Recent birthday acquisitions:
📖 Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life by Ralph Pite
📖 The Poetical Works of John Keats
#UniteAgainstBookBans and #LetUtahRead
p. 78: '[Hardy] could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some.'
p. 63: '[Hardy] went several times to hear Dickens read... and to hear John Stuart Mill speak on the hustings, and to the House of Commons to listen to Lord Palmerston. When Palmerston died, he got tickets for the funeral in Westminster Abbey, very conscious of the fact that the great man had stood in the House with Pitt, Fox, Sheridan and Burke. It was the personal link always that stirred Hardy's interest in history.'
p. xxii-xxiii: 'Hardy was a writer who made many of his best efforts out of incidents and stories he had collected and put aside, sights stored up, feelings he had kept to himself, anger he had not shown to the world. [As a poet] he is like an archeologist uncovering objects that have not been seen for many decades, bringing them into the light, examining them, some small pieces, some curious bones and broken bits, and some shining treasures.' ⬇️
panRead these Hardy novels before this one: Tess, Jude, Mayor of Casterbridge, Return of the Native, Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Trumpet Major, The Well Beloved. and don‘t read this one. It has all the Hardy hallmarks of astronomy, earnest lovers, and an unyielding English lanscape and social constructs that shape the fate of earnest lovers. But, the writing is clumsy, the science talk is too much, and the characters are dull.
panIt was a relatively short book by page numbers, but it took a while to get through. A love square with Anne considering Festus, Bob, and John. She should have picked John. Most worthy of them all. But no, she picked the player, his brother. And then such a depressing ending with Uncle Benjy dying and finding out that John dies a few years later. On top of all this, I don‘t know why they all thought Anne was such a catch. She was just coy.
Recent acquisitions by Robert Gittings:
📖 Young Thomas Hardy
📖 Thomas Hardy's Later Years
I already had these in a somewhat battered combined edition so I was beyond excited to find these beautiful first edition hardbacks with dust jacket covers at a local charity shop for only a few dollars! To whoever donated them - thank you! They will be cherished for a lifetime!
#UniteAgainstBookBans #LetUtahRead
