They misunderestimated me

Lots to get through this time around, so here goes with an inventory of Greek plays, weird tales, poetry, travel writing, children's history books, plays about dead saints, and ... a bit of George W. Bush.


Aeschylus, The Suppliants and Seven Against Thebes
The more I read Aeschylus, the more I'm convinced that his plays served as a sort of forerunner not to Eastenders or The Sopranos, but to Trisha or Jerry Springer. His plays are full of family strife and conflict, which is perhaps most apparent in his Oresteia trilogy. These two plays are less focused on familial squabbles, but Seven Against Thebes tells of the fratricidal conflict between the two sons of Oedipus - you know, the one who was a bit too much of a mummy's boy - and although Aeschylus' plays tend to be thin on plot, the way the characters unfold before our eyes makes for compelling reading. 8/9

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
Bryson's tour of Britain in the mid-1990s makes for entertaining reading, and this volume of travel writing, while not necessarily his most laugh-out-loud funniest, is still highly amusing and informative, and maintains a crafty balance between anecdote, interesting facts, and Bryson's general impressions of a place. Needless to say, with the UK being so chock-full of great places to visit, there are some notable absences - the section on London seems a little light, for instance - but then to do each place full justice would've entailed the writing of ten books, not one. 10

George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
Shaw's play about Joan of Arc is a masterpiece of characterisation. He paints Joan as a single-minded and fully-rounded figure, not necessarily one with whom we wholly sympathise; but then our sympathies, one feels, are meant to lie with the men making the difficult decision to execute Joan. In the end, nobody comes off as evil and nobody as particularly good - but that's not to say the play is a failure. Far from it. 10

Jacob Weisberg (ed.), George W. Bushisms
Don't ask me why I bought this book, but it was cheap, and light, and ... well, as easy as it may be to mock Bush's interesting use of the English language, it's still fun. 8

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Tales of Unease
Conan Doyle is one of the finest writers. Ever. That's my partisan opinion out the way. The man who gave us the master of rational deduction (or abduction), Sherlock Holmes, also spent the last decades of his life ardently believing in fairies. He's a hugely intriguing figure. Some of the stories collected here - in particular 'Playing with Fire' - reflect his interest in seances and spiritualism. Others, such as 'The Brown Hand', are masterly supernatural tales. 'The Brazilian Cat' should have everyone's pulses racing with genuine fear (it gave me at least one nightmare), and 'The Case of Lady Sannox' contains a shocking twist at the end. Also contained here is 'Lot No. 249', the story credited with originating the vogue for 'mummy horror' - no, we're not back to Oedipus again, but Brendan Fraser and Omid Djalili in Egypt. These are well worth reading, like all SACD. 10

John Betjeman, A Few Late Chrysanthemums
This 1954 volume continued Betjeman's view of England he'd already developed in the previous columes Old Lights for New Chancels (1940) and New Bats in Old Belfries (1945). The standout poem for me is 'Late-Flowering Lust', with its not-easily-forgotten image of two skeletons making out together. 9

Aristophanes, The Frogs
Another great comedy from Stoffy. This one features Euripides and our old friend Aeschylus, the two most celebrated tragedians of Athens, being brought from the underworld in order to have a contest to decide who is better. As ever, there's only one way to find out... FIGHT! 8

Terry Deary, Horrible Histories: The Groovy Greeks
I picked this up for 25p from my local library, as I was curious to find out what these little volumes, which I've heard so much about, were like. I was impressed, and have since acquired several others in the series. Deary writes with humour and a genuine passion for sharing interesting information, while the accompanying illustrations are hugely entertaining. 9

Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
This volume of literary criticism from 1977 is an insightful and well-written history of the ghost story, more literary history than cultural history (though the wonderful Andrew Smith is currently completing a cultural history of the ghost story, which I look forward to eagerly), but with some perceptive remarks about, in particular, the psychological ghost story (an understudied sub-section of the ghost story genre). Recommended for any enthusiast of the ghostly in literature, though you may have to seek it out on eBay or Amazon; I got this copy through my university library, but even then they had to borrow it from another library, so it's not necessarily easy to get hold of. 9

Next time, I hope to have more plays (I'm reading up on all the dramatists I can get my hands on, in preparation for a job I've got coming up in a couple of months), and more supernatural titles to bore you about. Till then, stay groovy. The overall average for this time around is a very creditable 9/11.