Reading recommendations

Hi everyone,

I have been lurking for ages because I have so little time to use the internet, but thought I'd respond to someone's request for talk on something other than the matrix (I haven't seen either film so haven't been able to get involved in that discussion, unfortunately. I want to see them but it will have to wait until I leave italy where I'm currently working, my Italian is no way up to watching films!)

My top recommendation for the year so far is the AS Byatt 'Frederica quartet' (not the official title but it seems to be how it's known). The first book is 'The Virgin in the Garden' and the most recent, which only came out last year, 'A Whistling Woman' . These books are definitely some of the best I have ever come across. They follow a group of people from the fifties up until the seventies, exploring their personal choices and decisions in the context of the great changes which were occuring at that time. It brings in an incredibly vast amount of factual material (for example on the education reforms of the sixties and seventies) but this is never obtrusive and meshes really well with the overall story. One of the things I particularly like about Byatt is that she celebrates intellectual life in a way I have never encountered before. I don't recall ever coming across another writer who conveyed the visceral, almost sexual pleasure of thinking and learning in this way. (I'm
  sure there are others but my reading is much more limited than I'd like - any recommendations, anyone?) I think that the books strike a particular chord with me because many elements in them correspond to my own life - when the series starts the main character, Frederica, is a frustrated teenager in the North of England, a landscape which I can certainly recognise evern if I was there thirty or forty years later! However, I think that anybody would get a lot out of these books. I have read each book twice so far and they have been completely absorbing both times. I look forward to reading them again and again over the years because I can see that they are the kind of books with have something different to offer as you grow and change. I wonder what I will think of them when I'm 60? (I'm 22 now).

Apart from that long eulogy, I'd like to say hi and welcome to the various newish people who have joined the list. It's always nice to hear new people's ideas and to revisit some old topics which I haven't thought about for a while. Also, are there any list members in the South of Italy? If so, it would be fun to meet up. I live in Barletta, near Bari.

Love, Lucy-Ruth

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Received on Tue May 27 05:53:30 2003