Mini Reviews
Challenge: Classic Club 50 and Back to the Classics
This grouping of Brit classics comes to you as part of my effort to post on books that fit the challenge requirements for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge.
Audiobook, narrated by Samuel West, orig 1887, 14 hr 16 min
I read The Woodlanders and loved it. Gave it 5 slices of pie. And since it is British, of course it has pie. (I really need to make some meat pies to celebrate Brit pies!!!!)
So FIVE slices of Apple Pie for this lovely twisty crazy tale of infidelity and nutty triangles of DRAMA. Published in 1887 — I swear, Hardy in now times would be a reality show writer but be sad about it.
Here’s what I wrote on gr:
I loved the language, I agree with others that Hardy delivers suspense and certainly drama, and he is a master at language. Oh, I said that already. He is becoming a favorite and I wouldn’t have guessed I would have said that since Tess about killed me. I adored Far from the Madding Crowd and that is still my favorite, but I delighted in this crazy tale of love gone wrong and twisty. (not THAT kind of ‘twisty’! get minds out of the gutter. No sordid descriptions of the dirty deeds in this tale, puhlease.) But this did have turns and unexpected conflicts and resolutions and just a ton of bad decision-making, as humans are wont to do. Such vexation!
I’m really not sure as to the ending, what really happened there. Was it a happy ending? If I hadn’t realized that the end was near, I might have been disappointed; but I knew the audiobook had only minutes to go and then = it stopped. Actually, I admire the framing that Tom did there with Marty at the beginning and at the end. Well done, Mr. Hardy! Huzzah
(the rating also reflects the comparison impact of the book I started immediately after which is Naked Lunch. These two stories couldn’t be more different…)
And for a pie quote:
Winterborne was standing before the brick oven in his shirt-sleeves, tossing in thorn sprays, and stirring about the blazing mass with a long-handled, three-pronged Beelzebub kind of fork, the heat shining out upon his streaming face and making his eyes like furnaces, the thorns crackling and sputtering; while Creedle, having ranged the pastry dishes in a row on the table till the oven should be ready, was pressing out the crust of a final apple-pie with a rolling-pin.
Back to Classics Category Fulfilled: Classic Tragic Novel. For an almost romance; no one has their HEA.
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A Clockwork Orange 
by Anthony Burgess, orig 1962, 240 pages
Back to Classics Category Fulfilled: uh…. none?
Whatever, let’s tell you what pies it had anyway.
It was like some frozen pie that she ‘d unfroze and then warmed up and it looked not so very appetitish.
“Still, I drank and ate growling, being more hungry than I thought at first, and I got fruit-pie from the larder and tore chunks off it to stuff into my greedy rot.”
This took some getting into; the language guide is a MUST! Then, once realizing that the author created an entire new language, it became fun. While also being demoralizing, frightening, scary, and sad. I like it much more now when I don’t remember all that much.
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Audiobook, narrated by Andrew Sachs, orig 1934, 6 hrs 43 min
I like the book cover of the edition 
because it does suggest the comedy. This is SATIRE people and it’s brutal. The divorce machinations are unwieldy and just off the top but what happens to poor Tony… yikes.
Satisfies the Classic Comic Novel category. √
And because it was audio, I failed to do my due diligence and record the pie quotes. It’s British. It had meat pie.
Rating 3 to 4 slices of pie.
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by Robt Louis Stevenson, Audible Studios 2017 (orig 1882), 6 hours 23 minutes
by Josephine Johnson, Simon and Schuster 1934, 231 pages
