39 Comments

if you have the time/inclination, i urge you to watch the Globe Henry IV with Jamie Parker & Roger Allam. I think Allam might be my favourite Falstaff and Parker's a terrific Hal. regardless, they're a wonderful pairing and i think you'll be sure to have a blast

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I tried it but didn't like it, though Allam wasn't great, though I usually like him.

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oh no! oh, i was really taken. although i’d not seen the play before. perhaps the charm of the whole thing overwhelmed. do you have a favoured Falstaff?

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The Orson Welles film is excellent, though not for a first approach to the play. The BBC version with Simon Russell Beale also great. I saw Anthony Sher and he was excellent; I don't know if you can get that on Prime? I didn't care much for McKellen recently. Overall, it's a very hard role to get right. The Globe performances are always goo even when they aren't good, if you know what I mean, I just didn't really take to that one.

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What perfect timing, I was just trying to figure out what to get at the library.

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Thank you for the list! I especially like the division between "published this year" and "not published this year." I wish more reviewers would mention books in the latter category in their year-end reading highlights.

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@Ian Leslie did such a list

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Read the golden bowl at your recommendation and it was excellent. His sentences, his ability to describe the interiority of relationships. Woof

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So glad to see this!! Isn't it just incomparable?

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“James” was also my pick for favorite novel of 2024. I thought Everett’s exploration of the themes of race (was Huck Black?) was interesting, but the writing itself is what carried the book forward.

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You are so right about The Golden Bowl. Not like anything else. Except maybe Proust? Read P much more recently but recall the same strange kind of readerly swoon.

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Yes exactly! I read the first three volumes of P this year (in the 12 vol set) but will hold off from including it until I finish. Just sublime.

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Susanna Clarke, Pale Fire and Emma—I’m definitely coming for you next year.

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Agree completely about “the thunder box”. I’m going to read the whole trilogy again.

I might be mis-remembering, but wasn’t there a hilarious scene in which a gauche young officer keeps referring to the Copper Heals as the Copper Heads. It’s somewhere in Waugh.

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Pale Fire is an incredible example of dread and the heaviness of dramatic irony. In the midst of it, just when I was feeling the most consumed with it, the most unexpected sentence floated up through it all, and I felt so grateful. "Well, that's a sentence I never expected to see..." I failed to mark it all those years ago, but had it on my wall for years, and now it has escaped my mind. It was about a weather balloon. Nabokov can be so dense, and the lightness of that sentence was pure joy. The timing was perfection. The book was good, but mostly I remember that line like a personal gift.

"Speak, Memory" was too much for me. Like Scarlet Fever dreams.

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Do you recommend any secondary writing on The Golden Bowl?

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John Bayley

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The 1-star reviews of 'James' on Goodreads are hilarious.

Apparently the book is simply an "I'm smart" fan-fiction of Huck Finn full of identity politics grievance, crossed with the senseless violence and rape of 'Django Unchained,' with the preposterous twist ending that Huck is really Jim's son (yes, really).

That such a powerful many guilty white folks be slobberin over this'n be mighty tellin.

(full review here)

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6822071229

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I also read Emma this year! The first time (and first Austen, though I've tried before) for me. It's absolutely fantastic, though it helped that I already knew the plot from Clueless (and that Wilkie Collins got me into the longer sentences of that sort of writing).

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The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild is my favourite of Enards, one of the major talents working today. The collection of Heaney's translations is also wonderful to peruse if you've never touched it, the fact he was among the finest translators of Irish into English is underdiscussed.

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What are the Irish translations

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The Midnight Court and Sweeney Astray.

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The Golden Bowl is the most frustrating novel I’ve ever read. At points it is incredibly boring. It’s also utterly brilliant. I remember reading page after page and wondering whether I could continue and then would hit something that was really good. It is a masterpiece of ambiguity. I’ve read a number of descriptions of the plot and invariably disagree with all of them. My response is well maybe, maybe not. The ambiguities here strike me as even deeper than that famous masterpiece of ambiguity, The Turn of the Screw. It is a great novel but it is understandable that many would think claiming to like it is mere pretension. It’s not but Graham Greene’s comment that Henry James late style is a reflection that by that point he didn’t give a shit about his readers , strikes me as correct. It’s also something of a compliment.

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Well I agree that "it's a masterpiece"...

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Would not have guessed you like Enard. Where do you recommend starting?

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that is the only one I have read

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Curious about what you think of Balzac’s Père Goriot? It’s on my list of recommendations.

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have not read

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