billybookblog

*contains spoilers* I laughed…a lot. And I needed it – I’d been feeling down, and I heard this would be a good pick-me-up. Published in 1954, though smelling distinctly of a wartime Britain (our protagonist, James Dixon, for example, tries and fails to ration his cigarettes, and owns only a few pair of trousers, which often have to be stitched by his landlady), Kingsley Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim , is what many have referred to as the cornerstone of the Angry Young Man movement of the mid-twentieth century. The university setting would confirm this, where our young, new lecturer, most commonly called Dixon by others throughout, is struggling to settle in and assure his position and salary, and ends up making a bumbling fool of himself in attempting so. Dixon certainly gets help from the narrator, whose uncertainty on matters only compounds this sense of confusion and lack of concern shown by those in academic positions at the unnamed university; “He’d read somewhere, or been told, t...

*contains spoilers* I’ve been wanting to read some Anthony Trollope for a while, and so, in my rush to find a book of his to stuff into my cabin bag for the band’s trip to America, I reached for the most reasonably-sized volume I could find: Doctor Thorne . Along with this choice I also took with me Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (which is the subject of my previous blog), Virgil’s The Aeneid (this particular edition is a more recent translation delivered in a wonderfully poetic prose, which differs nicely from the more constricted but yet still beautiful verse translation of Cecil Day Lewis’s), Homer’s The Odyssey (which I’m studying as part of a Classical Civilisation AS course, and I’ve already read many times – but still…), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette , and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim . How I managed to whittle down from the twenty books I’d originally picked to this expansive and yet concise collection is a struggle I shall protect you from. Anyway, so Doctor Thorne is th...