I well remember the winter of 1963.\u00a0 So bloody cold.\u00a0 Snow till May.<\/p>\n
Me too.<\/p>\n
He writes so divinely.<\/p>\n
Beautifully written, elegantly told, I loved this book.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing to me that I did a whole University Exam on Dickens and most of the facts discussed here were completely unknown.\u00a0 His love affair with the actress, with children, and his cruel treatment of his wife.\u00a0 Of course it was 1965\u2026.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t believe I haven\u2019t read this man.\u00a0 He is a delight.<\/p>\n
And the D\u2019Oyly Carte family.<\/strong><\/p>\n I loved this book too.\u00a0 Far better written than expected I knew a lot of the early story about how D\u2019Oyly Carte built a theatre and Hotel at the Savoy from the money he made for Gilbert and Sullivan.\u00a0 The Theater was the first to have electricity. An extraordinary sea change in theatrical history.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She tells the story elegantly with plenty of teasing details.\u00a0 Olivier and Marilyn on the cover, and you long to know what she was telling him in the Savoy bar.<\/p>\n All unhappy love affair stories are the same\u2026 I really enjoyed the opening of this and then felt it tanked.\u00a0 I liked the stuff on the importance of the novel, but felt the story wasn\u2019t up to it. I really enjoyed all the bits about the late Bronze Age collapse. Relevant to today with the possibility it was caused by a pandemic.\u00a0 This was all new to me (novel) but I found the non-novel better than the novel.\u00a0 She should do some essays.\u00a0 (Like Zadie Smith.) I look forward to her next.<\/p>\n An I. Q. novel. I have been following him since his debut.\u00a0 He tries to ring the changes on this one, but like all successful formats it becomes a bit of a trap.\u00a0 I think he should try something completely different, though he will be known for these books.<\/p>\n I find fashion not very interesting it seems. \u00a0\u00a0I met this pleasant man at the Bowie wedding in Florence.\u00a0 He was humiliated by Iman seizing his camera and unrolling the film.\u00a0 He went to his room he was so embarrassed.\u00a0 They were being paid a million by Hello Magazine for the exclusive..<\/p>\n A thriller.\u00a0 It thrills.<\/p>\n A fantastic book, which I had to read very slowly, a chapter at a time.\u00a0 It is mind blowing. \u00a0The five or six likeliest ends to the Universe are here simply laid out. \u00a0I first was amazed by her on The Infinite Monkey Cage.\u00a0 The end of the Universe is fascinating and I hope I\u2019ll be here to enjoy it.\u00a0 The most amazing thing is that in the future all the galaxies will have moved so far apart that we will have no sight or knowledge of the entire universe that came before.\u00a0 We will have reverted to the Medieval view of the Universe, that there is just us\u2026<\/p>\n She has the funniest footnotes.\u00a0 I suggested she might win a Nobel Prize for her footnotes.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t read a lot of fantasy so I have not read him as widely as I should.\u00a0 I really enjoyed this book though.\u00a0 My favorite was The Goldfish Pool and other stories, which was hilarious.\u00a0 And accurate. I will read more.\u00a0 He is a wonderful writer.<\/p>\n Occasional Essays.\u00a0 Always interesting. Of course I love everything she writes.\u00a0 She seemed to be defining a form of Quantum criticism in her essay on Barthes and Nabokov.\u00a0\u00a0 Learning to re-read almost as important as learning to read.\u00a0 A good book is one you can<\/em> re-read, a great book is one you must.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cCuriously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it.\u00a0 A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Dip and enjoy.\u00a0 Gold everywhere.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t aware of his work.\u00a0 I downloaded this to Kindle after he died.\u00a0 It\u2019s a funny autobiography, but thanks to his first love for drugs and alcohol, slightly less coherent than it might be.\u00a0 Indeed he has a fictional co-conspirator with him and can\u2019t wait to be away from the serious bits of his life story, indeed at times he seems to be channelling\u00a0 Hunter Thompson.\u00a0 Clearly an outrageous chap, he left lots of comedians distraught by news of his death.\u00a0 I met him briefly one year at Marty Short\u2019s Christmas Party.<\/p>\n The importance of Democracy is to vote unsuitable characters out and so I read the terrifying Trump chapters, and skipped the less interesting Biden scenes. America dodged a bullet but only just and the bullet (still mad) keeps on coming, because a con man is like a shark and must keep on going forward so somehow some people don\u2019t notice that he is lying through his teeth and everything he says is worthless.\u00a0 Sadly this shark is killing thousands of Americans.\u00a0 Poor suckers.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know Penny had written a book.\u00a0 Nice scenes of the early days and Laverne and Shirley.\u00a0 She visits us one year with Art on a Motorbike.\u00a0 I liked the crew of characters she grew up with and played with and partied with.\u00a0 I know lots of them.\u00a0 I found when her book got onto making movies I was less interested.\u00a0 Movie making is as dull to read about as it is to do.\u00a0 But she was always a treat and of course I married her on Laverne and Shirley..<\/p>\n The History of England from James 1 to The Glorious Revolution.\u00a0 Beautifully written history by a writer who is a master of the anecdote.\u00a0\u00a0 Very fine, popular history, that began with the Tudors, which I skipped and I can\u2019t wait to continue.<\/p>\n Just a bit too gentle and laid back for my taste.\u00a0 He is an amazing writer whom I have enjoyed widely.<\/p>\n Another brilliant book from the most brilliant writer.<\/p>\n Sadly I have never really got into him. I find him more of a parodist.\u00a0 He writes well but..<\/p>\n Literally a Who Dunit, this is a really funny book, the sequel to a highly popular first book The Thursday Murder Club Mystery which I will order immediately.\u00a0\u00a0 Hugely popular in the UK he deserves to be widely read and appreciated everywhere.<\/p>\n Booker prize winner and deservedly so. Really a family saga, which also contains the modern history of South Africa, from the deplorable apartheid world of Dr. Verwoerd to the current day. It is also a memento mori, a philosophical study of the human constantly condition faced with human mortality.<\/p>\n Effortlessly linked are the stories of Amor, and what happens to her two siblings Astrid and Anton.\u00a0 Really an amazing book.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Frostquake\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Juliet Nicolson I well remember the winter of 1963.\u00a0 So bloody cold.\u00a0 Snow till May. Inside Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 David Steinberg Me too. Henderson the Rain King\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Saul Bellow He writes so divinely. The Mystery of Charles Dickens\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A. N. Wilson. Beautifully written, elegantly told, I loved this book.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing to me that I did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Beautiful World, Where are you.\u00a0 Sally Rooney<\/h2>\n
Smoke\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Joe Ide<\/h2>\n
The Chiffon Trenches\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Andre Talley<\/h2>\n
A Slow fire burning\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paula Hawkins<\/h2>\n
The End of Everything (Astrophysically speaking). Katie Mack<\/h2>\n
Smoke and Mirrors\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Neil Gaiman<\/h2>\n
Changing my mind\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Zadie Smith<\/h2>\n
Based on a True Story. \u00a0 Norm Macdonal<\/h2>\n
Peril.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bob Woodward and Bob Costa<\/h2>\n
My Mother Was Nuts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Penny Marshall<\/h2>\n
Rebellion \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Peter Ackroyd<\/h2>\n
April in Spain\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Banville<\/h2>\n
Cloud Cuckoo Land\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anthony Doerr<\/h2>\n
The Lincoln Highway\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Amor Towles<\/h2>\n
The Man who Died Twice\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Richard Osman<\/h2>\n
The Promise\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Damon Galgut<\/h2>\n