It is published in paperback by Faber.This week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. My party trick is that if you read me one line, I can usually tell you the next (this is not a party trick that is in great demand). I’ve never ceased to find it perfect so funny, so sharp, and every reading offers something new: a new patterning, a new joke. When the world looks bleak and chaotic, I read Jane Austen’s Emma. It salutes Black Americans who “were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn – and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new”. James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket – the collection he built, two years before his death, of his essays from 1948-85. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. It was like living for a week on champagne. I read The Count of Monte Cristo three years ago. I can still see that he’s a titan – but, like Oscar Wilde said: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” When I was a teen I was bewitched by Dickens I loved the atmosphere he conjured, the feeling of licking the smog off the windows of London. I love everything she wrote, for its burning generosity you could read this a dozen times and not come to the end of its originality, its moral intelligence, its gargantuan flair.
It’s not as consistent as the Cromwell trilogy, but the highs are even higher. Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. I returned to it as an adult it’s my vote for the true great American novel.
I was too young when I first tried to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights shows what can be done with children’s fiction how bold and sweeping it can be. I have no real memory of not hoping to be a writer as soon as I understood that books were not grown from orchards of papery trees, it was what I wanted. The book that made me want to be a writer Toni Morrison’s Beloved gets my vote for the true great American novel
I had not believed, until then, that footnotes could be so funny that technical innovation could be such a source of joy. He was transformative: sexy, funny, wildly strange, galvanic in his refusal to bring anything less than his full intelligence to his days. So many of the visions of sex and desire we were offered felt bewildering to me in their restrictive thinness. I fell in love with John Donne’s poetry as a teen.
0 kommentar(er)
