Re: OT Non SF Recommendations..

Titus G wrote:

On 4/09/24 10:31, William Hyde wrote:
snip

My first day in the US I wanted to eat at a restaurant across the street
from my hotel in Maryland.  As I got to the end of the hotel driveway I
was confronted with nine traffic lights.  I ate at the hotel.  In fact,
I never left the hotel except by cab.

>
My first day in the US late last century was spent in Disneyland. We
decided on a Mexican restaurant close to the hotel in the Disneyland
area. Although the traffic wasn't heavy, the footpaths and surrounds
were filthy, poorly maintained and empty of pedestrians. Despite the
short distance we took a cab back to the hotel and did not attempt to
walk anywhere local again.
>
My favourite reads in recent decades include your recommendation of
Robertson Davies' trilogies and Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
Do you have two or three more to recommend? Thank you.

 How I wish I did!
 There must be many.
 I started Anthony Powell's vast river novel and read two and a half books virtually at a sitting.
 But then I fell ill, and on recovery had bad headaches and read virtually nothing for a while.  And lost the books in a move.
 So maybe?
 I'm a long term fan of Snow's "Strangers and Brother" sequence, but it holds to a very different view than either Davies or Durrell. There is some humour, especially of character, but the books are largely underlain by ethical issues (appeasement, the atomic bomb, class) as well as the narrator's flaws - invisible to him, of course.
 Some find the series to be too earnest, in particular one Anthony Powell fan I conversed with.  Not a dance, but more of a march to the music of time. Though witty, I find that inaccurate, and in any event the richness of character more than compensates.
 Snow took a lot from real life (one art critic is pretty much a clone of the mathematician G. H. Hardy) while his own career as a research scientist and later civil servant gave him an insight into the workings of society, including the corridors of power (a phrase he invented).
 I started with  the fifth book, "The Masters", which is about a long-delayed election for the mastership of a Cambridge college in the appeasement era. The book is packed with characters whose nature is revealed in their reaction to the election.  Human and political motivations intermingle in complex ways. It echoes and personalizes the larger struggle taking place in the world at that time.
 If you don't like that book, best avoid the rest of the series.  But if you prefer to start at the beginning, either "George Passant", the first written, or "Time of Hope", the first chronologically, will do.
 The former is the story, largely, of a tremendously capable and intelligent man confined to a job far beneath his abilities, in part, but only in part, because of class, the latter the narrator's origin story from humble(ish) beginnings (not poverty as Wikipedia says) to a career at the Bar.  Though, of course, both are far more than that.
 So, a suggestion, not a recommendation.  If you as yet haven't  try one of the above.  I've friends who love it, others who question my sanity on this issue.
 There was a truly terrible TV series.  Ignore it.
 With Powell and Snow, if you like their books there are many to like.
 I am missing two volumes of Durrell's "Avignon" quintet.  What I have read did not grab me as Alexandria did, but I keep meaning to return to it.
 No doubt I am forgetting something. With luck, it will come to me just after I hit "send".
  William Hyde