#168

Oh oh, Olaf Stapleton and Virginia Woolf!

#169

Stephen King - he may not be cool, and his recent books drag on a bit, but when in form he is amazing.
George Pelecanos - I discovered him by accident really, and when he started writing for The Wire, I thought he would blow up. But he hasn’t.
Asimov - Not an amazing technical writer in retrospect, but his Foundation and Robot works were amazing and stuffed with ideas.

3 Likes
#170

Yes - I think LF is better than Money, so defo give it a read.

1 Like
#171

Absolutely love A Time Of Gifts. Remember finding it in a box of old books and reading it out of pure curiosity as I wasn’t much of a fan of travel writing at the time. Found it really interesting and disturbing in its description of Europe sliding into the Second World War. Have read it twice now and keep meaning to read Between the Woods and the Water for a second time. Still haven’t read the Broken Road, though I’m not sure how it would match up to the previous two given it was assembled from his notebooks.

1 Like
#172

Freddie Bookhead

#173

I’m not even on freddiebookheadbook

#174

Died on the day I was born so pretty sure I am her reincarnated. Yes I will sign all your du Maurier books.

#175

I bloody love him. Kinda enjoy how ridiculously overlong his books often are. Part of the charm.

1 Like
#176

have you colour-coded these?!

#177

Yeah- just put them in order of colour to make them look more attractive. A lot of people do it. Takes less time than alphabetising actually.

#178

seems like the kind of thing i’d start doing and get bored of and then get annoyed that there were some ambiguous ones that didn’t fit anywhere. kudos for going through with it.

1 Like
#179

Ambiguous ones I just put wherever looks better- some of the colours have books with white spines but large letters of that colour.

#180

In some ways, The Broken Road is much closer to the voice of PLF than AToG or BtWatW because it is assembled from less polished drafts. It’s also sensitively edited - in the intro, Artemis Cooper (who wrote the autobiography) says they kept changes from his drafts to a minimum.

2 Likes
#181

That’s true, but it is also worth pointing out that it lacks the narrative throughline of the previous books - there are chunks of the journey missing including the end!, presumably because PLF either never actually wrote them, or just didn’t polish them to enough of a standard. It’s the best we’re going to get though, and it could have been so much worse.

In other PLF news, I enjoyed this book a year or two ago

It’s by someone who tried to recreate the journey in modern times. I was skeptical, but it was a good read.

1 Like
#182

Apparently there are gaps in the original diaries/manuscripts, but that he didn’t say anything about reaching his destination was weird. Cooper even mentions that in the intro, iirc.
The Hunt book sounds great. I wondered what a modern version of the walk would be like…
I found this while digging around/making sure I’d spelt Artemis’s name correctly. It contains the words “Paddy admitted to “having smudged the facts a little”"… http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/9570864/Everyone-fell-in-love-with-Paddy-Leigh-Fermor.html

1 Like
#183

I’ve decided it’s Borges. Yeah that’s right, my favourite writer never wrote a novel, come at me.

#184

“You still haven’t written a novel? Jeez Louise, Borges.”

3 Likes
#185

Actually not sure if this makes sense to anyone but me, given that I have - in my personal vernacular - adapted the phrase “jeez Louise” in such this way

#186

Yeah, I used to do this with my CDs but as @ericthefourth says, I got too annoyed trying to stick the ambiguous ones together so I ended up with a sort of jumbled misc section at the end. Surprising how well it works for CDs, though*. You often can picture the album not the title.

*caveat for those absolute monsters of CDs where the spine doesn’t reflect the album cover at all and Island can (could?) get to hell with their unified spine thing.

I like your guitar, Em. Is that a Jagstang or an HH type jaguar or something?

#187

That’s reminded me that there was a TV programme with Benedict Allen where he visited some of the places out of ATOG. Think it was weirdly on the same month that I finished reading it for the first time. Still really want to visit the Red Ox Inn where he stayed in Heidelberg

1 Like