I can understand how you feel - the language is very complicated and ornate. perhpas once you’re through with Polanski’s Macbeth, you could try Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944)? That’s such a great film: the begining is really memrobable. His Hamlet (1948) is also worth seeking out…
i have read it too and have understood a lot of things about what’s going on
nothing from books only movies
Heart of Darkness by Conrad at the moment; the atmosphere of mysterious darkness is fantastic.
I just started reading Christopher Frayling’s Spaghetti Westerns 2006 edition. I like it so far. Its a pretty hefty book almost like a spaghetti western “bible”. I’m sure most of you are already familiar with it.
Eh, I found it a bit boring.
I got this book for Christmas from my parents. I’ve only started it, but my impression is it’s a huge brick of a book and not structured very well. I guess that’s inevitable when a scholar tries to write a comprehensive text about a subject which is relatively untouched, the way spaghettis were when Frayling wrote his book. I found what I read quite readable, though.
At the moment I am reading this book while on vacation:
Just finished Rbert B. Parker’s Appaloosa yesterday. Very god read. Easy, quick paced, and highly enjoyable. The movie was definitely a very faithful adaptation. But it did take a few short cuts and cut certain intricacies with the characters. For example, in the film by Ed Harris, the witness against Bragg (played by Jeremy Irons) is one of his ranch hands. In the book, it is a deputy who survived a shooting at the ranch at the opening. Just but one example.
I liked the book a bit better because it is more expanded than what you see on the film. The book expands on the movie so to speak. Though it was of course written before.
I tried starting Charles Portis’s True Grit but my eagerness to continue with the Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch novels was too much so I picked up Resolution, the 2nd book, and started strong. Looks to be even better than Appaloosa. Recommended.
a few days ago I started reading “North and South” by Elisabeth Gaskell. At first I thought the language used is a bit old-fashioned. Also as far as I’ve read I’d say it’s rather slow paced. However it’s quite enjoyable and the plot is very interesting. Has anyone read it already?
I decided to have a break from more some more “serious” books (Tolstoy, Grass, Fulkner) and I’m wallowing in the sex, violence and seductive glamor of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. High class pulp fiction it may be, but it’s a lot of fun to read.
[quote=“korano, post:327, topic:1204”]Just finished Rbert B. Parker’s Appaloosa yesterday. Very god read. Easy, quick paced, and highly enjoyable. The movie was definitely a very faithful adaptation. But it did take a few short cuts and cut certain intricacies with the characters. For example, in the film by Ed Harris, the witness against Bragg (played by Jeremy Irons) is one of his ranch hands. In the book, it is a deputy who survived a shooting at the ranch at the opening. Just but one example.
I liked the book a bit better because it is more expanded than what you see on the film. The book expands on the movie so to speak. Though it was of course written before.
I tried starting Charles Portis’s True Grit but my eagerness to continue with the Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch novels was too much so I picked up Resolution, the 2nd book, and started strong. Looks to be even better than Appaloosa. Recommended.[/quote]
Quite a coincidence Korano. I’m currently half way through the third Cole and Hitch book, ‘Brimstone’ and so far it is just as much fun as the first two. Both of which were excellent in my opinion. Western genre fiction at its best.
“Mysterious America” by Loren Coleman. I’ve been reading a chapter a night since Christmas before I go to bed.
Killer in the Rain - a collection of Raymond Chandler’s earliest short stories from the likes of Black Mask magazine.
These are fascinating nuggets of proto-noir, as fluid, vivid and laconic as Chandler’s novels. He utilised many plot elements, characters, incidents and even entire passages from these stories for his most famous works, although the narrator is never referred to as Marlowe (it’s the same voice, though, unmistakably).
I only intended to dip into it, read a couple of stories now, some more another time, but they quickly got me hooked.
One odd thing. Marlowe - or Dalmas/Carmady, as he’s identified here - is commonly regarded as an urban knight, a man of strong ethics in a world where morals are for sale. And that’s the case here. Yet he can be vicious in his judgements, saying of one particular rich bitch that he disapproves of, “I hope she gets raped on the way home.” And this in front of another woman (who doesn’t rebuke him for his comment).
Great stuff, Starblack!
That KILLER IN THE RAIN collection is one of my favorites.
Currently, I am re-reading some of the novels from the “Buchanan” Western series by Jonas Ward.
Just started with the first one, THE NAME’S BUCHANAN, last night. This book is the basis for the classic Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Western, BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE.
I agree, this is an excellent collection. You raise a good point about his hero’s (at least here) moral ambivalence. I think Chandler was still learning in some of these stories and this immorality might have come from being inspired by Dashiel Hammett’s cold Continental Op.
Absolutely agree, amigo!
Quite possibly.
There’s always a risk of judging a work of art from an earlier period (and/or a different cultural climate) according to “enlightened” modern standards, and I don’t mean to do that here. But the casual misogyny (and racial stereotyping) that runs through these tales, and others of their ilk, is striking even so.
I think my favourite story so far, incidentally, is Bay City Blues. Our man get sapped a few times (of course) in the course of a grubby murder investigation in one of those out-of-town locales that Chandler renders so starkly (if a little smugly at times).
[quote=“Starblack, post:332, topic:1204”]Killer in the Rain - a collection of Raymond Chandler’s earliest short stories from the likes of Black Mask magazine.
These are fascinating nuggets of proto-noir, as fluid, vivid and laconic as Chandler’s novels. He utilised many plot elements, characters, incidents and even entire passages from these stories for his most famous works, although the narrator is never referred to as Marlowe (it’s the same voice, though, unmistakably).
I only intended to dip into it, read a couple of stories now, some more another time, but they quickly got me hooked.
One odd thing. Marlowe - or Dalmas/Carmady, as he’s identified here - is commonly regarded as an urban knight, a man of strong ethics in a world where morals are for sale. And that’s the case here. Yet he can be vicious in his judgements, saying of one particular rich bitch that he disapproves of, “I hope she gets raped on the way home.” And this in front of another woman (who doesn’t rebuke him for his comment).[/quote]
If you’re on a Chandler kick at the moment you might like the season they are running on Radio 4 currently mate.
Looks like they’re running for a few weeks in total.
Thanks Phil - my father-in-law also alerted me to those broadcasts.
Did you hear the Radio 4 broadcast of A Hat, A Coat and A Gun on Thursday morning? It was about Chandler’s life, and it really was quite informitive.
Missed that, JW. I’ll try to catch up with online.
Incidentally, I just came across some waspish comments by Chandler about his contemporary James M. Cain. Chandler makes no attempt to disguise his disdain:
“I hope the day will come when I don’t have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way.”