Podcast & Book Recs

[neadods]

American iTunes has picked up a BBC Radio 4 podcast called "Shakespeare's Restless World." It's 13 episodes, each running slightly over 13 minutes, about political events in Shakespeare's time. Although the narrator has a slightly disconcerting habit of referring to things that we can't see ("This is an example of a silver whatsit" or "Where I am..."), I'm finding it an interesting listen.

I had an epiphany today - I'm suddenly buying a bunch of books because I'm actually trying to buy a lazy weekend with nothing to do but read a good book. Which is a bit much to ask Barnes and Noble to deliver.

That's not stopping me from reading books...

A Jane Austen Education was a great deal more charming and a lot less navel-gazing than I expected it to be throughout. In fact, it's given me new eyes for Persuasion (which needs a reread) and encouraged me to take another run at Mansfield Park, despite having failed 3 times to read it before.

And despite my absolute inability to wade through The Turn of the Screw again, (ye gods, that's turgid!), I have high hopes for Florence and Giles. It's a book that's going to demand to be taken on its own leisurely terms -- the second paragraph is a single sentence* -- but that sentence is built of gorgeously evocative words and phrases such as "a house uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence, a neglect of a place... leaked and rotted and mothed and rusted."

I think the bedroom and library cleaning can go for a little while longer. I may have found me a book that takes precedence this weekend no matter the chores waiting.


*Nowhere near the run-on winner; I think I still have my copy of The Pyrates, in which the first sentence ends halfway down the second page.

Comments

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I think that's one of the reasons why Austen herself liked Emma so much. There really wasn't a major lesson for Emma to learn (aside from "don't be a dick") and no Moral Lesson to impart to the reader. Chick Lit.

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

Hee, yeah. No one's falling off walls or catching deadly illnesses or anything; Emma is brought face to face with her bad behavior by something as simple as a reprimand by a friend.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Exactly! It's a soothing sort of a book; no real tempests, no real problems, but also the sort of stumbles that everyone has had in their lives.