'Your walls lay fallen, strewn along the earth': My Week in Books 7

While the rest of the world (or seemingly the rest of the world) is off watching Big Brother Seventy-Nine, or else the World Cup, I'll be holed up reading dusty tomes and trashy paperbacks. Next week I'll have more poetry for you, but in the meantime it's 2,500 years of fiction, criticism, and drama, in 500 words:

Aeschylus, Oresteia (a long time ago)

Comprising three separate plays although believed to have originally been a tetralogy (the fourth work has sadly been lost forever), this is the only trilogy in Greek drama that has survived. Each of the three plays - Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides - takes a very simple scene and explores the conflicts between the characters, the specific focus here being family relationships,
including matricide and marriage. Worth reading. Trivia: Aeschylus was allegedly killed by a falling tortoise. This story is almost certainly apocryphal, but still ... it's a good one. 9

Christopher Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words (1993)

Another work of criticism by the incomparable Ricks. I won't say too much here as I've reviewed Ricks' books in detail here over the last few weeks, but this is insightful, witty, and playful (sometimes too playful, as Ricks occasionally is). Still worth a read, although not the Ricks book I'd recommend to a newcomer. 8

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Although this novel - one of the first in English - dips a bit in the middle, it's a great work, a fantasy rendering of real-life explorer William Dampier's Voyages (1701, I think). Everyone knows the bit where the Lilliputians tie 'giant' Gulliver down; but there's much else here, including the horses with reason (I can't remember how you spell their name, and I can't be arsed to go and check - forgive my indolence). Trivia: the Yahoos, the human brutes in the final section (who live alongside the intelligent horses), gave us the word 'yahoo' meaning a 'lout', but also the search engine (etc.) of that name. Yahoo! 9

That's all for this week, folks. I have lots planned for the next week: I'll be dipping my toe in H. P. Lovecraft, and have also slowly started to work my way through all of Larkin's Collected Poems again (like the songs of The Smiths, their power increases, not diminishes, on each rediscovery). Still, it's bound to be a bit of a surprise even to me what makes the list next week.