CUT IT OUT
Regarding the discussion of the term “blockbuster” in these pages, I read voraciously and have always taken care of my books. I was “sold” Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth by so many friends, but found it impossible to get started — the book is much too thick to hold comfortably and needed both hands to keep the pages open. So it sat unloved, unread and ready to go to a charity shop until I followed the advice of an old friend who shares my dislike of these vast books designed to last a fortnight’s beach holiday, and took a knife to it. I now have three manageable paperbacks: a “three-decker” which I suppose eventually will only be fit for recycling, but which I might at last get down to reading.
Nancy Fisher, Hove
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WHAT A LAUGH
David Baddiel’s claim in his last column that high literature can almost never actually be funny must provoke a cry of protest from most readers — particularly from “Bardologists”, as he condemns Shakespeare as rigorously unfunny. Yes, Malvolio and many of Shakespeare’s fools may be tedious, but that depends on the production. The comic value of his plays is by no means restricted to yellow garters and cheap laughs. Anyone who has seen and survived the Globe’s Titus Andronicus must have found the moment where Titus manically serves up Tamora’s sons in that pie painfully funny. The expression “lol” seems to have replaced actual laughter, but high literature can force us, literally or literarily, to laugh out loud.
Ruth Rushworth, by e-mail
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NO ÉTRANGERS
How interesting to learn that George W. Bush and Jeanette Winterson shared the same holiday reading — Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. I wonder which will be more infuenced by it — and in what way.
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Giles Speight, Portslade