I am also some 300 pages into Simon Schama’s ‘The French Revolution’. 300 pages in and the revolution is only just brewing up. As this h/b book is just short of 800 pages, I risk doing myself an injury if I drop it, falling asleep whilst reading it in bed. So it’s Einstein in the e-reader. It’s so long since I read any of the Schama I will have to start again from the beginning.
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That’s a good suggestion. I am enraptured by T.S. Eliot reading his ‘Four Quartets’ and Patrick McGee reading ‘The Third Policeman’ [Brian O’Nolan aka Flann O’Brien]
I really enjoyed All the light we cannot see.
Some other recent favourites: The Bronze Horseman (Paullina Simmons - trilogy), The Gargoyle (Andrew Davidson) and The Girl From Krakow (Alex Rosenberg).
I’m currently working through Crime and Punishment as it’s always on the top 100 books lists. Enjoying it, but why do all of the characters have at least 3 different names? Makes it quite hardwork!
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Just finished Big Sky by Kate Atkinson, v good it is no. 4 or 5 of the Jackson Brodie books, I love KA - esp in a different genre Life After Life and A God In Ruins, so good.
I can’t wait to get my hands on Hilary Mantel’s final Thomas Crowell book, just out but not yet in the uni bookshop in Germany when I was there alas
Just normal Russian naming convention, then add in nicknames, diminutives etc 
I have, this morning, taken delivery of The Mirror and the Light, the long awaited 3rd part of Hilary Mantels wonderful trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Can’t wait to start reading it and lose myself in her prose once again.
Michel Bussi -After the crash. Introduced to him by a book club choice. Black Waterlilies. Unfortunately can’t read them in the original French as it takes me so long and I loose track of the story trying to translate. But very well written.
Also recommended The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaitre -I think the original French title was ‘Au revoir les hauts’
BBC2 @ 21.00 might interest you?
Return to Wolf Hall?
Oh yes, you bet! Got it all lined up. Enjoy.
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Lovely thread, unfortunately for about thirty years nearly all my reading has been non-fiction and mainly research related. However, at the beginning of February as a partly symbolic gesture, following the UK’s departure from the EU, I began reading Norman Davies’ *Europe: a History. It’s very unusual in being a history of the whole continent (which Davies describes as a continental ‘peninsula’) and is written from the perspective of an Oxford history professor with a Welsh and Polish background.
I won’t bore people with the detail as it spans many millennia, but instead offer the author’s observation (from 1993) that some countries on the geographical periphery of Europe, have over the centuries drifted in and out of the European sphere: his two examples are Britain and Russia! One of many incisive perspectives.
If you find this of interest and want to read more, I’d recommend ordering a remarkably cheap secondhand hardback copy on Abebooks - at over 1300 pages it’s too big for a paperback (which in any case would drop to bits before you were beyond mediaeval Europe).emphasized text
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I have just finished Jean-Paul Dubois “Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon” which won the Goncourt last year, and thought it a good time to reread Camus “La Peste”. I also finished recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez “El amor en tiempos de colera” though I started that well before the coronavirus outbreak as I don’t read very fast in Spanish
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Oh my goodness, ’ La Peste’, memories of A level French have just come flooding back!!
Quite - I can’t actually remember whether it was on the syllabus or not in those (for me) far off days, but I certainly read it as a teenager, along with quite a few of his other books
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This has been a great thread. There are so many books that I need to read. Thanks everyone.
Thank you too, Annajayne. The thread has been a gift, and revealed lots of talent and knowledge, as well as inspiring more reading.
I am currently proof-reading “Archetypes in religion and beyond: a practical theory of human integration and inspiration” in first draft manuscript by a friend of mine, Robert M. Ellis. A fascinating read and highly relevant to most of the worrying issues that face us and our world today IMO.
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That sounds interesting Peter. Does your friend draw at all on Mircea Eliade’s post-WWII works such as Patterns in Comparative Religion?
I found Eliade’s accounts of the global commonality of symbolism very rich and illuminating, despite him becoming rather unfashionable (at least at the Open University). Suspect this was due to an unspoken disdain for the Jungian aspects of his theories, rather than his links with Ceaușescu’s Securitate.
However, the latter seems pertinent to current debates on the separation or otherwise of a person’s creative output from other aspects of their life. I think each such instance needs to be assessed and judged separately, and that the content of Eliade’s writings is so distant from his personal treachery that they aren’t undermined by his betrayal of fellow intellectuals.
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I love reading biographies and have just started Elton John’s - Me.
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Your own interest in this is very gratifying, Mark, so thanks.
I’m not a proofreader, and I just volunteered to read through Robert’s draft manuscript and comment freely on it before he submits it for further critique prior to publishing. I have started to read the text and have picked up (and passed on to RME) a couple of typos, word omissions, and points where punctuation might improve coherence or flow.
Robert is a prolific and published author on philosophical subjects, and founder of the Middle Way Society (MWS) of which I am also a founder-member, and currently the sole presence in France.
The MWS figures on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter too.
As regards Eliade, his work is not referenced by Ellis in this current work, and this does intrigue me, and I may ask him about this a propos nothing at all:thinking:
. My own interest in and tentative involvement with African traditional healers and nganga in Zambia led me to some investigation of shamanism and thus inter alia Eliade’s studies. He is referenced delicately and appropriately in one of my old OU study texts on Comparative Religion, and there is a mild hint of reproach for his apparant taste for authoritarianism in the political realm.
But I enjoyed his work quite a lot. Thanks again.