2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?

All of Salter I found great, except for his last novel, which was a bit tedious and unoriginal. But Hunters, Light Years, Solo Faces, A Sport... All excellent.

Xp yes, Pym is wnderful, though sometimes I just want to yell WHO CARES WHAT THE VICAR IS DOING???

^ a commendable and sensible impulse, especially if one will not unduly startle bystanders through its indulgence.

I always care what vicars are doing! Wodehouse taught me that.

Wodehouse vicars are almost always doing something mild-mannered and ineffectual.

If you don’t keep an eye on your vicar they might cut some crucial pages from their sermon the weekend of the big handicap.

Are you guys referring to The Great Sermon Handicap?

Oh wait sorry. Didn’t read previous post closely enough

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

Maybe just because he wasn't as widely read.

Here's a nice Jhumpa Lahiri tribute to "Light Years" that I just found: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/26/spellbound-2/

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

― Uncle Redd in the Zingtime (James Redd and the Blecchs),

Maybe because Salter kept his nose to the ground, concentrating on the failings of his male character instead of using it as a metaphor.

(that's how I remember Light Years)

I'm not sure those other guys deserve all the trouble they get either.

Yeah, not as widely read and not as self-regarding.

I read Patrimony by Philip Roth a few weeks ago, my first Roth book (thanks to Alfred for putting the idea in my head that this should be the first one I checked out). Roth in autobiographical mode, with his father as subject, sounded more inviting to me than any of the novels. I found it moving and, in places, startlingly intimate. The ending made me cry of course. I've lost a parent to cancer, so a lot of it resonated with that experience. Herman Roth is so much like one of my grandfathers that I wound up thinking just as much about what it was like losing him.

xp Evelina is hysterically funny and sharp, and pretty rough. There's real violence, sexual harassment, ogling men around every corner.

Yeah, there are a couple of scenes where she's alone, and drunken men in packs are coming up at her, and the menace is really well captured. For a comic novel it is amazingly good on the feeling of being powerless.

After a week of bloody naval warfare, for my next book I chose something where the battles are more sedate: Barchester Towers, A. Trollope, wherein High Church and Low Church clerics politely vie for social supremacy, unsheathing their well-manicured claws at one another, while the reader is invited to look on in fascinated amusement.

Cesare Pavese: The Beautiful Summer -- wonderful book, lovely cover, but Penguin also fail to give the translator's name and seem to have printed the actual pages on crappy old newsprint and then charged 8 quid for it

HALT! Are you aware that a summer reading thread has begun at 2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?, and if not, why not?