Mondays are ordinarily my days for blogging on the Good Life Press blog site. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks. This is because I no longer have Mondays free from paid employment, and my whole weekly structure has been thrown out. I think I will have to revert to blogging on Sundays.
Today’s blog will be mostly about books. Since Christmas I have read three and am currently on a fourth. I have already blogged at length about Tess of the D’Urbervilles and so shall not mention her again. The other two have both been autobiographies; one by Elisabeth Sladen and the other by Stephen Fry.
Elisabeth Sladen was the actress who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who in the 1970s, and was one of the women on television I fell in love with before I was seven (Toni Arthur from Playaway was another). She died last year, and I was genuinely upset about it, despite only ever having seen her on telly. Anyway, her book was endearingly rubbish and I loved it. It was luvvie throughout and clunkily written, with reams of anecdotes which would only appeal to the most obsessed of Doctor Who fans. However, that describes me nicely, and there was definite warmth and charm to the book.
Stephen Fry’s autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, is equally luvvie but rather better written. Lots of gossip, and not for those of a prudish disposition. It covers the 1980s, which was the decade I started out 10 and ended up 20, and I have clear memories of Stephen Fry in those years. I think I was first aware of him in Blackadder, of course, but I also have fond memories for Saturday Live hosted by Ben Elton. Fry comes across as obsequiously modest with an inferiority complex, which is odd – and he recognises it as odd and its own breed of arrogance. Anyway, it is an entertaining read and insightful into the person he wants to present as being the real Stephen Fry.
The book I am currently reading is a door stopper of a novel, and I absolutely love it, even though I am only about a sixth the way through. It is called Freedom and is by Jonathan Franzen. So far it is about angst and relationships in middle-class America. If it continues in a similar vein to its beginning, then I cannot recommend it enough. It is our current book group book, and I will be interested to see what everyone else thinks about it.
Ben Hardy
January 17th, 2012
Well that didn’t go right. I will try posting the blog from a different computer when I can. Possibly not until Thursday. For some reason my ‘copy and paste’ failed. Bah!
Ben Hardy
January 19th, 2012
Hurrah – that has now worked.