From Way, Way Back in Your Book Backlog

Extollager said:
#116 above should have been posted to the "From Way, Way Back in Your Book Backlog" thread, since it relates to a rereading, not to turning backlog into something read (for the first time). Oh well! My next comment on Blish's novel will appear there.
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No, no...I meant that #116 should have been posted to the "From Way, Way Baxck in Your Reading Life" subforum.
 
Extollager said:
Randy M. suggested that one read Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan (stories and studies of strange things) from beginning to end, rather than as a book to dip into --

Lafcadio Hearn's KWAIDAN

-- so I think I will do just that. I bought my Dover edition on 8 Nov. 1975 and have never read all of it, so it seems like a candidate for this subforum.

Once again -- this subforum is a place for anyone to write about getting around to books that he or she's had on hand for a long time (relative to his or her total reading life) and has decided to tackle. How you define "way, way back" is up to you; if you ask me, I'd say that, if you're 20, reading at last a book you acquired when you were 16 or younger might be something from "way, way back"; if you're 30, a book you acquired when you were 22 or before; if you're 40, a book from when you were in your late twenties, etc. If you're 60, you might be talking about reading something you acquired before your 40th birthday, or well before then -- something like that. I suspect that many of us having books we do mean to read but that have sort of "faded into the wallpaper" and that yet might be worth reading.

If there's anything interesting about the circumstances in which we acquired such books, that could be mentioned. My copy of Kwaidan came from a small used-book store, Blue Goose, in Ashland, Oregon. ....I never asked the woman, Liz Jones, who ran the store -- but maybe I should have -- just how she went about stocking it, given how often she turned up interesting out-of-the-way things, such as the Mirage Press edition of Robert Foster's Guide to Middle-earth with a nice wraparound dustjacket by Tim Kirk (not fully pictured here):
Guide_to_Middle-earth_Kirk.jpg


I brought that one home 26 Feb. 1972. I'd probably had to give her a down payment on it to hold it, as it's not too likely I'd have had enough ready cash. ...This was three years before Ballantine issued the 1975 Tolkien calendar, the Tim Kirk special. Here's Farmer Maggot's farm from that calendar...
maggots_farm.jpg
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Sometimes, if you dig out a book from way back in your backlog, it's almost like getting a new book. : )
 
I'm activating this thread so new folk can contribute. My current "new" reading launch is a book I bought ten years ago, which, for me, is not from way, way back in my book backlog, since I have books from 20. 30, 40+ years ago that I still haven't read. If you're younger than me, a book doesn't have to be from so long ago to count as "way way back" in your backlog. If you're in your twenties, five years or so might qualify!

The book I just mentioned is a 1912 selection of the letters of Robert Southey, who, I suppose, is now forgotten by pretty much everybody except students of British romanticism. He was the guy who, with Coleridge, was going to marry two Fricker sisters and go to America to start a "Pantisocratic" colony on the banks of the Susquehanna. Each fellow did marry his lady, but the colony never got started.
 
On 19 August 1979 at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, I bought Vol. 2 of Malcolm Muggeridge's memoir sequence Chronicles of Wasted Time, The Infernal Grove (title from Blake). I'd read the first one at about the same time, and now it seems the time has come to read this second volume. It's good. This volume resumes the story after MM's return from Russia, about which country he, as a Moscow-based journalist, had tried to inform British readers regarding the reality of misery under Stalinist collectivization in the 1930s. Soon he is off to India to witness late days of the Raj, then back to London to write for the Beaverbrook press till he resigns. Very readable, kept me up reading too late last week.
 
Ann Rice's Vampire Series (Interview, Vampire Lestat, etc.)
The Great Gatsby (I know, for shame!)
The Picture of Dorian Gray

I'm sure there are more, but I'm not at home and therefor running entirely on memory.
 
Oh... I keep on meaning to read The Sword of Truth series (have had the complete series for about three years now) but well...
 
Steven Sorrels said:
Definitely give it a try. I read the entire thing in one extended sitting. (I was working an overnight shift at a festival at the time and had time to kill.) :ROFLMAO:
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I will I will... says I,
Intending to right at that time,
To do as asked,
But deep in the depths,
Of my mind,
I know another sparkling novel
Will catch my eye
And lead me over the Downy Moors
Forgetting all but the next page.
 
I've begun reading Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (purchased 2 July 1991) and Mary Butts's The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (the complete 1989 version), which here in North Dakota I received by mail from Blackwell's of Oxford on 28 Dec. 1989, having ordered a copy after seeing a review in the Times Literary Supplement. The Johnson is lively and makes me want to read more that's connected with this period, notably the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian. The Butts seems like a penultimate draft, but a pleasure to read. Mary Butts was the great-granddaughter of Thomas Butts, who was William Blake's patron, and Blake artwork was displayed in the house in which she grew up; but so far she mostly writes about her girlhood's imaginative formation near Poole. I believe she made a huge mess of her life but had got beyond some of her problems when she came to work on this book, her last, which was published posthumously in an expurgated edition. This is perhaps the only thing by Butts I have read, but that TLS review was enticing, and there's the Blake angle. Then this past summer I read Grevel Lindop's new biography of Charles Williams (author of The Place of the Lion, All Hallows' Eve, etc.); it turned out Butts and Williams corresponded for the last three years of her life before she died before her time in her forties. I gather she wrote some stories of the supernatural, and she writes of seeing a faerie- or leprechaun-type of person when she was little.

She mentions this picture by Blake:
Newton-WilliamBlake.jpg
 
There is a very large part of my collection I simply haven't got around to reading yet.
To be honest I think some of my long untouched piles of books are starting to turn into coal!
 
Back in the '70s (I think) I picked up a $.95 pb of Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher, a mystery novel featuring his recurring characters Lieutenant Terrance Marshall and Sister Ursula. It's a neat locked room mystery that probably wouldn't be remembered today except for it's interest to s.f. fans: Several of the characters are amalgamations of the s.f. writers of the day. One seems to be a stand-in for Jack Williamson (maybe Clifford Simak?), a couple seems to stand in for Kuttner and Moore, though the Kuttner figure might also include a bit of Heinlein, and so on. It's Boucher using his knowledge of a sub-culture to both promote the sub-culture and make a living. Fun, light read if you ever get a chance to do so.


Randy M.
 
I've started The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen a few times but never got very far, the same goes for The Time Traveler's Wife, Atonement and The Kite Runner.

Ulysses is here somewhere and I bought a huge box full of Ruth Rendell and Val McDermid books ten years ago that I've barely touched.
 
Now reading Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, a copy of this edition

md19625489452.jpg


of which I bought on 26 June 1991.
 
I ordered a copy of the Everyman paperback of The Mabinogion from Parker and Son in England, and presumably picked it up (30 Nov. 1976) at the post office in Ashland, Oregon, where I lived. After a while I began to read it. This edition (Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones) is eleven stories, starting with the Four Branches (Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan, Math), which I read for the first time 30 Apr.-1 May 1999 (and again 3-4 August 2011). Today I read, for the first time, the last of the book's stories, "Gereint Son of Erbin." So I've read the whole book now.
 
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