Your latest book purchases.

[Cybele]

Latest book purchase -- "Magic and Grace: a Novel of Florida, Love, Zen and the Ghost of John Keats," by Chad Hautmann
I bought it because of the title. I have doubts about this being my kind of book, but I couldn't pass it up.

[Saturn]

Ha, you people will buy anything with the name Keats on it

Latest purchase of mine; Ovid's Heroides, I'm still waiting for - get your finger out Waterstones!

[Ennis]

Ha, you people will buy anything with the name Keats on it

Latest purchase of mine; Ovid's Heroides, I'm still waiting for - get your finger out Waterstones!

Saturn! You got that right (to use poor Southern dialect. . . .)!!

[Saturn]

I've discovered you can buy amazon gift cards in shops so I bought one and had a lovely package delivered yesterday with 3 books:

Gore Vidal, Julian: The great author's fictional take on the life of the short lived last Pagan Emperor of Rome.

Livy, Rome's Mediterranean Empire: Books 41-45 and the Periochae: The final 5 books of Livy's monumental History of Rome plus the later summary, the Periochae which contains much information from the lost volumes of this crucial source.

Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures Of A Romantic Biographer: The biographer of Shelley, and Coleridge takes a trip both autobiographical and full of insights into the figures he's written about by following in their footsteps across Europe and discovering surprising things about both himself and his subjects.

[Cybele]

You'll enjoy Footsteps. . ., Saturn.
Then, of course, I'd enjoy reading Richard Holmes's grocery shopping list. (I think I've gushed a bit about his Age of Wonder.)

Please let us know how you like Julian, will you? I think I recall reading some other stuff by Gore Vidal that was really well-written. (I remember him mostly as a pundit and wit on talk shows in the 1960s.)

(OK. Since I can't spell, I Googled Vidal, and found myself at Wikipedia where I found,

Vidal is—at least in the U.S.—even more respected as an essayist than as a novelist.[33] The critic John Keats praised him as "[the twentieth] century's finest essayist." , , ,

Please, someone who is this critic, John Keats?

[Saturn]

Surely that's got to be some mischief making by some naughty Wikipedia contributor, or maybe someone can correct me.

[Ennis]

Hello, fellow Keatsians!

I just purchased an interesting (sounding) book from Barnes and Noble. It's entitled Lost Keats by Terence Faherty (copyright date is 1993). The B and N's blurb says:

"A man with more questions than answers, Owen Keane, has one foot in the priesthood, the other in detective novels -- a trait that finds him
questioning his own vocation. So when a fellow seminarian disappears, Owen sees it as a chance to unravel a mystery, and perhaps his own
inner struggles. A man with questions more than answers, Owen Keane finds a chance to unravel this mystery. But it's not until he meets a
descendant of the English poet (I wonder who that is?), John Keats, that scattered clues fall into place -- and at the centre is a missing sonnet[/u]."

Sounds interesting, doesn't it. (All parenthetical comments, underscoring, and bold-faced type are mine.) I can't wait until it comes and can get started reading. I'll keep y'all informed (for those grammarians on the forum, I apologize for my dialect; it just seems to come naturally; although I certainly wouldn't let my students use it in their formal writing!).

"Speaking" of novels with Keats (or Keats-based) characters, as anyone had a chance to read Peter Ackroyd's The Case Book of Victor Frankenstein? I mentioned it on another thread a while back. A movie is supposed to be in the works, but that's all I know about that now.

Hit a site about Whishaw (ah! "forever young," forever Keats [my apologies to The POET] in his Richard the Second role (for BBC TV). Great Mother Goddess, he sure looks good (which he does anyway, even though he's young enough to be my son!!, but like I'd stand a chance anyway !!).

[Saturn]

I'm still waiting for that production of Richard II, can't wait.

[Raphael]

Never heard about that!

[Ennis]

Hello, Everyone!

The Lost Keats has arrived; here's a (I hope not too lengthy) tease (with thanks to the author, Terence Flaherty):

(Prologue, of sorts):

"A Murder

The darkness around me was hot and fetid and washed with red. My thoughts were as feverish as the night, and I wondered if I might be ill or drunk or dreaming. I was standing in the shadows in the corner of a small room. To my left, tall windows opened onto a balcony and a starless black sky. Through the open windows came a confused murmur of foreign voices from the street below. The voices were overlaid every few seconds by the rumble of distant thunder. These two sounds, the voices and the rumbling darkness, were both background for the room's own sound, the laboured breathing of a dying poet.

