BRITISH AUTHOR CHALLENGE DECEMBER - MANTEL & WODEHOUSE

HILARY MANTEL

P.G. WODEHOUSE

Hilary Mantel is the only female writer to win the Booker Prize twice.

Details of her work can be seen here:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/hilary-mantel/

I will read :



Bring Up the Bodies

P.G. Wodehouse possibly the most renowned humorist of the 20th Century is best remembered for his creations Jeeves and Wooster.

Details of his prodigious output can be seen here:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/p-g-wodehouse/

I will read:



Very Good, Jeeves

I have The Girl in Blue unread on my shelves so that will be my Wodehouse book for December. I'm planning to read A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel. I'll pick up a library copy tomorrow afternoon.

I've been waiting all year for Wodehouse! Off to read some Psmith.

I haven't read anything by P. G. Wodehouse. Ever. However, earlier this fall I saw a movie about him titled Wodehouse in Exile. It was part of a series of BBC produced movies that the local art house movie theater put on to showcase the British side of WWII. It was a very good movie and I would recommend it. I am sure that it is available on Netflix. It also showed how dependent Wodehouse was on his American wife. She made most of the decisions for both of them and when he was cut off from her he was barely able to function. Now I want to read a biography of him and find out more about him.

I'm probably reading or listening to Bring Up the Bodies. I've got the audio of The Inimitable Jeeves ready to go after I finish The March for the AAC.

I read Honeysuckle Cottage as part of the Ghostly collection by Audrey Nieffenegger. Laugh out loud funny, plus lots of snorting. Beyond saying that a thriller writer inherits the home of his romance writing aunt, I wouldn't want to spoil it for you. I came across it published separately as one of those little editions along with three others.

I'm planning to read Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. It's one of the few of her chunksters that I haven't read yet.

I need some easy reading/listening this month to accompany the second half of Gravity's Rainbow, so I got the short audio of The Inimitable Jeeves and consider Mantel's Learning to Talk. Read Thank you, Jeeves years ago for the 1001 challenge and didn't like it very much, but I find I'm enjoying this one much more. Great audio material, and the humor imo works better with short stories than with a longer plot.

#10
I read Place of Greater Safety earlier this year. I will let you get started before I say anything about it. Just remember - it is historical fiction - and with historical fiction the reader knows how the story is going to end.

>12 benitastrnad: hmm, intriguing.

I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for the December choice. LOVED IT! Great way to finish my BA reading year!

Finished My Man Jeeves a few days ago and started A Place of Greater Safety yesterday. It is my first book written by Mantel. I am so far behind every trend in the reading world and pretty much every other world, too.

Back in 2012 there was a group read of Wolf Hall. Out of that read there was a tutored read hosted by Chatterbox for Ilana (Smiler 69). I lurked on that thread and found it fascinating. The thread is now inactive, but I kept it starred because I knew that I wanted to read Wolf Hall at some point and would want to refer to that tutored read. Here is the link to it. It should help those who are reading Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Chatterbox said that people were welcome to lurk at the time, and since it was three years ago, I figured that she wouldn't mind if I brought the link into this thread. If that is not OK, just let me know and I will delete this message.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/137481

Very Good, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

I purposely chose Wodehouse for December for an enjoyable wind-down to the year and I was not disappointed.

I am always worried that his writing will read as dated but it remains timeless. The eleven stories here all are marked by PG in his characteristically deft strokes. Bertie remains a fool, all the more brilliantly exposed by narrating the tales himself whilst Jeeves invariably comes to the rescue appearing always to throw Wooster further in the soup in the process.

Great fun; no sex (as such), no violence (as such) and no coarse language; a genuine slice of a better, if madcap, world.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

With this novel Hilary Mantel became the first lady to win the Booker Prize on two occasions and it is hard to dispute her right to have done so on a reading of this.

I think this is a more accessible work than its predecessor but not necessarily a superior work of literary fiction. Written in a curious but effective not quite first person but not third person style, we can see the somewhat opportunistic and reluctant machinations of Cromwell as they develop. It is very interestingly pointed out and may hit an historical bulls-eye that it also contained a settling of accounts with those assisting in the demise of Cardinal Wolsey to who Cromwell was indebted.

Henry is pictured as pliable, friable and decidedly unstable with a coldness of purpose towards his lustfully selfish ends that chills even from the remove of almost half a millennium. Anne out schemes and over-reaches herself and her incredulity at the suddeness of her demise and the web she is caught in is wonderfully achieved.

Despite knowing the fate awaiting our main protagonist in the projected last part of the trilogy, we look forward to see how Mantel manages to takes us to that end and whether she can bag three-in-a-row Bookers in so doing.

Recommended.

#18
That's the problem with historical fiction - we know how the story ends. And if somebody is writing about a person or event, it most often ends badly.

Finished Mantel's The Giant O'Brien tonight. I liked her style but I didn't like the book; it was kind of like listening to someone who speaks well but has absolutely nothing to say worth listening to.

>15 Fourpawz2: - Shame on me! I remembered, yesterday that I have read a book by Mantel before - Fludd a few years ago. How could I have forgotten that, I don't know.

I read Leave it to Psmith this month, and had a lot of fun with it. Some laugh-out-loud moments, in the best Wodehouse style.

I finished The Girl in Blue by Wodehouse last night. It's one of his later works, and I was glad to see that he hadn't lost his touch.

Well, I finally finished The Inimitable Jeeves ! What a waste of time - no lovable characters, very basic story line - never again!

>24 LoisB: I hope the audio is better than that! If not, I may put on Christmas music for the drive.

"You wrong me, relative. Except at times of special revelry, I am exceedingly moderate in my potations. A brace of cocktails, a glass of wine at dinner and possibly a liqueur with the coffee- that is Bertram Wooster."

-The Code of the Woosters

Thanks, to the BAC, I am finally reading my very first Wodehouse and I like it. I am not sure if this is the best place to start with him but it was available at the library, in an Everyman's Library edition.

Just finished Quick Service by Wodehouse, a complete novel included in my book The Most of P. G. Wodehouse. I think it would have made an excellent radio play--lots of people going in & out, quick one-liners & general controlled chaos. Sort of the Marx Brothers meet Fawlty Towers. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the collections in this volume--they'll make great breaks between long serious tomes.

>24 LoisB: Sorry that he flopped so badly for you Lois. I guess he is definitely not for you because that one is one of his most highly regarded Jeeves books.

I need to review The Inimitable Jeeves which I finished on audio the day after Christmas. I'm kind of waiting until I have a better Internet connection when I get home tomorrow. It won't receive a very high rating. I found it rather tiresome. I suspect the biggest problem is that it was likely original a serialized story so there are character development aspects that keep getting rehashed from chapter to chapter for those who may have missed the earlier installments.

I finished Wodehouse's Mike yesterday, a collection of the short novels Mike at Wrykyn and Enter Psmith. I have taken Psmith as my idol and I aspire to be just like him.

I've read this one before, but was once again surprised to at how much I enjoyed it considering the amount of cricket that is being played and discussed. I wouldn't know a googly if I was struck by one*, but I found Wodehouse's descriptions of the games as thrilling as a James Bond car chase.




*I am actually so ignorant of cricket that I'm not even sure if a googly is something that could strike a person.