Books, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Latest Book Discoveries

With so many books and so little time, it helps to have a little guidance. It also helps when two or even three books can be read simultaneously – thus saving the reader valuable time for even more books.

Here then is my current recommended reading list. Something for everyone here.

Old Favorites Rediscovered

The Old Bookcase by Friedrich Frotzel 1929

Steppenwolf Hall – A German man has a spiritual crisis in an old house in Wiltshire.

Gaudy Knight – An Arthurian legend of fashionable armour set in an Oxford College

(This was later re-published as Gaudy Nightwood also known as Tender is the Nightwood –  Glamorous lesbian goths go drinking in the South of France.)

Midnight’s Children of Dynmouth – An allegory of colonial rule set in a seaside town.

The Lord of the Rings of Saturn – A fantasy walking tour of middle earth

Rogue MailHunted by enemy agents and the police, a man goes postal in Dorset

Howard’s End of the Affair – How a bookcase ended a wartime romance

Fahrenheit 451 Years of Solitude  – Just before his death, a South American colonel discovers how to burn books

The Glass Bead Game of Thrones – A young man advances in a world torn apart by competing fantasies plus dragons,

The Martian Chronicles of a Death Foretold – Even after fair warning, Americans cannot stop the end of the world

Gone With the Wind in the Willows – In which the wild wooders set fire to Atlanta and Toad declares he will never go hungry again.

Lorna Dune – A feudal interstellar romance set in a west country moorland 

The Spy Who Came in From Cold Comfort Farm – An everyday story of double-crossing country folk. 

The Death of the Heart of Darkness at Noon – An orphan disappears in Africa before being killed in a Stalinist purge.

And Now a Few Books on my TBR (To Be Read) Pile

Rene Magritte:  La Lectrice Soumise. 1928

Which one should I read next? Can anyone help out by providing a simple summary of what any of them are about?

Anna Karen In A Pickle

Middle March to a Different Drummer

Things Fall A Part from that Mrs. Lincoln

Invisible Mann Booker Prize

The Old Man and The Sea, The Sea 

Pale Fire Next Time

The Handmaid’s Tale of Two Cities 

Little Drummer Girl With a Pearl Earring

Barchester Towers of Trebizond

Clockwork Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

Strangers on a Train to Pakistan

Rejected and Neglected

Some books that weren’t for me:

Paradise Lost Horizon – This is the poem that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the Garden of Eden was located in the mountains of Tibet. 

Giovanni’s Room at the Top – Upwardly mobile homosexual having affairs in a tower block in Paris.

Block Beauty – How the city got another brutalist skyscraper.

Gulliver’s Travels with Charley – A voyage across America accompanied by a poodle.

Lord Jim of the Flies (I did not enjoy this dystopian seafaring yarn but I did enjoy the sequel: Lucky Lord Jim of the Flies where our hero quits the sea for a college job and delivers the last word on Merrie England before passing out. 

Happy reading everyone! Do you have any new titles to suggest? 

Girls of Lincoln Bench School study their reading lesson. Near Ontario, Malheur County, Oregon. 1939. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
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26 thoughts on “Latest Book Discoveries

  1. I wish I’d had your guide handy sooner. Howard’s End of the Affair – Had I known there was a tale about a bookcase ending a wartime romance, I would’ve had second thoughts about purchasing this particular article of furniture for myself. I recently found The Tenant of Mansfield Park to be very gothically gripping.

  2. I think “The Handmaid’s Tale of Two Cities” is that book where the Republic of Gilead finds itself in the midst of the French Revolution and some women are forced into servitude only to be rescued at the last minute by one man who looks like the exact copy of another! My other favourite books are “Never Let Me Go Tell It On the Mountain” and “A Lost Lady Susan”.

  3. I kid you not – a friend swears that when she worked in a bookshop, one person came in and asked for ‘1984 Charing Cross Road’ and ‘Dining Out in Paris and London’. Might have been the victim of a windup.

