O Don Basilio.  I love Cold Comfort Farm, haven't read it for ages, must dash upstairs and see if I still have my copy.  The mysteries of the sukebind and something nasty in the woodshed 

I love it when someone reminds you of a much loved book which you have completely forgotten about.  If that makes sense.

Not reading, but watching,  (and off-topic I am afraid) Little Dorrit is a Dickens I have never read but I find I am glued to the new Andrew Davies tv adaptation.

Just searched the bookcase and it seems I will have to buy a new copy of CCF.  However, I have come downstairs with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell and Gerald of Wales    Both of which I think I read when I was about 18!!

Little Dorrit is a very wonderful book: Amy Dorrit herself is the only remotely convincing self effacing female heroine in Dickens.  Mrs Clennam is a variant of Miss Havisham and Great Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm and the scene at the end when she suddenly finds her legs and she and Amy Dorrit confront each other is one of the most profound scenes in Dickens.

Miss Wade is the only obviously lesbian character in C19 fiction that I know, and although she is in part a negative caricature,  I remember Dickens does portray her with a bit of sympathy, although she is still a baddie.  (But Tattycoram is being patronised by her employers, and I hope she is having a nice time in Calais with Miss Wade.)

Do read the book some time.

The taint of the prison.

Bird, be quiet.

I have just started on the poet & academic Andrea Brady's English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Early Modern Literature in History)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Funerary-Elegy-Seventeenth-Century/dp/140394105X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1226961404&sr=1-1

It's a subject that fascinates me (that's the kind of fun-lover I am) & looks to be beautifully argued & documented.

Andrea Brady has some lovely photos on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreabrady/sets/72157594355801470/

of Suffolk Churches.

Now, Pepys like, I must to bed. (Well, not exactly Pepys like )

Night all.

I've just read this:

COTIFARL

Having "sort of" enjoyed his second novel (see earlier), I thought I would "sort of" enjoy this, his first.  In fact I really enjoyed it.

I think I have mentioned on this forum before that occasionally, you get a performance that transports you somewhere fantastic, but has one or two odd blemishes - like a single slightly out of tune note, or a scratchy bow change - which bring you back to reality.  Well, Salmon Fishing is the literary equivalent of this.

I was hooked (excuse the pun), and read the thing in 4 sittings.  Tiny things got in the way, like the way some one wrote in a diary the words "So I went to write my diary".  They wouldn't do that, woudl they.  I always used to write "So I came here to write this", or even anthropomorphising it with "I came here to you, Diary".

But they really were teeny weeny blemishes.  Overall it is a lovely book, which tells the tale of a man whose narrow life is transformed.  It's also quite funny, especially the parody of Blair and Campbell.

Tommo