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A carregar... One Hundred Best Books (1916)por John Cowper Powys
A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Recently I learned of three books by John Cowper Powys — author of Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and Porius among many others — that are available free for the asking at the Gutenberg Project to read on line or download. The three books are: One Hundred Best Books Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions I ended up reading One Hundred Best Books first. It is very short, pithy and to the point beginning with an introductory essay on Books and Reading, followed by the list with a short commentary on each book. Powys makes clear that this is a very personal list and in fact in answer to the question which he poses rhetorically: "What is one to read?" the best reply must always be the most personal: "Whatever profoundly and permanently stimulates your imagination." However, this presents a bit of a conundrum because the chances are one actually has to read something to know whether it will "profoundly and permanently stimulate your imagination." Powys starts off with an almost sophomoric breeziness which reminds me of the kind of thing you would find in a college yearbook. But eventually he settles down into a more normal style of discourse, presenting his discussion of what goes into literary taste, both personal and cultural, and invites the reader to disagree and make his own list. In his view if there is a secret to the "art of literary taste," it may simply lie in "the art of life itself," meaning: the capacity for discovering the real fatality, the real predestined direction of one's intrinsic nature and the refusal, when this is found, to waste one's energies in alien paths and irrelevant junketings. This is the soundest possible advice for a young reader — or perhaps even for an old seasoned reader. At the time he wrote this (1915), apparently great hulking novels had gone out of fashion. In fact, he laments a time when people who "in the old, sweet, epicurean way, loved to loiter through huge digressive books, with the ample unpremeditated enjoyment of leisurely travelers wayfaring along a wonderful road." There is no shortage of "huge digressive books" on the list to whet the appetite. Lists such as Powys's One Hundred Best Books are always great fun to peruse and compare with one's own taste, and this one is no exception, allowing for differences in contemporary fashions — both his and ours. It is gratifying to see how many books on his list are still thriving as favored reading today. What's on the list, you ask? I invite you to download it and see for yourself. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Pertence à Série da EditoraLittle Blue Books (435)
Excerpt: ...and desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous treatment of Vanessa-his savage championship of the Irish people against the Government-make up the dominant "notes" of a character so formidable that the terror of his personality strikes us with the force of an engine of destruction. His misanthropy is like the misanthropy of Shakespeare's Timon-his crushing sarcasms strike blow after blow at the poor flesh and blood he despises. The hatefulness of average humanity drives him to distraction and in his madness, like a wounded Titan, he spares nothing. To the whole human race he seems to utter the terrible words he puts into the mouth of God: "I to such blockheads set my wit, And damn you all-Go, go, you're bit " 55. CHARLES LAMB. THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Charles Lamb remains, of all English prose-writers, the one whose manner is the most beautiful. So rich, so delicate, so imaginative, so full of surprises, is the style of this seductive writer, that, for sheer magic and inspiration, his equals can only be found among the very greatest poets. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of Charles Lamb's philosophy. He indicates in his delicate evasive way-not directly, but as it were, in little fragments and morsels and broken snatches-a deep and subtle reconciliation between the wisdom of Epicurus and the wisdom of Christ. And through and beyond all this, there may be felt, as with the great poets, an indescribable sense of something withdrawn, withheld, reserved, inscrutable-a sense of a secret, rather to be intimated to the initiated, than revealed to the vulgar-a sense of a clue to a sort of Pantagruelian serenity; a serenity produced by no crude optimism but by some happy inward knowledge of a neglected hope. The great Rabelaisian motto, "bon espoir y gist au fond " seems to emanate from the most wistful and poignant of his pages. He pities the unpitied, he redeems the commonplace, he makes the... Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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"Our "One Hundred Best Books" need not be yours, nor yours ours; the essential thing is that in this brief interval between darkness and darkness, which we call our life, we should be thrillingly and passionately amused ... for the only unpardonable sin is the sin of taking this passing world too gravely." ( )