  4. I can’t remember if you saw this but my post ‘Titles in search of books’ was similarly inspired by your notion: https://wp.me/p2oNj1-3tY

    The title that had one reader spluttering into their tea was “The Angry Caterpillar: the diary of a butterfly larva with IBS.” You may be safer with the others — I found putting my drink down helped when reading your post… (Btw, I rather fancy ‘Lorna Dune’ — maybe as a film on Netflix though.)

    1. Ah! Thanks. Yes. I wrote this post after finding some of the titles in an old google doc sandbox.
      And now I see I must have written that after reading your post and tucked it away. Because – Lo and behold! There is most of my post in my reply to yours! Oh well – worse things happen in “The Wide Sargasso Sea of Troubles”.

      1. 😁 I’m currently enjoying ‘Slaughterhouse-Five on a Treasure Island’ (Kirrin Island gets blasted to smithereens) and ‘At the Mountains of Moominsummer Madness’ (when Cthulhu visits Snufkin and Snufkin is not impressed).

        1. Sound like excellent reads! As for Kirren Island – one of Uncle Quentin’s experiments gone awry? George will be in such a sulk now.
          And while we are on the topic of the beloved Enid:
          “The Naughtiest Girl in the School for Scandal”

          Here’s a time-saving combo: “Giovanni’s Room With a View From the Bridge Over the River Kwai.”
          Alternative: “The Enormous Room at the Top Girls of Slender Means”

  5. A few more for your bookshelf

    The God of Small Things Fall Apart
    The God of Small Things They Carried
    Twenty Thousand leagues Under the Sea of Stories
    Around the World in Eighty Days of Wine and Roses
    Women in Love in the Time of Cholera
    Light in August is a Wicked Month
    A High Wind in Jamaica Inn
    The Death of the Heart of Darkness
    Watership Down and Out in Paris and London
    Quiet Flows the Don Quixote
    Half of a Yellow Sun Also Rises
    Cloud Atlas Shrugged
    Never Let Me Go Tell it on the Mountain

  6. Fall of the House of Cards

    Little Bleak House on the Prairie

    The Good the Bad and the Beautiful and Damned.

    I think book titles will be crashing in my head all day!

    1. I know what you mean. Once they start up the brain-rattling can get quite intrusive! And it only gets worse if you let poems creep in;
      “The Sound and the Fury of Aerial Bombardment”
      “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like The Sun Also Rises”

      “The Little Prince Caspian”

      …. and how about this classic

      “The Chicken Soup Murder on the Orient Express”

  7. ….and then there’s MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL UNDER THE SUN (good and evil being about the only things that will grow in the midnight sun — and I’m not too sure about the good).

  8. Treasure Island of Dr Moreau
    Victorian gothic

    Forever War of the Worlds
    H G Wells take on the Vietnam war

    1. The Mysterious End of the Affair at Styles
      –unpublished collaboration between Graham Greene and Agatha Christie;
      well, – I suppose death would be one end of an affair!

      1. Excellent! Some good reads there. See also:

        “4.50 from Paddington Bear “- Stuffed animal sees a murder from a train.

        And thinking of Christie mysteries, here are some doubleheaders:

        “The Sittaford Mystery of the Blue Train”
        “Appointment with Death Comes at the End”
        “Mrs.McGinty’s Dead Man’s Folly”

        And this one has the extra treat of political intrigue in the sandwich;
        “Peril at End House of Cards on the Table”

        And here’s a cross with Dorothy L. Sayers:
        “Death in the Clouds of Witness”

    1. Of course. Jeeves would prove most useful if ever one’s Khyber were in any kind of peril.
      And they bring to mind “A Farewell to Arms and the Man” – a little-known collaboration between Hemingway and Shaw. A poignant and heartwarming dramatic tale of wartime romance and amputation.

Comment. Your thoughts welcome.