Every once in a while I get interested enough in a writer that I decide to read “everything” he or she has written.
(No literally everything, perhaps, but a lot!)
This started in college, when I discovered that the college library often had volumes of letters or collected essays written by novelists that I was studying. I remember reading a collection of letters by Dostoyevski over one Christmas break, and a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf. It gave me a sense of connectedness with the novelists — with the human beings behind the novels.
More recently, after enjoying Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, I went on to read several more of his novels, and then Bright Young People by JD Taylor (a history of Waugh’s contemporaries) and Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson.
Now I’m being drawn in the same way to DH Lawrence. I’ve recently re-read Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and now I’m reading his bio by John Worthen, DH Lawrence, The Life of an Outsider, which is excellent. And I’ve picked up several other books by Lawrence for my TBR pile, with more to go; I understand his travel writing is also very good.
Which leads me to Goodreads: I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to talk about Lawrence to other people who are reading him?
Please feel free to join! I’ve posted a bit already from Worthen’s biography, and will post some more as I dig into more books by and about Lawrence.
