MarysLibrary

Outmoded Authors Challenge - September

I devoted the day yesterday to reading the first book I'v'e chosen for the Outmoded Authors Challenge, A God and His Gifts by Ivy Compton-Burnett. As you know I'm starting out behind the rest so this is my September book.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in 1884 and her novels, even those written as late as A God and His Gifts, which was published in 1963, are Edwardian. She is the master of unconscious self revelation, one critic said, and has no parallel and no equal said another. Her novels are almost entirely in dialogue.

I mean it when I say that. There are not more than half a dozen paragraphs in this book that do not contain dialogue. The narrator says almost nothing except to move people into, out of, and across the drawing rooms in which all the "action" takes place. There is almost no physical action - it is all verbal. Reading her is like reading Restoration Comedy. Her work is as finely tuned and as scalpel sharp as the best of the 18th century.

The god of this book is Hereward Egerton (make what you will of his name), a man who is what we would now call a sociopath. The world's rules were not made for him. He himself and his work are the only things that matter to him. He is unconstrained by sexual mores, even the most basic - not just those in play during the Edwardian period but even those we respect today, few as they are.

Ivy Compton-Burnett is not ourmoded. She is simply out of fashion at the moment. But I predict a Compton-Burnett Renaissance soon. I would rate this book about the cream of disfunctional families six on a scale of one to five. There is almost nothing better. Jane Austen's ascerbic wit is timid in comparison.

Outmoded Authors Challenge

I've decided on my list for the Outmoded Authors challenge. Since I'm two months behind as I begin I'll read easy and short books for September and October. Then I'll go on to something a little longer and I'll finish wtih three library books.

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1. September - Ivy Compton-Burnett, A God and His Gifts
2. October - Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Lonliness
3. November - Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
4. December - Elizabeth Bowen, Heat of the Day
5. January - Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
6. February - Merce Rodoreda, A Broken Mirror

I wanted to read Elizabeth Bowen, Dawn Powell, and Olivia Manning, but all are in Box 153 and that box is nowhere to be found, alas. I'll find it eventually, but it may be too late for the challenge so I'll read the library's Bowen, Barnes, and Rodoreda instead.

Challenges

Book bloggers have a quaint practice called the challenge. One blogger challenges others to read a set of books that fall into a category like Russian literature, or ghost stories, or books that the reader already owns but hasn't gotten around to reading yet.

The last is called From the Stacks and although I'm don't usually read for challenges I'm tempted to do this one. I have so many books that I really want to read - that I want to read badly enough that I went out and bought them - that it's a shame not to take advantage of a challenge that would force me to get moving.

However, there are two other challenges that caught my eye recently. One of them, First in a Series, is a year-long event in which one is required to read a book a month in 2008, each book being the first in a series of books. You get to choose what you read - a mystery, Proust, Harry Potter, Anthony Powell, C P Snow, Dorothy Dunnett, whatever. I'm thinking seriously about signing up for that one. I go on and on about how I HAVE to read books in the order in which they were written, or in which the author has requested that one read them. So it seems like I ought to support a challenge that so epitomizes my reading philosophy.

And then there's Outmoded Authors. In this six-month long challenge you are required to read a book a month by an author who has become outmoded or is neglected. There are lots of authors on that particular list - many more than six. I have books by many of the authors on the list and some of them are very short novels, which is well, because the challenge started at the beginning of September.

So, which to choose? I think I'll go with Outmoded Authors, which I read about on Pages Turned. More about this challenge tomorrow.