Review Four - book group at a distance

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Longer chapters made keeping apace on reading this book a little more challenging than our recent books but we did all manage to finish the book this weekend.

Mixing up our book genres is a great way to keep reading a fun activity and although I know I've read Alice more than once in the past it was like coming to a completely new story.

Kentishbookboy's thoughts are purple and mine (with interjections from Mr Norfolkbookworm this time) are in brown.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Synopsis:
Alice is spending time with her sister, and gets very bored listening to her read, so she begins to daydream. Alice's adventures lead her down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, where she meets an array of curious and strange characters - including the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle and the grinning Cheshire Cat.

Alice is sitting with her sister, who is reading quietly, and is bored - the book doesn't seem to have pictures or illustrations and so Alice isn't interested. All of a sudden Alice notices a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking at a pocket watch, run by. Alice follows the rabbit down a rabbit hole and falls into a weird and wonderful world.

Dilemma:
Alice lands in a world where everything is utter nonsense. From always being tea time, to talking animals, and playing card soldiers, Wonderland is completely unique and confusing!

Alice is in a world where nothing makes sense, however familiar it looks. Cats grin, babies turn into pigs and Alice can't stay the same size. How is she going to survive her adventures, keep her head and return to her own world?

Morals/Themes
Morals: Believe in yourself what you can achieve
Themes: Try to make sense of the world around you.

It is a quite hard to pick out a moral or theme from this book. You could say that don't eat or drink anything you are unsure of (and checking it doesn't say poison isn't quite enough!) is a good lesson to take. That it is ok to be curious is potentially another one, as is being open minded to anything out of the ordinary.

Recommendation: 
I'm not sure whether to recommend this book because even though it's complete nonsense, it can also be quite difficult to understand in places. 3 1/2 stars

Hard to put into words how I feel about this book, the story is great and magical but it did feel a little bit of a slog at times. I can't say that children's literature has 'dumbed down' since Alice was published - you only have to look at The Umbrella Mouse to see that hard topics are covered - but something has definitely changed, and to be honest I think for the better.
I can't really say that my opinions are formed because I am more familiar with the Disney adaptation of the story - the Cheshire cat in that terrified me as a child and I will still switch over if I see the cartoon on!
I think I give the book 4 stars overall as so much of the book does remain in our consciousness today, even if the prose was hard work!

What I find most interesting is that Kentishbookboy highlights that the story is a dream/daydream from the very start, but when chatting to Mr Norfolkbookworm he was talking about the abrupt ending to the book - not even thinking that this was simply because Alice wakes up!

We're back to something more contemporary with our next book as it is the Michael Morpurgo novella I Believe in Unicorns.

Theatre 2016: Review Twenty-Seven

Pride and Prejudice, Theatre Royal, Norwich. September 2016.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Norfolkbookworm had not read Pride and Prejudice before seeing this at the theatre. Even the brilliant Longbourn hadn't inspired me to read the original but when a friend asked me to see this with him I wasn't loathe even though I did rush into the theatre straight from work and was a little hassled.

I am so pleased that I went, like all good theatre not knowing the plot didn't matter as the story unfolded clearly and with great pacing. Not knowing the original novel I'm not sure what was cut, I'm guessing some smaller subplots, as what we got was very linear and straightforward - I expected Austen to be more complex.

The staging for me was a little fussy and at times I was a bit distracted by it - a revolve has been built on the stage and the main scenery was a metal staircase/balcony. The cast and the props came in and out through this and the movements were all highly stylised. Quite a lot of the run time did seem to be the stage revolving and furniture being moved.

This sounds like I'm ambivalent about the show, and I'm really not - these are all niggles. I liked the actors and also the use of the orginal text into the script. I also liked the feminist message that came through without it feeling out of time for the play. It has also finally inspired me to read the novel.

This is the second touring production from the Open Air Theatre that I've seen and enjoyed in Norwich - I must make an effort to see one in their original location next summer.

Responding to an Upstart Wren

Thinking about the classics

A close friend has just started a new blog which can be found here, and is well worth a read. She is much more erudite than 'wot i is' but we often end up debating books and the arts world in general and so when she posted her take on reading what are deemed 'classic books' it made me think a lot and here is my partner post to the Wren's.

Reading the classics

Although attending the same school as the Wren I don’t have quite the same recollections regarding English lessons, the fruits of being in a different form and then following an arts track through the years perhaps?

I don’t think we had to keep a book journal, but I feel that if I had done so similar comments about reading age appropriate books would have come my way. The TARDIS may not have featured on my list (I confess I was scared by Doctor Who as a child and so would never have sought out books on the topic) but there were certainly books set in schools, space and an awful lot of teen books with a didactic environmental message. 

There weren’t any classics however. 

I don’t know why.  As a younger child I raced through books such as Black Beauty, Heidi, Little Women, Pollyanna, Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, The Secret Garden etc., and then I repeatedly borrowed the more modern classics, by authors such as Arthur Ransome and Laura Ingalls Wilder, from the library. The language and style of these is as complicated as any contained in an adult classic novel so I don’t know why I didn’t naturally move on them.

When I did graduate on to books published for an adult market (not adult books, that’s another whole can of worms) I moved onto authors such as John Wyndham, and R F Delderfield before the more traditional teenage fare of Jilly Cooper and Virginia Andrews.  

I missed out the classics.

Like the Upstart Wren my GCSE English course didn’t introduce them to me, although my teacher did pick drama as our topic and I did meet Shakespeare (although I now realise that this was an abridged version and not the full play) and J B Priestley. 

Interestingly on asking my English teacher for book recommendations when stuck in a reading rut I don’t recall being pointed towards the classics at all – Gerald Durrell is the author who I know I discovered at this point. 

I didn’t continue with English past GCSE, focusing on languages – in which I enjoyed reading French and German classics, occasionally in the original language. 

Fast forward twenty years and I am now nearing completion of an MA in Shakespeare Studies. More interestingly I still haven’t read that many of what are considered classic novels. I always intend to but then get side tracked.  

So to many my reading does have a big hole in it. 

I love reading translations of classical Greek and Roman works, and also Elizabethan/Jacobean drama but then I skip forward about 300 years to my next love – rediscovered books from the early twentieth century. Publishers like Persephone Books and Virago are just made for me.  They  republish books, or authors, that were hugely popular in their day but have since slipped into obscurity. I don’t mean people like Nevil Shute (who I also like) but people like Elizabeth Bowen, R C Sherriff and then the well-known authors of children’s books like Richmal Crompton and Noel Streatfeild who also wrote for adults. 

I read an incredible amount of translated fiction, literary fiction and also narrative non-fiction. I  like reading historical books set in all eras so my avoidance of the classics seems even odder.  I’m not even that keen on TV adaptations of them, but the reasons for that is a post for another day! 

I do feel guilty for having this gaping hole in my literary life, I know I should read more of the classics and I don’t even have the excuse of ever being expected to read them and so rebelling against this edict.  But – and here is the big but READING SHOULD BE FUN, and although I do read a lot for improvement/education I do expect to enjoy what I read and so far that hasn’t been many of the classics. 

I will keep trying new ones but I feel my split personality when it comes to books will keep me either in antiquity or the near past, for some reason I seem to empathise with both settings far more than the period 1700-1900.

As my studies come to an end in the next few months I am hoping to have more time to respond to thought provoking blogs and statements from friends as well as statements in the press, but for now it will just be the Wren and the Bookworm replying to each other!