From Way, Way Back in Your Book Backlog

[svalbard]

That brings to mind a book I read 32 years ago now about Hardrada.

https://books.google.ie/books?id=NE...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[Extollager]

Thanks, Svalbard -- I might look that up. haven't ever read Treece yet. The novel I'm looking to read first, dealing with some of the persons and events of King Harald's Saga, is Hope Muntz's The Golden Warrior.

 

[svalbard]

I will check that one out. It has some polarising reviews on Goodreads which I always find to be a good thing. Another book that is quite brilliant and features Harald in a memorable scene and if might presume written in a style that you might enjoy is King Hereafter.

 

[Extollager]

Have started a book I bought on 28 June 1975 from the long-gone, fondly-remembered Bartlett Street Book Store in Medford, Oregon, for 50c, an old, cheaply-made American printing of H. Rider Haggard's Mr. Meeson's Will.

Here's something about this forgotten novel, with spoilers. I'm not reading it through yet myself, butu I do remember having read about the very odd location of the will already.

JSBlog - Journal of a Southern Bookreader: Mr Meeson's Will

Goodread folk seem to like it:

Mr. Meeson's Will by H. Rider Haggard

 

[Extollager]

Finished this obscure Rider Haggard novel. It's dispatched with some fairness as "Mr. Meeson's Will. 1888. Partly a robinsonade; mostly mundane melodrama" here:

R. D. Mullen- The Books of H. Rider Haggard: A Chronological Survery

Curiously, it belongs to the ten-year period that Haggard himself regarded as his best. Look at some of the other books Haggard wrote around that time! Meeson must've been something knocked off in a few weeks between efforts on far better books -- specifically nos. 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18

 

[Extollager]

Mr. Meeson's Will might've made an enjoyable 90-minute made-for-TV movie in the 1980s, with Serena Gordon as the heroine.

 

[Vince W]

Serena Gordon She's dreamy. Sigh.

 

[Extollager]

I'm starting today a reading of The Iliad. I'm using Fagles's translation, which I've owned for 22 years. Unlike me, the translation moves right along.

 

[Night_Eternal]

I've had this copy of Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars for fifteen years now, yet I have not yet read it for some reason. I want to check it out, but other things have caught my attention. Maybe I'll read it after another fifteen years!

 

[Extollager]

Today I've started a first reading of Mervyn Peake: A Biographical and Critical Exploration by John Batchelor. I bought this book on 21 June 1979 at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon.

 

[dask]

I am now intentionally trying to make the majority of my reading fit into this catagory. I've no iron clad plans to stop procuring and reading new acquisitions but am going to concentrate on books in my collection I've been meaning to read but kept postponing for one reason or another. I'll also probably be spending more time here than in the current month reading thread. The Other Log Of Phileas Fogg, my coffee shop book I've already mentioned in the March Reading Thread, has been sitting on my shelf since I bought it off the rack in 1973. My at home book is now:

I got this $30 marvel free from joining a book club back in the mid 1980s, not sure if it was the Book Of The Month Club or The Science Book Club. I like the logical way Asimov builds up to his topics and the history he uses to illuminate them. This is two volumes in one, the first dealing with the physical sciences and the second the biological sciences. One glitch I noticed is he gives credit to George Gamow for coming up with the term the big bang where every other reference I've found credits Fred Hoyle. Not the biggest mystery in science I guess.

 

[Randy M.]

I am now intentionally trying to make the majority of my reading fit into this catagory. I've no iron clad plans to stop procuring and reading new acquisitions but am going to concentrate on books in my collection I've been meaning to read but kept postponing for one reason or another.

I like this idea. I may adapt it or a not too rigorous variation of it. I have some older sf novels I've put off reading for no good reason and that I've been itching to dip into.

 

[Extollager]

Giving this thread a poke partly to make sure it's not confused in anyone's mind with the thread about rereading books last read a long time ago.

Towards the end of last year I made a point of finishing a bunch of short story books and an essay collection that I had started many years before.:
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story collections The Spinoza of Market Street, Gimpel the Fool, and The Séance (all three books begun 2003); George Borrow’s Wild Wales (apparently begun 1999); Ian Frazier’s essay collection Hogs Wild (begun 2017); Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories ed. Matlaw (just the stories in this Norton Critical Edition, begun 1997).

 

[Extollager]

I've begun a first reading of Dunsany's Tales of Three Hemispheres in the Owlswick Press edition with Tim Kirk illustrations, which I bought around 40 years ago.

 

[Extollager]

That Dunsany book Tales of Three Hemispheres is loaded with duds. But I'm enjoying a book I've had for around 20 years and not read till now, Konstantin Paustovsky's In That Dawn, the 3rd of six volumes in his Story of a Life. (Recently a new translation of the first three volumes under one cover has been issued and received lots of good reviews.)

 

[Extollager]

I bought a paperback copy of Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers in Feb. 1983 and am reading it now for the first time -- and relishing it. I think it's had a narrow escape more than once from a cull, but happily I hung on to it.

 

[Extollager]

Bought 50 years ago today, Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings. The authors recommend dipping into the book rather than reading it straight through, but in all this time I'm sure there's much I never read, so a straight-through, leisurely reading commences.

 

[Extollager]

I began to read the Pantheon edition of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, bought 12 March 1976, methodically, beginning with the first story, on 9 September 2009. I had no desire to rush the reading, which I completed today, 16 July 2024. There were some hiatuses -- e.g. I read story #43 on 9 July 2011, and didn't read #44 till 12 August 2012. But what a great and wonderful book. The drawings by Joseph Scharl go very well with the stories. The introduction by Padraic Colum seems to evoke the milieu in which the stories were told orally. I think I read the comments by Joseph Campbell during a time of less methodical attention to the book, in which I would just read one or two with intriguing titles (I suppose) at a time. That might have been when the book was a new possession. A note says that this edition "is based on the translation of Margaret Hunt. It has been thoroughly revised, corrected and completed by James Stern."

Hunt was British and lived 1831-1912. Stern (1904-1993) was born in Ireland but after living in the US etc. settled in Wiltshire. He had served with W. H. Auden in postwar Germany. Auden wrote a review of this Grimm edition that's quoted on the dustjacket. Stern's German wife Tania collaborated with him on translations, and I wonder if she contributed a lot to this book.