The Content Reader

These ladies are two of my favourite authors. I have now read everything (except the Juvenilia) they have written. It really was a fight at the end. The two novels left to read were Mansfield Park and Shirley . Have I struggled? Indeed I have. It was a heavy road uphills. They are classics, I like the authors so I really wanted to read them. In the end I had to use my method of reading a chapter a day to be able to finish them. Both novels are "much ado about nothing" as Shakespeare put it. The stories are boring, the characters are boring, ok, they are little better in Shirley than in Mansfield Park . The first book contains 572 pages and the second 330 pages. Rather long and thick in other words. They could both have been written in 100 pages if the authors had restrained themselves a little bit. There are so many stories about nothing interesting, nothing that takes the story further, descriptions of nature and for Shirley thoughts about circumstances that is probab...

It is March and another chain of books for 6 Degrees of Separation , hosted by Books Are My Favourite And Best.   This month begins with a book published in 1990, The Beauty Myth  by Naomi Wolf. Summary from Wikipedia: " The basic premise of The Beauty Myth is that as the social power and prominence of women have increased, the pressure they feel to adhere to unrealistic social standards of physical beauty has also grown stronger because of commercial influences on the mass media. This pressure leads to unhealthy behaviours by women and a preoccupation with appearance in both sexes, and it compromises the ability of women to be effective in and accepted by society. " It comes well into the #metoo movement and is worth thinking of. That brings me to someone who was not happy with her looks, Charlotte Brontë and her heroine Jane Eyre. It is about a plain girl who manages to catch the hero with her brain rather than her looks. Women still fighting today to be taken for...

So finally I managed to finish walk No.2 from Derek’s book Brussels for Pleasure . It covered the Sainte Catherine district in the southern part of Brussels, where once there was a harbour. The harbour was covered years ago and it is difficult to even imagine how it was then. I started the tour at the square ‘Quai aux Briques’ and took the first right turn to enter into the square Sainte Catherine. Continuing along the square it continues into a beautiful street with benches and trees in the middle, almost like a square. There we can look at the first house of interest, an Art Deco building constructed in 1928 by a firm importing exotic fruit. When we look up to the top of the house we see decorations suitable for such a firm; pictures of orange and banana trees. Next fantastic building is on Rue de Flandre. This is a so called ‘hidden gem’. The real house lies hidden inside in the court yard. Today the building is a theatre and art

This was a read for the Brontë Reading Group here in Brussels, which met yesterday evening at the restaurant "Carpe Diem". This is Charlotte Brontë's first book and it was not printed until after her death. The publisher, and other persons as well, thought it was not good or appropriate as it was and wanted to change it. However, Charlotte refused. It might be that some editing took place then, before printing it. As usual we had a lively discussion. This is always the case when we have different views. Some loved the book, others didn't, some said it was ok. Some thought the characterisation was not good enough, others thought it was. If you have read Jane Eyre  and Villette  you recognise things from this book that she used later on. I found a lot of the descriptions of the city was rather clear here, not mistaken it for anything but Brussels. In Villette  she has written around it a little bit more. More discretely in a way. Here is a short resume of the story ...