K. Amis, Take a girl like you (1960)
R. Crowley, Empires of the Sea (2005)
R. Graves, Seven days in new Crete (1949)
F. O'Brien, The third policeman (1967)
J. Roth, The Spiders web (1932)
K. Stockett, The Help (2009)
T.H. White, [The Once and Future King]
_________ The Sword in the Stone (1938)
_________ The queen of air and darkness (1939)
_________ The ill made knight (1940)
_________ The candle in the wind (1958)
_________ The book of Merlyn (1977)
This was tight. I almost gave it to The Help, which I thought was outstanding. In fact I almost gave BOTM jointly, but that's pathetic (Yes it is Masterchef the Professionals 2012). It's always possible to make to choice. So, although I know it's partly because I have a weakness for barking mad aristocrats, it's Gavin Maxwell's account of how he kept an otter as a pet. That description does the book a disservice - it's a well known classic. Nonetheless, it is essentially about a man deciding to upend his life to keep an otter. As such, it's charming, what makes it brilliant is that he manages to do it while both avoiding tweeness - in fact the fairly bloody diet of otters is well documented - and anthropomorphising - he is very good on the animal personalities of the otters without projecting further. Also, impressive in a slight book, it manages to pack in delightful snippets of memoir (I then had to look him up properly) and a string of evocative segments on the region and the natural world. The reading public of 1960 were right; it sold millions.
As an aside, the reading public of 1960 cannot entirely be congratulated. Kingsey Amis' book of the same year, lauded at the time, is deeply unpleasant and though the reviews found it highly comic, I fear this has faded. The climax of the plot is exceptionally unpleasant.
No comments:
Post a Comment