Bibliography, January 2011

Read (12)

BOTM: H. Lee, To kill a Mockingbird

A.S. Byatt, The Children's book
A. Christie, The mirror crack'd from side to side
A.C. Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
D. du Maurier, Rebecca
L. Mitchell, Charles James Fox
A. Moore, Watchmen
R.C. O'Brien, Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH
M. Spark, The girls of slender means
Tacitus, The Histories (K)
Thucydides, The Peleponnesian War (K)
P.G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves

Bit of a rejig here. Because of what we might call 'Just in time' acquisition I've dropped numbers acquired. I will indicate what I've read on Kindle and what is a reread (with an *), but otherwise, anything else is bought or read from A's list .

I'd also add I almost had a tie here, though Lee's was best. Rebecca deserves an honourable mention. It's one of Anna's, and brilliant. Lushly written, clever in execution, painted with great characters, and fun to read. However, the lean, gentle prose of Mockingbird was better in every respect. Sparse, clever, and almost perfect descriptive prose, particularly at the start. It also had a lot more variation and shadow than I had thought it would.

In fact, neither were the books I expected them to be, and I'd single out two moments in both that were full of pathos almost carelessly thrown in beyond the main arc of narrative or point. In Rebecca there is a brief sequence near the end where Max comments that it is now too late, the nature of the girl he married has irrevocably changed by the knowledge she has gained, though of course the reader knows that knowledge is essential for her own happiness (sorry, that's a bit cryptic, but I'm avoiding spoilers). It's counterpart is the single line of Lee's where Atticus simply says ' Arthur, thank you for my children'. A hadn't remembered it, but it made me cry. That and especially the following sections I find critical to the book, representing a triumphant climax of the weaving together of the double, maybe even triple, narrative, and taking it beyond the already powerful (and famous) set pieces of the trial and its aftermath. A masterpiece.