What I'm Reading

[poliphilo]

I was glad to finish Wuthering Heights. Great book. Emotionally draining.

I'm now reading Algernon Blackwood during the day and Rebecca West at night. 

Blackwood was a prolific writer of short stories.  Some are embarrassingly clumsy, some are rather wonderful. He's at his most convincing when he's out in wild nature- the Canadian lakes and forests by choice. I just finished The Damned- a haunted house story that fits somewhere in the continuum between The Turn of the Screw and the Haunting of Hill House and is good enough to stand with either. 

The only thing I'd previously read of Rebecca West's was The meaning of Treason, her excellent non-fiction study of Lord Haw-Haw and other mid 20th century traitors. The book I'm reading now, The Fountain Overflows, is a novel- first published in 1957- about a magical Edwardian childhood. 

Comments

[chochiyo_sama]

You keep reminding me that I need to reread this book as an adult. I read it as a teenager and found it ponderous and silly. I wanted to slap the both of them, Heathcliff and Katherine. Silly, immature, pompous gits, the both of them.

Maybe as an adult, I will find them more palletable. I was a pretty silly, immature, pompous git myself in my youth.

[poliphilo]

Heathcliff and Kathy are pretty dislikeable- and so are most of the supporting cast. The characters who aren't vindictive and cruel are weak and silly. It's a powerful book- and a highly original one- but I don't particularly like it.