"The man lay sleeping on a couch made up as a bed in the opposite corner of the room from my concealing shadows. The only light in the red darkness came from a candle on a table near the sleeper's head. Around his bed were tall piles of books, standing like silent witnesses. There was a single book face down on the table, and beside the table a chair. Someone had recently been reading to the sufferer. (My note: Severn and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying?) Perhaps I had been myself. I couldn't quite remember. Something, the closeness of the room or the rising noise of the storm, made it impossible for me to concentrate.

"To steady myself, I studied the man on the bed. He was small of stature and wasted, his regular features pale and sharp. The only colour in his face was a blue tinge that shaded his lips and eyelids. His skin was dotted with tiny beads of moisture, which reflected and multiplied the candle's flame. These points of light seemed to grow and lose focus, obscuring the sleeper's face like tears in my own eyes, and I wondered if they were a sign of his delirium or a symptom of my own. If it were not for these living beads of light and for his breathing -- a gurgling, really -- heavy and slow, I would have thought I'd come too late, that the poet was already dead and one with the ageless books.

"Outside, the rumbling had slowly grown in strength until it obscured the street voices and challenged the drowned breathing from the bed. The thunder climaxed in a single echoing boom, and then the rain began, steady and hard. The room was lit now by flashes of lightning. For the first time, I could see that it was papered in a choking floral pattern, pale red roses covering the walls and even the ceiling. (My note: those ceiling flowers [daisies?], I believe, were blue. Or at least they were in 2009 when I was there; although the "death" apartment has been "updated" since my visit to be more "in tune" to what it was like when Keats and Severn were there. They may now be red!)

"One of the lightning flashes cast a shadow over the death scene. I realized then that the books and I were not the only watchers in the room. From off the balcony came a silhouetted figure, a black shadow who moved slowly toward the bed. I waited for the lightning to reveal the newcomer's face, but he was nearly to his goal before it flashed again. The figure bent low over the glistening head and pulled a pillow from beneath it. I recognized the threat in that gentle movement. I cried out, but no one -- neither the stranger nor the dying poet -- heard me. The shadow, still bent forward in a formal bow, pressed the pillow against the sleeper's face.

"In the same instant, the tortured breathing stopped and the candle beside the bed went out. I struggled forward against the moist darkness, fighting to reach the bed, but I was held in place. Then I found myself falling backward, away from the darkness and toward a hissing, flickering light."


My apologies for the length, but what a "hook" for any Keatsian!

Jeez, Saturn, I wish my pleasure-reading tastes were as sophisticated and challenging as yours!

[Raphael]

Sounds in intriguing that Ennis- atmospheric opening to a book.

[BrokenLyre]

I agree with Saturn - wow - what a unique and creative way to open the story of Keats. Makes me want to read more. I like the fresh perspective. Thanks Ennis.

[Ennis]

I agree with Saturn - wow - what a unique and creative way to open the story of Keats. Makes me want to read more. I like the fresh perspective. Thanks Ennis.

At the risk of a "spoiler," I don't think you'll like the ending, if you read it.

[Raphael]

I went into a very old second hand bookshop today - the shop itself dates from 1785!!! I have been there before- the man who owns it said in the late c.18th it was a shop selling tea!

I had some time before work and I felt compelled to go and look outside, as I could see shelves of books outside- and I know what that usually means- bargain books! Well, what a bargain I found- soon as I looked the words KEATS in red capitals jumped out at me on a small beige book with a lyre on the cover.It dates from 1941 and is part of a series The English Poets in Pictures, edited by Dorothy Wellesley. There is a drawing of Enfield School, several portraits, a painting of Hampstead in 1821, and one Severn painting I have not seen before. It's a variation of the one of John sitting in his room in Wentworth Place. The book itself includes some poems, parts of the longer poems and some letters. The price? 50P!!!!

I can take some photos on my phone tomorrow and upload them.

I also got a biography of Oscar Wilde and a nature book for the same price.

[Ravenwing]

Adieu.