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emma_in_dreamVirginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925)
I was lucky enough to get a book voucher as a baby shower gift and I spent it on me, me, me. Having reread my collections of Woolf essays I thought it would behoove me to read her *Common Reader* which, after all, contained the essays she thought were the best and most cohesive.
And she was right. It really is a very good collection. Astute, amusing, insightful though not her feminist best.
Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine (1956)
My favourite Renault of all time, this is the story of Alexias, a young Athenian of good family who comes of age at the end of the Peloponnesian wars. He narrates the story of his love for Lysis and his studies with Sokrates. The well developed relationship between Lysis and Alexias is one of my favourite parts of the novel.
The other aspect I really like is the way Renault conveys the terrible feeling of living at the dying days of an empire or way of life. The only other novel I can think of that does it so well is, cough, Margaret Mitchell’s *Gone with the Wind*. Only *The Last of the Wine* does it without the racism and the apologies for the Klan. It is incredibly moving to see the slow decay of their whole way of life, their whole society, brought on by the hubris and over-extension in war.
I was lucky enough to get a book voucher as a baby shower gift and I spent it on me, me, me. Having reread my collections of Woolf essays I thought it would behoove me to read her *Common Reader* which, after all, contained the essays she thought were the best and most cohesive.
And she was right. It really is a very good collection. Astute, amusing, insightful though not her feminist best.
Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine (1956)
My favourite Renault of all time, this is the story of Alexias, a young Athenian of good family who comes of age at the end of the Peloponnesian wars. He narrates the story of his love for Lysis and his studies with Sokrates. The well developed relationship between Lysis and Alexias is one of my favourite parts of the novel.
The other aspect I really like is the way Renault conveys the terrible feeling of living at the dying days of an empire or way of life. The only other novel I can think of that does it so well is, cough, Margaret Mitchell’s *Gone with the Wind*. Only *The Last of the Wine* does it without the racism and the apologies for the Klan. It is incredibly moving to see the slow decay of their whole way of life, their whole society, brought on by the hubris and over-extension in war.
