Literary Something New Under the Sun • June 2019

[Bookworm_Girl]

Here are my votes.

-2 to Blood Meridian
-1 to To the Lighthouse
-1 to The Bride of Lammermoor
-2 to Italian Hours
-1 to The Early Stories of Truman Capote
-1 to Celestial Bodies

[sun surfer]

About six hours left for voting!

[Spinnenmonat]

2 to Huxley
2 to Woolf
2 to Brontë
2 to Walter Scott
2 to Henry James

[sun surfer]

Initial voting is complete and we have a tie! Bookworm_Girl was correct .
The tie is between:

-Blood Meridian
-The Bride of Lammermoor


Run-off voting is now open!

Voting will close exactly TWO DAYS from this post.

Each person has ONE vote to use.

If the run-off also happens to end in a tie, the selection that received all its votes first will win.

[Spinnenmonat]

My vote to Walter Scott

[AnotherCat]

Blood Meridian

[Bookworm_Girl]

I’m totally fine with either of these books. I’m going to go with Blood Meridian.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I’m totally fine with either of these books...

Actually, I am too - both were already on my reading list.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have wanted to read Cormac McCarthy for ages! And, since I live in the Wild West near the Mexican borderlands, Blood Meridian is of particular interest to me. On the other hand, I was watching a Canadian TV show last night set in the early 1900s, and The Bride of Lammermoor was mentioned. How odd is that! I was delaying voting hoping that someone else wanted to make a definitive decision. So, I ultimately picked the more contemporary book just because we’ve read a few classics lately.

[Spinnenmonat]

Walter Scott was a very successful writer in his lifetime, but nowadays, I guess, he is quite neglected, maybe because of his archaic writing style. I am not sure whether The Bride of Lammermoor is among his most well-known works, but it's definitely remembered by the opera lovers thanks to Donizetti's world-famous opera Lucia di Lammermoor.

[sun surfer]

I’d be happy with either but I’ll go with Blood Meridian. That’s an intriguing note about the Lammermoor opera, Spinnenmonat. I’ve never read an entire Scott novel though I would like to.

[sun surfer]

And we have a winner! Our something new is Blood Meridian. I'll have the discussion thread up soon.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by Spinnenmonat

Walter Scott was a very successful writer in his lifetime, but nowadays, I guess, he is quite neglected, maybe because of his archaic writing style...

Your nomination reminded me of an event which got me reading some of Walter Scott's novels.

In the early 2000s I was doing a long assignment for a company which one of its senior managers was a Scotsman who, it turned out, was a keen reader. We got talking about books which had him quizzing me about what Robert Louis Stevenson books I had read. The next day he turned up with one of the ones I had not read, and when I returned that to him he produced another until I'd read the lot.

Then, of course, he had Walter Scott in mind for the betterment of my education in Scottish literature and was disgusted when I confessed that the closest I had come to any of them was as Classic Comics when I was a kid. So I had to start on Walter Scott's novels and got through around four or five of the better known ones before the assignment ended and the supply dried up.

I have to say I found some parts of them hard going but did enjoy them even so and have since built up a complete ebook collection and put them on my "to read" list. However, I have only ever got to the "list" bit and not to the "read" bit. It is so long since I read the ones that I did that I have forgotten the stories - your nomination of The Bride of Lammermoor may just have prompted me to get started on them all again .