What are you reading?

[Philidor]

TH White: falconer, medievalist, Freudian, alcoholic, ‘homosexual and sado-masochist’ (Sylvia Townsend Warner) the product of an alcoholic father and an emotionally frigid mother, described by JK Rowling as strongly influential on the Harry Potter books -- Wart is ‘Harry’s spiritual ancestor’.

[Florestan]

Another all time favourite of mine.

Coincidentally:

Originally Posted by Florestan

Harry Potter


Dmitri Shostakovich


Sylvia Townsend Warner

[stephen w]

Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen, for the second time. One of my favourite biographers. She is very good at evoking a period, and did this very well also with her Pepys biography

[micrologus]

[Herzeleide]

This arrived t'other day. It's very good, though the proof-readers need sacking, because there are several mistakes throughout, some of which affect the meaning (or rather, obscure it).

[birabiro]

I love they way Gogol makes characters out of objects, like the General's nose, or the sleeve he sees walking down the street. The short stories are wonderful; a witch steals the stars on Christmas Eve and hides them in here sleeve!

[Herzeleide]

I saw this in Birmingham central library.

[Florestan]

Oh brilliant! Fill us in on all the juicy bits as you go.

[stephen w]

"Shorelands" Winter Diary
by C.F. Tunnicliffe

Full of lovely watercolour sketches of birds in flight above Anglesey estuaries, against a backdrop of the Snowdon mountains, this is a text quite similar to the 'Nature Notes' to be found in the Guardian and Times. (A friend who spent many years in Bhutan says she always read the Nature Notes, they gave her a nostalgic feeling of home.)

A review Ive found says:

'Found among Tunnicliffe's papers after his death in 1979 but only recently recognized, this manuscript was written as the sequel to "Shorelands Summer Diary". It completes his portrait of a year in the life of the natural history of Anglesey. From Tunnicliffe's practice of dating all his sketches, it has been possible to date the illustrations for this work in the collection at the Oriel Ynys Mon, the spectacular new gallery in Anglesey. Charles Tunnicliffe was one of the greatest British bird artists. In his hands, the written and painted observation of natural events combine to create a picture in colour, line and words of a lovely part of Wales, sanctuary to a profusion of birds in a glorious landscape of mountain, cliff and estuary'.

I first saw Tunnicliffe's work in my childhood paperback of Tarka the Otter.

[Florestan]

That sounds beautiful.