Books - My Go-To Therapy

As ever, thinking about books and reading has provided the instant solace and comfort I require.   Not chocolate, not a hot bath or a chat with one of my daughters.  Just to sink back into the world of words, and find a like-minded person.

Here's what I found while trawling the internet in search of diversion. Over and under-rated authors, a list the Times Literary Supplement published in 1977.

I enjoyed this a lot - even though I have never heard of one of the commenters listed (Mary Douglas).  Another, Anthony Powell, would himself appear on my own list of totally over-rated authors.

To summarise what I found most satisfying, here are some extracts from the complete article. The pictures are added by me.

Philip Larkin 

(geeky university librarian)

Underrated:

the six novels of Barbara Pym published between 1950 and 1961 which give an unrivalled picture of a small section of middle-class post-war England. She has a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life.

Overrated:

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. This is not intended to mean that I think Miss Pym a better novelist than Mr Lawrence, but Women in Love has always seemed to me the least read­able of his novels: boring, turgid, mechanical, ugly, and dominated by the kind of deathly will-power that elsewhere Lawrence always attacked. I seem to remember that Middleton Murry felt the same way about it.

Yupp - totally agree with just about every word of both these paragraphs. 

Bob Dylan

Overrated and underrated: the Bible.

Dylan, so off the wall as ever ....  Picture, just because I love Bob Dylan 

Hugh Trevor-Roper (historian)

Leaving aside the great charlatans, like André Malraux and Teilhard de Chardin, who are hors concours, I consider the whole Bloomsbury group—excepting only J. M. Keynes—to be the most overrated literary phenomenon of our times. Above all, Lytton Strachey: Strachey who has recently been accorded a two-volume biography, and whose only achievement was to trivialize history, to empty it of its real content and meaning, in order to raise a few complacent titters from the radical chic of his time.

Picture - Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf

This one is more complex...

I love the analysis, sharply incisive, well-written, and I agree that generally the Bloomsbury Group are over-rated.  I do, however, make an exception for Virginia Woolf.  She was a radical feminist, a wonderful sister, a thoughtful and insecure person  .... And could put it all down in words, so effortlessly articulate.... Yes, I can always find something to interest me when I pick up a book by or about Virgina Woolf.

So, now, having cheered myself up, I am ready to return to normal cheerful and active state of mind.