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Very very rarely do I read a book for a second time....But...one of the few exceptions is Ferdinand Celine'..."Long Days Journey into Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan". I love the guy's work.
Very very rarely do I read a book for a second time....But...one of the few exceptions is Ferdinand Celine'..."Long Days Journey into Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan". I love the guy's work.
"The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne" by the Revd. Gilbert White, which I read every year and if, as now, I am unwell. The last English writer I truly enjoy.
I also read the Shakespearean tragedies every year, and "Paradise Lost". Byron in poetry.
If sacred works are allowed, De Imitatione Christi (Thomas à Kempis) in Latin and of course the Authorised Version.
The Lord of the Rings
I have read the trilogy probably well beyond 50 times or more since I was 14 years old. I read it twice last year and have begun it for the second time this year. Something about it comforts me, especially in troubled times.
Since last year I have re-read many novels from my collection that I had not read for a long time.
I re-read novels probably for the same reasons that people re-watch favorite movies (I would hazard a guess that many members of The Lounge have watched Casablanca more than once.) Since the 90's it has become increasingly difficult to find new fiction that wasn't derivative, blatantly ideological or saturated with post-modern political correctness.
There is certainly good new stuff out there but it is the exception not the rule.
Fiction has always been deeply political and ideological. If you haven't noticed it, you need to consume more. Even the Lord of the Rings was heavily based on Tolkien's contemporary politics and experiences on WWI battlefields. The Orcs are portrayed in a deeply pro-British, anti-Kaiser way, mostly as British propagandists portrayed them: a rabbling mass of Huns who will shred you to pieces as soon as look at you.
Lord of the Rings portrays war in a complete opposite manner as All Quiet On the Western Front did. All Quiet humanized the enemy, proposing the idea that had their governments not been enemies, that opposing soldiers may have been friends. After all, many of the soldiers had no personal objections against their enemies. They didn't hate Germans for being German.
Fiction has always been deeply political and ideological. If you haven't noticed it, you need to consume more. Even the Lord of the Rings was heavily based on Tolkien's contemporary politics and experiences on WWI battlefields. The Orcs are portrayed in a deeply pro-British, anti-Kaiser way, mostly as British propagandists portrayed them: a rabbling mass of Huns who will shred you to pieces as soon as look at you.
Lord of the Rings portrays war in a complete opposite manner as All Quiet On the Western Front did. All Quiet humanized the enemy, proposing the idea that had their governments not been enemies, that opposing soldiers may have been friends. After all, many of the soldiers had no personal objections against their enemies. They didn't hate Germans for being German.
I reread fiction constantly--Tolstoy and Turgenev and, yes, Tolkien, too. Updike and Irving, Sayers and Christie and Chesterton. Hemingway, certainly. And I reread The Master and Margarita every year around Halloween. Less so with nonfiction although I think Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius should be revisited regularly. Poetry is very resonant at different times of our lives, particularly as we get older. Dickenson's "Because I could not stop for Death he kindly stopped for me" barely registered when I read it in school but now, in my 50s, I read it with a whole different perspective......
... people ranted and moaned about having to wear masks to protect themselves from the Spanish Flu pandemic.
People haven't changed. They're as stubborn now as they were then.
I’ve reread Conrad more than any other writer, I like his prose, it has a kind of concentration to it, you can feel how hard he worked for those sentences. His early/middle work obviously, Nostromo, Youth, The N*gger of the Narcissus (his best work in my opinion), The Secret Agent and the like. Funnily enough his later novels sold well, even though they were far inferior to his earlier work, as Conrad himself admitted (‘Conrad by numbers’), in part because the paperbacks had salacious covers!
That mystique is hard to pin down, is it the modern idea of man alone in a vast universe or is it a kind of negative pantheism? Even Heart of Darkness is open to these contrary interpretations - most people see it that Kurtz is corrupted somehow by the jungle and becomes barbaric, but it seems more likely that Conrad meant Kurtz corrupted the natives, given the activities of the Belgian rubber companies in the Congo that Roger Casement and others revealed, and which were largely the inspiration for Heart of Darkness. In Nostromo the character Decoud is stranded on a small island and, faced with the immensity of nature, kills himself. It's all very confusing but seems to keep Conrad popular.Conrad, undoubtedly exceptional greatness.
However, I personally find him depressive coin mint struck in the literary realm of mystique and imagination.