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Though she be stormy, she is beautiful. 🩵
The Sea, The Sea | 
Though she be stormy, she is beautiful. 🩵
#WondrousWednesday
@Eggs
1. The sea, the sea. The smell of salty brine and windswept sand. Blame my childhood visits to the Cape.
2. Campfire. My aunt & uncle built a log cabin in the woods when I was a kid, & we spent weekends helping No electricity, no bathrooms (outhouse!) but we had a fire every night! 🔥
3. Maple leaves in the fall. They smell syrupy, but crunchy. I‘m a New England girl 🍁
Thanks for the tag @
I've fallen super behind on my reading (and buddy reads!) as my sister and niece are visiting from abroad and it's been really a lovely and busy time so far. Plus we made a little trip to Penang and I haven't been near the sea in so long—it was definitely what I needed! Something about the water ... restorative 💗
I think there were books I read in February 2022 that I enjoyed more, but this is the one that will probably stick with me the longest. Weird, provocative, and strangely compelling. A book about an awful person who does awful things, but I wanted to know more, nonetheless.
#12Booksof2022
#AlphabetGame Letter S
Iris Murdoch is one of the authors I discovered by reading the #1001books list. And I‘m glad for that. She‘s become a favorite and this book is one of her best.
#awesomeaugust
@Andrew65
Days 3 & 4
Over 4 hours of reading ✔️
Finished Phosphorescence, Sudden Traveller and The Book of Hope ✔️
Starting tagged but finding it hard going. I love Murdoch's writing, her nature descriptions are poetic and spot on. However, Charles Arrowby has to be the most self-aggrandising, egotistical bore of a man I have ever come across. Here's hoping for more characters to dilute him
pickA majestic piece of writing! A splendid blend of romance, philosophy and suspense which kept me glued to the pages and made me feel the sea itself was one of the lead characters.
A famous theater director retires in a small village by the sea hoping to spend time in solitude and write his autobiography. Instead, he finds his first love he lost 40 years ago and all his plans for serenity are stormed off.
"Trembling with emotion I tore my clothes off and walked into the sea. The cold shock, then the warmth, then the strong gentle lifting motion of the quiet waves reminded me terribly of happiness."
"It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life."
"The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal."
pickMurdoch will never become a favorite with me, but I think I now better appreciate her farcical plots and awful yet compelling characters. The book is narrated by Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director and general self-absorbed asshat. He may no longer be on the stage, but won‘t stop trying to manipulate everyone around him. When he runs into his first love in a remote seaside town, he loses his grip on reality...
#Booked2022 Title Repeats
pickI had a great reading experience with this novel. I read it slowly over a month and was always happy to return to this world. I laughed out load several times and was often suprised by turn of events in this novel. A delight. 3 🌟 Read this as part of the Big Book Challenge.
#OnThisDay in 1999, Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch passed away. Among the many awards and honorifics she received in her life were numerous honorary degrees, a Booker Prize for The Sea The Sea, and she was named a Dame in 1987 for services to literature. "There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present." #HistoryGetsLIT
Drove 2 hours to spend my birthday by the sea — even though I live in The Ocean State & could have driven 10 minutes. 😅 Sometimes, you just need a change to feel like you‘re living.
Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone! 🎉🥰
Book haul post 3 of 4....
I completely fell in love with this Vintage Iris Murdoch edition (yet to read, and now I have seen it in person, I have both #coverlove and #pagecountphobia !!😍😱)
Having a look at the tagged book this morning - that audio cassette is certainly a collectors item 😁
I am posting one book per day from my extensive to-be-read collection. No description and providing no reason for wanting to read it, I just do. Some will be old, some will be new. Don‘t judge me - I have a lot of books. Join the fun if you want.
This is day 13
#BooksToRead #TBRPile
No #cozyreadingnook from me as I've spent the morning at my heart hospital for my annual mot - everything is fine.
On the plus side I managed to pick up this book from the book stall that gets rid of ex-library books!
