Finally getting round to read....

My former history teacher gave me a reading list before I went to university. She was a highly intelligent formidable woman and said I should try to complete it before I graduated.

Well, I finally read the last two books on the list this year. Zola's Germinal which is one of the most wonderful books I've ever read, and the Confessions of Saint Augustine! A bit different, but the humanity shines through both.

I found Germinal the most depressing book I have ever read!
I am trying to get away from my staple diet of the 18th and 19th century English classics - but I still have never found a writer I enjoy as much as Jane Austen!

Well yes, but what a polemic.

I'm with you on Austen.

I read Germinal in my teens; in fact I read all of the Rougon Maquart series [something to do with coming from a dysfunctional family I guess]. Nana was serialised on the telly when I was about 17 and that's what got me interested. I wondered the other day about re visiting some of my favourite books. Didn't Zola say to one of his friends [was it Van Gogh?] that he could do more to help people by writing powerful books and, at the end of the day make money for himself than going out preaching to people for peanuts?

But for history it has to be Herodotus.

As someone who alwys considers herself well read, I'm ashamed to say that it's only quite recently that I''ve got into Austen Of course I've always loved Pride & Prejudice and we did Northanger Abbey at school (although I never found it as funny as our teacher did) and now, after watching them on television I finally read Emma, Persuasion and Sense & Sensibilty and I wonder how I ever managed without them. I keep thinking I should give Trollope a go. Perhaps that can be a retirement project.

You will enjoy Trollope, but do read the Barsetshire Chronicles in the right chronological sequence or you will get confused. The Palliser novels are extraordinarily reminiscent of the political machinations today!
There are some books that repay you for sticking with them, even if they don't grab your attention immediately, such as Middlemarch. On the other hand, I have tried really hard to read some famous classics, such as Tristram Shandy, and never got past Page 100.
One of the minor sorrows of my life is that one of my daughters did not enjoy Austen - she said the language put her off.

I love Trollope.

I've been struggling with Middlemarch ever since it was serialised on the BBC years ago.

The Way We Live Now is my favourite Trollope.

I admit Middlemarch is not an easy read, and there are many side plots, but I got caught up in the romance of Dorothea and Will. And I hated Casaubon!

Pride and Prejudice was the first grown up book I really enjoyed and thanks to a Miss Brodie-type English teacher I have loved reading ever since.
What a legacy Jane Austen left.

On my way through the Palliser novels, Greatnan, I've just finished The Prime Minister and some of the observations on coalition government could hardly be more apposite now. When I was 14 and off school with and abscess in my ear, I had gone though almost everything Agatha Christie ever wrote and was brought a copy of Sense and Sensibility by one of my mother's friends. I still have that book and all of Jane's others - well thumbed over the years, my comfort reading. As for George Eliot, I adore Middlemarch which is a most skilfully plotted novel - and I fell in love with Adam Bede.