We lost the goats for a while, but then two of them turned up in Alma’s old hut in the back garden, taking some sun.
Where was Vesla?
Vesla was hiding behind the goat house…
Dyv took these with a telephone, so Vesla’s a bit fuzzy.
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A Bad Guide 
So lucky you found them! Vesla is smiling, and so jaunty! She can’t help being fuzzy…
She’s looking surprisingly jaunty.
Red Badge of Courage.
Can you do that or have I slipped into a parallel universe? Editing out “Panties” was one thing, but this is strange. Also, even with “Two” (but now it’s worse) I kept seeing it in the “tab” and thinking “How many goats are there? They’ve found some more?”
Messing with my head.
No, you’ve slipped into a parallel universe.
Dearie, have you read The Red Badge of Courage? I haven’t, but I’m thinking about it.
When I was young I read what is now called a “graphic novel” version. We called them “comics”.
Anyway, the Three Great American Novels are Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and the Wizard of Oz. I’ve read the first two.
I haven’t read any of them. I like the beginning of the Wizard (film), but I’ve never managed to watch the whole thing without getting distracted.
Oh you must read the Twains. Top stuff – at least at the age I was when I read them.
Ahem. Of course I agree about Twain, but I suggest you read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or any of Frank Baum’s other 13 Oz books (I’ve read them all, and my sister has acquired a complete set over the years).
That Judy Garland film is glitzy gush for Americans, OK in its way, but it’s no wonder you keep getting distracted from watching it to the end.
Moby Dick? The Great Gatsby?
Moby Dick? The Great Gatsby?
Ha! I’m glad you’re all paying attention. I didn’t say I’d never read anything American, though I must say Moby Dick wasn’t my favourite. I’m fond of whales. It’s a bit like Coleridge & The Ancient Mariner; how am I supposed to feel sympathy for this idiot who’s shooting birds with a crossbow? I’m not crazy about Hemingway, either, for similar reasons. Give me Ferdinand the bull, any day.
I do like the things I’ve read by Mark Twain, so I ought to buy them; and if you say so Stu, I’ll give Frank Baum a try.
Hemingway reeks of the bogus. When I was about 14 I read my father’s collection of the novels of Upton Sinclair. His politics were tedious rubbish but he could spin a yarn all right. Then I read the Grapes of Wrath and a bit more of Steinbeck – not bad at all. I also read lots of Science Fiction, much of it American. Whether I could bear to read it as an adult I don’t know, but it was wonderful fun for a adolescent. Who else? Ah yes, humour – Thurber, O Henry, Perelman, Benchley.
Is Gatsby worth reading?
Oh yes, my father recommended Damon Runyon but I never got round to him. Any good?
Never read Damon Runyon. Fitzgerald – some people think he’s the best US writer. Gatsby’s good, though it’s a very long time ago that I read it and I can’t remember it very vividly. I think Saul Bellow is pretty great. In my time I’ve also liked Truman Capote, Steinbeck, Annie Proulx, Nicholson Baker, Patricia Highsmith, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Thurber, E.B. White and lots of others, Tom Wolfe can be pretty funny in small doses & Hunter Thompson too. I like Margaret Atwood, from Canada.
For many years starting in the mid-’90s, I read only novels by women writers. Atwood and Munroe were at the top of my favorites. I had gotten fed up with clever-clog male productions from people like Bellow, Frisch and Roth. Don’t ask me what that was all about, I couldn’t really say.
I ordered most of the books from Silver Moon Bookstore in Charing Cross Road, a kind of feminist and lesbian bookstore, now sadly no more. I knew one of the owners pretty well from correspondence and telephoning, and went out to lunch with her once when I was in London. I liked to think of myself as an honorary male there, well-tolerated despite being ditto. Life can be pleasant sometimes, if you let it be so.
Interesting. Here’s an article about it, from the Guardian.
There are lot of great Americans I haven’t read. And some I’ve read. I, too, found Hemingway tedious. I’ve read one or two by Saul Bellow without being convinced. Twain is of course brilliant, as is Steinbeck. I used to like John Irving, but his unpredictability got predictable. The only female American writer I’ve enjoyed enough to read with some thoroughness is Toni Morrison, who I binge-read just around the time she got the Nobel Prize.
I’ve read a fair amount of crime novels, some brilliant portraits of American cities or sub-cultures, some utterly boring serial-killer hunts.
And then there are the comics — Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Jeff Smith, … . I’m not much into superheroes, but I can even take some of that when it’s done with talent.
Crown: it was in fact Jane Cholmeley whom I knew.
That’s good, Stu. I like to see people’s photographs.
I forgot crime novels. Of course. And I love all the usual suspects there.
I like Crumb & Art Spiegelmann.
Mention of Hemingway reminds me that I always liked Martha Gellhorn.
And Fran Liebowitz goes with Tom Wolfe & Hunter Thompson (small doses).
So no one has read Barbara Kingsolver, Eudory Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Djuna Barnes, May Sarton, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy – to name but these ? Not even Mary Baker Eddy, Margaret Mitchell or Valerie Solanas ?
Nancy Reagan may not have written anything, but the world of finance has enshrined her in an eponym:
… as an eponym …
I was offered books by all of them, and I just said no. Actually I’ve tried Edith Wharton several times & I just couldn’t. I liked Mary McCarthy, though I was probably too young (twentyish),
What about S. Plath?
I simply assume that everyone who is anyone has read The Bell Jar. It would be too shaming for whoever has not done so, were I to bring the subject up.
I guess I am not anyone. I have heard of most of the people mentioned here, but have read few of them. I have heard of The Bell Jar and it is not the type of thing I feel like reading.
I took a compulsory course in American literature years ago. I mostly remember Hawthorne, Moby Dick, Poe, Whitman, some Twain, some Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner (the last three were not on the program), most of which I enjoyed, and I also had to read an extremely boring book, The Education of Henry Adams (the partial autobiography of Henry Adams, who was from the Adams presidential family). I was very conscientious and made a point of reading each of the assigned works twice, and if possible other works by the same authors, but I could barely finish Henry Adams once, and twice was beyond my tolerance level.
The previous year, Adams had been on the exam, and students failed in droves! In French universities, if you failed the June exam for a course, you could try your luck again in the fall, before new classes started, but the Adams book was on the Fall exam. Pure sadism! As a prof said at the beginning of my year, “Henry Adams is not the kind of author students will take with them to read on the beach. We know you will gladly read Hemingway, but we want you to read other authors too”. Surely there could have been a less boring choice.
marie-lucie, I was just kidding about “everyone who is anyone”. Do you know of any famous, boring book in French that is compulsory reading in French or Canadian universities ? I have only encountered one – Les 120 Journées de Sodom – but then I haven’t read thousands of books in French. More like a hundred or so over the decades, I guess, some philosophy but most of them novels by Simenon, “Fred Vargas”, Nothomb, Voltaire, Beauvoir, Voltaire – all great stuff.
Oops, two Voltaires. One of them should be Hugo.
A few bandes dessinées and the crime novels of “Fred Vargas” are the only fiction I’ve read in French
I thought maybe I shouldn’t have put the quotes around Fred Vargas, indicating a pseudonym, because my pedantic principles tell me I also should add them around Simenon and Voltaire.
What is the deal with the French inventing these cutesy names for themselves, like Colette or, for Pete’s sake, Miou-Miou ?