#festivephotochallenge #readnosedreindeer #wintergames @Clwojick @StayCurious
#GratefulReads - Day Two - #PreferredGenre ~ #VintageClassic #PenguinRandomHouse ~ The styles of these books are all different, but each book captures the era of writing perfectly ~ tiny time capsules that absorb you.
Not quite #SevenSeas, but it‘ll do!
#RedRoseSeptember
@arlenefinnigan @Cinfhen
Iris Murdoch was born 100 years today..... Penguin have republished some of her books with some gorgeous covers....
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/jul/where-to-start-reading-iris-murdoch-...
so-soThe difficult thing about very well written books about terrible people is that often I just can‘t enjoy them even when I think they‘re really well done. I loved Iris Murdoch‘s writing style and would absolutely read more by her, and the main character was amazingly created on the page, I just can‘t truthfully say I *enjoyed* it that much.
Lunch date with Iris Murdoch and veggie sausage pasta 🥰
Cloudy but warmer then it looks on the south bank today for lunch. I read Iris Murdoch on the lawn in front of the Tate modern with some gentle music from a really good busker next to a homeless charity fundraiser, which was a lovely atmosphere. I‘m enjoying this book a lot but only have 4 days before it‘s back to the library so the rush ruins the mood a little bit
#HowFarIllGo #MayMovieMadness
When the weekend ends, sometimes I have the odd fantasy of wanting to escape to some vague, lonely city by the sea, and just read for several days without interruption. I might be able to make some progress on my TBR then 🤔
Just placed a hold on the Olivia Laing, which sounds like an interesting reflection on her move to NYC and the loneliness she experienced there, along with an analysis of the same feelings in art.
pickLove this cover image and I loved the book too. The narrator is frankly detestable and the reader has to wonder why he has so many women pursuing him, especially after his plot to get an old childhood sweetheart to fall in love with him by imprisoning her in his house, but the characters are so wonderfully drawn and there is a subtle sense of mystery about cousin James and his capabilities.
On an Iris Murdoch binge, thanks to her I am actually getting back into reading 'serious' books 😁
pan#inlaws #reviews #others
The point, the point? A self-absorbed, unlikeable narrator tells us about his brilliantly successful career in the theatre, how he was (unaccountably) catnip to almost every woman who crossed his path, and what he had for his dinner. Oh, and he goes swimming and has some tedious friends to stay. Couldn‘t finish it, didn‘t want to, don‘t care.
Actually the Gulf of Mexico but..hey. Glorious day for reading. And swimming.
so-soRead the summer of 2003. I liked her description of the lunches. Later. found out her husband supplied the information. LOL
bailedCongratulations, Ms. Murdoch: you‘re not only a brilliant novelist but you‘ve matched—no, surpassed—your male peers in creating relationships so claustrophobically bilious between characters so utterly hateful that I almost puked all over page 203 just now. Instead, I bailed. Well done! Bravo!
Diving in...
#currentlyreading #lunchtimereading #penguinclassics
1. Shakespeare and maybe Iris Murdoch
2. Usually night in with the books, unless there's really good food involved. 😁
3. I don't think I have a favorite era.
4. @BarbaraBB, @RidgewayGirl
@GarthRanzz
Thanks for the tag @Billypar
pickCharles Arrowby, a famous, now retired theatre director, moves to a small village by the sea to enjoy a peaceful life. However, old friends and memories find him out, including an old love that broke his heart.
Death as a journey. I just thought it was a beautiful piece of writing.
pickThis book starts out slow, but halfway through it gets really intense. The plot is outwardly thin all the way through, but there are so many strands, such obsession, insanity, growth, relapse. What do we really know? What can we rely on? Not memory, not our biased perceptions of others. A crazy bunch of characters that, while unlikable, fascinate. And such amazing prose! My first Murdoch, but not my last.
"Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world."
"How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing."
"Thus people can be light sources, without ever knowing, for years in the life of others, while their own lives take different and hidden courses. Equally one can be (...) a monster, a cancer, in the mind of someone whom one has half forgotten or even never met."
"I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so."
