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Jul 2019
10:48am, 24 Jul 2019
28,672 posts
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LindsD
Earthly Powers I absolutely loved.
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Jul 2019
10:50am, 24 Jul 2019
113,497 posts
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GregP
If I've got the right book I could recite the opening paragraph for years - suspect it's one of those famous openings?
I read 'Earthly Powers' and 'Ancient Evenings' around the same time and loved both.
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Jul 2019
10:51am, 24 Jul 2019
113,498 posts
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GregP
Yep. Quick google reveals it to be 'famous', after a fashion:
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
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Jul 2019
10:54am, 24 Jul 2019
28,674 posts
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LindsD
The end is just magnificent iirc.
I remember thinking 'of course'. And being totally satisfied.
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Jul 2019
11:00am, 24 Jul 2019
40,601 posts
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McGoohan
"And I woke up in bed with the bishop. It had all been a dream."
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Jul 2019
11:03am, 24 Jul 2019
28,676 posts
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LindsD
"And I was totally satisfied"
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Jul 2019
12:24pm, 24 Jul 2019
40,603 posts
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McGoohan
Here, I hope is the relevant bit of IOAWNAT I mentioned earlier:
So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter's night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop pas the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter's night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.
You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.
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Jul 2019
12:28pm, 24 Jul 2019
38,759 posts
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Diogenes
I love books about books and reading
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Jul 2019
2:36pm, 24 Jul 2019
113,505 posts
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GregP
Remember I said I found the book 'comforting'? There you go.
I shall go and see if I still have mine, in which case I will pause midway through book four of the five-book sub-hobbity-tosh that is the Belgariad, postpone Salami Planet and re-read.
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Jul 2019
2:43pm, 24 Jul 2019
40,608 posts
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McGoohan
Surely it's your solemn doody to read Lairy Planet?
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Acts of Minor Dissent
Sep 2024