You know how you go past some book or other, maybe for years, & all of a sudden that's the one you have to read? Lark Rise to Candleford, by Flora Thompson (1876-1947), was like that for me. I'm sorry my mother's not around to ask not just about the book but about the times, as she heard them from her mother's (Alice Woodland Phillips 1885-1982) generation. She describes, beautifully & quietly, the end of a rural English community, before anyone realized it was coming to an end. Even though I'm only a quarter of the way through, I feel like I'm going to be calling it one of my favorite books for the rest of my life.
NauenThen
What I'm reading
July 4, 2022
Tags:
Flora Thompson
5 Comments
Comments
Jul 21, 2022 7:41 AM EDT
Didn't know about Thompson but just read her Wikipedia entry. There are so many talented writers that are unknown/forgotten; in fact, there are several books covering just this topic. I recently started one by Joe Milutis called "Failure: A Writer's Life" about essentially unreadable authors. Not quite the same thing and, as it turns out, Milutis' book fits into the very same category that he writes about! :)
- Michael Sharpe
Comment by Elinor on Jul 21, 2022 10:01 AM EDT
ha ha. One person's unreadable is another person's greatest hit, yeah? I feel like I find wonderful, overlooked authors & poets (& artists too, for that matter) all the time. And a subgenre is probably that of books/authors that are so of their time that they are dated. John O'Hara comes to mind. I remember when Hermann Hesse was popular in the 60s/70s, my father (German, born 1906) marveled - to him Hesse was a forgotten writer of the past who he never imagined would be read decades later in another country & context. New York Review of Books & Tough Poets press both do a good job of bringing back deserving overlooked writers. (Full disclosure: Tough Poets reprinted my husband's 1985 novel Mangled Hands.)
Jul 21, 2022 11:38 AM EDT
I've read three of O'Hara's novels and about two years ago read one of his biographies by Geoffrey Wolfe. Not a nice man but his relationship with his daughter was touching and tender. He grew up in Pottsville, PA and when I was working in Harrisburg from 2016-2018 I drove up to visit and his house has a plaque. About two blocks from the Yuengling Brewing which was there during his childhood days. A really big name in his time and apparently thought he was up for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Really heavy drinker and burnt a lot of bridges.
- Michael Sharpe
Jul 21, 2022 11:57 AM EDT
I've got "Tough Poets Press" in my 'Literature' bookmark and keep meaning to re-scan it. For some reason Marvin Cohen's books keep popping into my head. I did tell you that I bought your book "Into the Night" and have started it but I have the bad reader's habit of trying to manage multiple books at the same time and at the moment the 'habit' is impeding the possibility of completion! :)
- Michael Sharpe
Comment by EN on Jul 21, 2022 12:02 PM EDT
That reminds me of this piece about Dylan crashing a Norman Mailer party: https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/11/02/when-bob-dylan-practiced-downstairs/