94 replies to this topic

[papeetepatrick]

dirac, on Mar 29 2007, 09:40 PM, said:

Michener too, and studied 'Gone with the Wind' with an intensity usually ascribed to Talmudic scholars.

It is a funny thread, but some time ago BT began wandering afield in topics unrelated to ballet, and it's nice when the thread is as rewarding to read as this one has been.  

It is funny.  But you and 4mrdncr made me remember trudging all the way through 'Hawaii', although I had to check it out of the library umpteen times.  I also got hold of Harold Robbins in junior high school and just felt sooooooo cool reading 'The Carpetbaggers' and 'Where Love Has Gone'--and I still love the trash movie version of both of them for certain scenes--like Baker/Peppard in the former and the hilarious one with Davis/Hayward toward the end of the latter.

[Paul Parish]

Oh yes, any historical novel. I read all of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series, all of Michener, Uris. But preferred Regencies -- Desiree I went through several times, and re Gwtw, I was on a first-name basis with Suellen and Careen O'Hara, talked about them as if they were real.

[Estelle]

Helene, on Mar 22 2007, 05:47 AM, said:

I read all of the Nancy Drew books.  We had a subscription and a new one would arrive every month or two.  My favorite was the first, The Secret of the Old Clock.  I also loved The Boxcar Children, a book whose full title I've forgotten and for which a search on amazon.com came up fruitless, but something like "[boy's name] and the Santa Fe Trail" and these biographies of famous people that were sold in our supermarket.

I also read some Nancy Drew books, but in France they were translated as the adventures of "Alice" (her full name was Alice Roy), I guess that "Nancy Drew" was considered too difficult to pronounce for French kids- and of course I pronounced her "French" name as if it were the French name "roy" (pronounced like "roi") and not rhyming with "boy"... I believe that many of the names of other characters were changed, too. One of my favorites was an episode when she went to Cuzco in Peru, "Alice chez les Incas", also there was another episode with some kind of haunted castle which I liked but found very frightening. I still remember that it was in those books that I learnt the spelling (or the existence) of some words, for example "tronquer" in "le singe à la queue tronquée", the monkey with the uncomplete tail which was engraved on a piece of wood in the "Incas" episode...)

What was striking for me when I had a look at those books a few years later is that I hadn't realized then that there were quite old (published in the 1940s for some of them), and the drawings often dated back from the 60s (I read it in the early and mid 1980s); as a kid I really paid no attention to that (well, also there probably was the fact that anyway the US were some kind of really unknown and exotic place in my mind so I didn't expect everything to look like "everyday life"...)

[cubanmiamiboy]

Wow...let's try to go baaaaack in time.. .so many books made their way through my teen years...but if my memory is right, then i guess the first one that really made an impact on me and i read when i was around 11 was Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights".  Ever since i was a kid i had developed an attraction over this kind of obscure, romantic and tragic atmosphere, (hence, my favorite ballet nowadays being "Giselle").  I particulary remember my simpathy for one of the characters of the book, Isabella Linton, who falls in love with Heathcliff   ( the main character and a man dealing with his own demons, revenge, love and betrayal), and marries him. She sees Heathcliff as a romantic figure, like a character in a novel, ultimately ruining her life by falling in love with him, who never returns her feelings and treats her as a mere tool . To this day i still feel fascinated with this story.  Another book that i remember reading around that same time is the short Dostoievsky's novel "White Nights", which i always recomend to read for its delightful and tasteful ambience and beautiful love story...

[dirac]

cubanmiamiboy, on Jul 20 2007, 10:26 PM, said:

I particulary remember my simpathy for one of the characters of the book, Isabella Linton, who falls in love with Heathcliff  ( the main character and a man dealing with his own demons, revenge, love and betrayal), and marries him. She sees Heathcliff as a romantic figure, like a character in a novel, ultimately ruining her life by falling in love with him, who never returns her feelings and treats her as a mere tool . To this day i still feel fascinated with this story.

Many share your fascination, cubanmiamiboy.  I re-read Wuthering Heights every few years or so. It's really not a 'romantic' story (in the slushier sense) at all.