March 2021
What is your favourite novel about reading or your favourite where books play an important role?
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5 Mar 2021, 5:01 p.m.
Chapter 6 of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford - a letter to a lost son Peter:
They had returned it unopened; and unopened it had remained ever since, having been inadvertently put by among the other letters of that time. This is it:—
“My dearest Peter,—You did not think we should be so sorry as we are, I know, or you would never have gone away. You are too good. Your father sits and sighs till my heart aches to hear him. He cannot hold up his head for grief; and yet he only did what he thought was right. Perhaps he has been too severe, and perhaps I have not been kind enough; but God knows how we love you, my dear only boy. Come back, and make us happy, who love you so much. I know you will come back.”
But Peter did not come back. That spring day was the last time he ever saw his mother’s face. The writer of the letter—the last—the only person who had ever seen what was written in it, was dead long ago; and I, a stranger, not born at the time it was written, was the one to open it.
They had returned it unopened; and unopened it had remained ever since, having been inadvertently put by among the other letters of that time. This is it:—
“My dearest Peter,—You did not think we should be so sorry as we are, I know, or you would never have gone away. You are too good. Your father sits and sighs till my heart aches to hear him. He cannot hold up his head for grief; and yet he only did what he thought was right. Perhaps he has been too severe, and perhaps I have not been kind enough; but God knows how we love you, my dear only boy. Come back, and make us happy, who love you so much. I know you will come back.”
But Peter did not come back. That spring day was the last time he ever saw his mother’s face. The writer of the letter—the last—the only person who had ever seen what was written in it, was dead long ago; and I, a stranger, not born at the time it was written, was the one to open it.
4 Mar 2021, 10:57 a.m.
Michael Ende's "The Neverending Story" is a powerful example!
“If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger--
If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early--
If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless--
If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.”
“If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger--
If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early--
If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless--
If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.”
4 Mar 2021, 6:56 a.m.
Penelope Fitzgerald's The bookshop - Thinking about why we need bookshops has also been very topical over the past year.
4 Mar 2021, 6:30 a.m.
Well, there is obviously David Copperfield.
Also interesting in view of 'Reading for Life' by Phil Davis. See also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VttpPk25OaA
Also interesting in view of 'Reading for Life' by Phil Davis. See also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VttpPk25OaA