You seemed to be keeping a bit of a low profile recently, but I figured you were just taking it easy over the summer or, at worst, having some back spasms. But food poisoning?! And ending up in the emergency department !? I'll refrain from any jokes about raw oysters. Anyway, I'm glad to hear you're better and feeling up to producing another mammoth newsletter; every one seems longer and more informative than the last.
I'm hoping you haven't given up your plans to visit The Mount later this year. (My copy of "Twilight Sleep" has a stamp indicating it was originally purchased at The Mount's bookstore.) After reading several Edith Wharton novels and reading Hermione Lee's biography, I'm really curious to see how the place looks. If the summer is too unpleasantly hot, a trip in the fall would be fine too. Anyway, take good care of yourself!
I’m slowly morphing back into something resembling a human! And interestingly it wasn’t oysters that took me out! I’m still surprised by how sick I got and how long it’s taken me to feel 100% normal again. If only we knew what made me sick in the first place.
I still plan to go to The Mount this summer. I’m trying to find a good day to go. So how, some way I will make it there! (I feel like I should start singing now but I’ll spare everyone around me from that torture 😆)
Katharine Smyth's memoir -- really more like literary criticism meets memoir and packaged in what feels like a love letter to both Woolf and Smyth's father -- is spectacular, and I love that you're highlighting it here, Alyssa. I've read it 3 times now, and was somewhat obsessed with it myself as I've always been a lover of all things Woolf, and each time, it only resonates more deeply for me. Thank you for the review!
The film adaptation of “The Last September” came pretty close to replicating onscreen the images and sounds I had created in my imagination while reading the book. I enjoyed the look and the feel of the film, and the time period it evoked. The screenplay by John Banville made a few changes to Elizabeth Bowen’s storyline, two of which I enjoyed and one I didn’t. I liked not seeing the Naylors’ ancestral home go up in flames as it does in, I think, the very last sentence of the novel. I also liked watching Lois leave home in the company of Marda Norton. The two have formed a relationship by the end of the film, and Marda seems just the sort of older mentor figure Lois needs as she enters early adulthood and, what Bill Furlong would call, “the world of men”. It’s a more satisfying ending than having Lois go off to France with her ineffective cousin Laurence, as I recall is what happens in the novel.
What I didn’t like about Banville’s screenplay is the whole subplot towards the end involving Lois having an affair with the Irish rebel hiding out in the old mill. I gather the purpose was to show how connections between the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the Irish people were changing in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Uprising and the subsequent Irish War of Independence. The interactions between Lois and the rebel serve to illustrate Lois’s naivete, but it seemed entirely out-of-character for her to have a physical relationship with this young man she had known since childhood, but thought of as belonging to a lower class. Even when they played together as children, Lois was the miller and the young man and his sister were her “helpers”. This whole episode seemed clumsy and unnecessary, and served only to disrupt the flow of the story.
I'm so glad you liked 'All the Lives We've Ever Lived' - relieved actually - since I recommended it to you before I'd actually read it myself! But I've now read it and I enjoyed reading your review - it actually made me like the book more - reading your enthusiasm for it! While I was reading, I really enjoyed all the bits about To the Lighthouse and Woolf's own experience of losing a parent and how Smyth related them to her own experience, but began to run out of energy in the final quarter or so. But I suspect that had to do with my own headspace while reading rather than the book!
Anyway, always good to see Woolf well represented in your reading SITREP :)
You seemed to be keeping a bit of a low profile recently, but I figured you were just taking it easy over the summer or, at worst, having some back spasms. But food poisoning?! And ending up in the emergency department !? I'll refrain from any jokes about raw oysters. Anyway, I'm glad to hear you're better and feeling up to producing another mammoth newsletter; every one seems longer and more informative than the last.
I'm hoping you haven't given up your plans to visit The Mount later this year. (My copy of "Twilight Sleep" has a stamp indicating it was originally purchased at The Mount's bookstore.) After reading several Edith Wharton novels and reading Hermione Lee's biography, I'm really curious to see how the place looks. If the summer is too unpleasantly hot, a trip in the fall would be fine too. Anyway, take good care of yourself!
I’m slowly morphing back into something resembling a human! And interestingly it wasn’t oysters that took me out! I’m still surprised by how sick I got and how long it’s taken me to feel 100% normal again. If only we knew what made me sick in the first place.
I still plan to go to The Mount this summer. I’m trying to find a good day to go. So how, some way I will make it there! (I feel like I should start singing now but I’ll spare everyone around me from that torture 😆)
Katharine Smyth's memoir -- really more like literary criticism meets memoir and packaged in what feels like a love letter to both Woolf and Smyth's father -- is spectacular, and I love that you're highlighting it here, Alyssa. I've read it 3 times now, and was somewhat obsessed with it myself as I've always been a lover of all things Woolf, and each time, it only resonates more deeply for me. Thank you for the review!
The film adaptation of “The Last September” came pretty close to replicating onscreen the images and sounds I had created in my imagination while reading the book. I enjoyed the look and the feel of the film, and the time period it evoked. The screenplay by John Banville made a few changes to Elizabeth Bowen’s storyline, two of which I enjoyed and one I didn’t. I liked not seeing the Naylors’ ancestral home go up in flames as it does in, I think, the very last sentence of the novel. I also liked watching Lois leave home in the company of Marda Norton. The two have formed a relationship by the end of the film, and Marda seems just the sort of older mentor figure Lois needs as she enters early adulthood and, what Bill Furlong would call, “the world of men”. It’s a more satisfying ending than having Lois go off to France with her ineffective cousin Laurence, as I recall is what happens in the novel.
What I didn’t like about Banville’s screenplay is the whole subplot towards the end involving Lois having an affair with the Irish rebel hiding out in the old mill. I gather the purpose was to show how connections between the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the Irish people were changing in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Uprising and the subsequent Irish War of Independence. The interactions between Lois and the rebel serve to illustrate Lois’s naivete, but it seemed entirely out-of-character for her to have a physical relationship with this young man she had known since childhood, but thought of as belonging to a lower class. Even when they played together as children, Lois was the miller and the young man and his sister were her “helpers”. This whole episode seemed clumsy and unnecessary, and served only to disrupt the flow of the story.
Ooh I've always wanted to see an audiobook recording setup, that's super fun! I always try to imagine how I would narrate audiobooks, lol.
Glad you're better after your illness as well ❤️
Middlemarch!!!! <3333 I'm glad you liked Constant Reader!
I'm so glad you liked 'All the Lives We've Ever Lived' - relieved actually - since I recommended it to you before I'd actually read it myself! But I've now read it and I enjoyed reading your review - it actually made me like the book more - reading your enthusiasm for it! While I was reading, I really enjoyed all the bits about To the Lighthouse and Woolf's own experience of losing a parent and how Smyth related them to her own experience, but began to run out of energy in the final quarter or so. But I suspect that had to do with my own headspace while reading rather than the book!
Anyway, always good to see Woolf well represented in your reading SITREP :)