Originally Posted by Zichao

Brief round of Humiliation: the first few chapters of Great Expectations is all the Dickens I've ever read.

You have to be prepared to skip, but there's some really good stuff in there. I've been reading some popular Victorian fiction lately - Wilkie Collins, Sheridan le Fanu, Dickens, and on to Sherlock Holmes, and it's much better than you might expect. Dickens is in that sort-or-shadow where oldie popular stuff disappears, but I think it's just about beginning to come out on the other side and be just old, rather than sort-of-good-for-you.

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Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle I'm a big fan of (also, other less well-known gothic writers, but I've done a bunch of penny-dreadfuls-are-awesome ranting here before, so I won't do it again), I just never really got into Dickens. I don't like Trollope either.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle I'm a big fan of (also, other less well-known gothic writers, but I've done a bunch of penny-dreadfuls-are-awesome ranting here before, so I won't do it again), I just never really got into Dickens. I don't like Trollope either.

That's because they push the worst of it, 'The Warden' and such. The political stuff is interesting, and the hunting stuff too, if you can free your mind from current reactions. I find his attitude to women a bit sick, however. Interesting picture of the Victorian 'gentleman' from one of the few people who believed it, so to speak, from outside. I'm always struck by the fact that Trollope - who stood as a Liberal candidate - and Marx would actually have come across, and influenced, some of the same people. You see it in Phineas's landlord in 'Phineas Finn'. Which gothic novels do you fancy? I need things to read!

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It just all seemed so bloody slow. You'd go through 50 pages and everyone would still be in exactly the same shit that they started out in.

Gothic stuff that most people haven't heard of these days: I never miss a chance to propagandise for Matthew Lewis. The Monk is everything a book should be, his plantation diaries aren't gothic, but they're clever and amusing too. Anything by Ann Radcliffe (can never remember how to spell that). Huysmans' Là-bas is as baroque as they come and has one of the funniest bedroom episodes in literature. Despite the vast quantities of filler I'm a big fan of Leo Taxil, though you won't find anything still in print so it's something of a pointless recommendation. "X.L."'s decadent horror stories are good (Saki meets Bram Stoker, to quote me) and they were a huge influence on everything that followed - like Taxil, if it comes to it - but again have been more or less completely forgotten by the mainstream.

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Speaking of Saki, there was an item sent into Pseud's corner recently signed "Saint Vespaluus", which made me go w000t! I suppose it's the joy of disconvering a fellow enthusiast - there's a bit in Alan Clark's diaries where he refers to Sredni Vashtar and I had a little mental high-five moment over that too. And there's a nod towards Taxil in Kuroshitsuji, which made me very happy.

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Tried reading the manga of Nougami Neuro again on the train back to Paris last night, and strangely, really enjoyed it this time once I got past the first couple of chapters. Considering that I was cackling like a loon, I suspect that people could tell that I wasn't using my laptop for Srs Business. The jokes at Yako's expense are cleverer, funnier and more involved in the manga ("They're great shoes aren't they? So shiny and new... Want to lick them?"), and everything's basically done in more depth, so you get a better sense earlier on of the relationship between the two main characters, something that took a while to develop in the anime.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

It just all seemed so bloody slow. You'd go through 50 pages and everyone would still be in exactly the same shit that they started out in. Gothic stuff that most people haven't heard of these days: I never miss a chance to propagandise for Matthew Lewis. The Monk is everything a book should be, his plantation diaries aren't gothic, but they're clever and amusing too. Anything by Ann Radcliffe (can never remember how to spell that). Huysmans' Là-bas is as baroque as they come and has one of the funniest bedroom episodes in literature. Despite the vast quantities of filler I'm a big fan of Leo Taxil, though you won't find anything still in print so it's something of a pointless recommendation. "X.L."'s decadent horror stories are good (Saki meets Bram Stoker, to quote me) and they were a huge influence on everything that followed - like Taxil, if it comes to it - but again have been more or less completely forgotten by the mainstream.

Thanks. 'The Monk' and things by Mrs Radcliffe are in our local library, so I'll try those. Have you read Le Fanu's 'Uncle Silas'? He's a bit careless about the minor characters, but it moves faster than Trollope, and is generally described as Gothic. The ghost-story man James (not Henry!) regarded him as his great model.

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No, I've never read that one, but I'll give it a go.

Currently: The CNN Effect, and God it's boring. Useful, I suppose, and someone clearly had to write it, but still... In any case, it's for exams so it doesn't count.

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I totally hate Dickens. Did GE for shool once, utter misery from start to finish; wasn't a single character I would have bothered to save from drowning. It's only utility has been to serve as the origin of my description of soap operas: unpleasant people being unpleasant to one another.


Currently reading Rusalka, by CJ Cherryh. It's a sort of fairy story (I say that because it's so different from stock fantasy) set somewhere a bit north of Kiev. Uses traditional slavic critters - the rusalka of the title, which is the ghost of a drowned girl, vodyanoi, leshy (which are the original form of Tolkiens ents), domovoi (the House-Thing) etc. I read it once before long ago; it is the first of a trilogy, the others being Chernevog and Yvgenie.

Slavic mythology rarely gets an outing; the only other one I've come across was Prince Ivan by Peter Morwood. It's a refreshing break from tired sub-Tolkien stuff.

I think it must be a requirement of the syllabus to hate whatever you do for GCSE Eng. Lit. I did To Kill A Mockingbird and loathed the paint-by-numbers emotional blackmail of it all the way through. I read Animal Farm the day before the exam and asnwered the questions on that instead.

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