December played havoc with my plans to get out and about. The first two weeks seemed to be mainly about shopping for presents, the last two weeks about looking after the kids, playing with new presents and enjoying lounging about the house. Still plenty of free stuff to enjoy if you don't get out and about though, thanks to libraries and the internet. Here's three free things that I enjoyed.
Library book: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Great big German family saga that charts the decline of a bourgeouis family in pre-unification Germany. While not usually a fan of family sagas, this one is a cut above. Highly readable, interesting characters and big themes: sacrifice, death, decadence, conflict between business and art. The central character that binds the book together is Tony who suffers bad marriages and disappointment in her attempts to be socially acceptable but remains a sympathetic character who endures long after the males of her family are driven into the grave by work and poor health.
An early movie by Hitchcock starring John Gielgud who you forget was quite the handsome young movie star with cheekbones that could cut butter (as the expression apparently goes), Madeleine Carroll as the chirpy English girl whose enthusiasm for espionage is soon tested and who delivers the fast moving dialogue with aplomb, Robert Young as the baddie German spy with a nice line in patter and the great Peter Lorre overacting like mad as the murderous General. The wit, the dramatic angles for the action and above average characterisation mark this out as a Hitchcock and well worth 86 minutes of anyone's time.
Free ebook: After London by Richard Jeffries
I downloaded this onto my new toy, an e-reader. Described by the Observer as a strong candidate for the most beautiful of all Victorian novels, the fact of Jeffries being a nature writer shines through both in his scientific description of post apocalyptic England and the descriptions of the hero's voyages which teem with detail about the birds and landscapes he passes through. The strongest parts of the book are the descriptions of environmental collapse in the first part and Felix's trip through the nightmare landscapes of an extinct London which are truly gripping.
I was less enthralled with the descriptions of future feudal societies, although there is some interest in Jeffries proto-socialist philosophising about the corruption of the nobility, the inability of the lower classes to overthrow a society that they recognise to be rotten and which enslaves the vast majority of them and the eulogising of a society of workers (the Shepherds) where men and women's work is of equal value, sharing and hospitality are the norm and war is for defence rather than glory or gain as in the other societies Felix encounters, which, perhaps, were the parts that were said to give William Morris such inspiration for his News from Nowhere in which "absurd hopes curled around... [his]... heart as... [he]...read it."
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