This is my first encounter with this English author’s work – today at the English Speaking Club (hosted in a library in Saratov) I picked two books by him, and started with this particular one. The book, as Wikipedia tells me, was written in 1975, but the events take place approximately 90 years earlier. It must be hard to write with such confidence about the past, I daresay – involves a lot of historical research to get the background right.
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“The Painted Veil” can be justly tagged a love story, but it’s not quite a usual one. It goes much deeper into the psychology of everyone involved than it’s usually done in love stories – and it has, unfortunately, no happy end.
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This book – unlike most of the books written by this authors – didn’t grab my attention at once. When I first made an attempt at reading it, I did a chapter and a half – and then put the book aside. It bored me. Now I can’t believe it, because my second attempt was more successful, and the book proved excellent.
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Philip Marlowe obviously doesn’t like his new client – a nice-looking, quaint, modest young girl, an obedient daughter of a religious mother. Is it just because she disapproves of smoking and drinking? Or is there something more behind his rudeness? ESP, probably?
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This is another novel from the series about the American journalist Jim Qwilleran, his “psychic” cat Koko and his other Siamese – a female called Yum Yum without any super abilities. She is just charming and very independent – that’s all.
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My road to discovering Ian Rankin wasn’t a short one. Having received two of his novels as a gift from an English friend more than a year ago, I hesitated until recently, the unusual thickness of the volumes putting me off. Then I went through my collection again and found the third book by the same author – a collection of short stories named “A Good Hanging”. I put all three books together on the shelf – and this holiday season decided to try them finally, since all my fellow detective story lovers seemed to regard Ian Rankin as one of the masters of the genre.
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“The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” is a book of poems of Middle Earth, of which only the first two relate to Tom Bombadil – the enigmatic creature looking like a man but having powers no man possesses.
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“Ozma of Oz” is the second sequel to the famous L. Frank Baum’s book named “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. I’ve just read it for the first time, so my impressions are very fresh.
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“The Happy Prince” is one of Oscar Wilde’s most famous fairy tales – short and unusually pious for this author. It talks about a statue of a Happy Prince – a beautiful statue decorated with gold and gems, but not as happy as others think, because the Prince can see all the poverty surrounding him in the town where he is. So, with the help of his new friend – the Swallow – he sacrifices first the ruby that decorates his sword-hilt, then two saphires – his eyes – and finally all the gold. Swallow delivers those gifts to the poor people of the town, and then one day drops dead from cold, because in order to help the Happy Prince he fails to fly away to the south in time.
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