Hardy's turn of phrase it absolutely deft, his meaning is always sharp and concise and yet the language used is very dreamlike and almost poetic. One of my favourite phrases so far has been "the spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light". Aqueous light! Genius!! And although it is a sad story, there are touches of humour and hope throughout the book.

I also think he writes characters very well. My view of Tess before I began the book was that of Gemma Arterton in the BBC adaptation. She was a character whom I couldn't relate to; she was very pathetic and naive and too stupid to keep herself out of trouble. Tess in the book is the complete opposite. She stands up for herself, and even though she senses danger she almost sacrifices herself to try and do the best she can for her family. Even after her rape, and the death of her baby, she refuses to be beaten. She is determined to make a life for herself. She refuses to crawl in a corner and die. She's a spirited, clever heroine. She's aware of the dangers around her but is bound by her overiding sense of responsibility, and most of all, I get the impression that Tess knows herself. Despite being embarrassed by her past, I don't think she is ashamed of herself. As for the other characters in the book, Hardy writes the human condition perfectly: Angel's hypocrisy and Alec's undertone of darkness even after he has turned over a new leaf for example. He writes humans very observantly and well.

I love the imagery in the book. Apart from the "aqueous light" (love that phrase!!!!!!!) a lot of emphasis is placed on Tess's face, particularly her mouth. There's the sense that her good looks lead her to her doom, but at the same time Tess can speak sharply and perceptively and smile. It's just something I've noticed as I've been reading the book. Tess's mouth seems a crucial, emphasised part of her character.

So. I haven't finished the book yet but I highly recommend it, and I will definitely be reading more Thomas Hardy in the future.