Books & reading are a large part of life at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia with stacks of reading material around the house. I usually have 2 books going, one for the train & one for home. The Husband enjoys novels, while I go for essays, memoirs & histories, but we are both adventuresome readers willing to give all genres a try. I am quite attracted to ‘coffee table” books. The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian Library has at least 100, & I will continue to visit old favorites & on a rainy Sunday I will spend time perusing The Villages Of Tuscany or The Gardens Of New Orleans.
I enjoy short story collections for the train because, well… they are short. Hector Hugh Munro wrote under the pen name Saki. He is considered to be one the masters of the short story form. He wrote most of his best work for newspapers, which was common for his era. The Stories would be later gathered into anthologies & sold as books. Saki wrote of a vanished & jaded world of upper class rural & metropolitan life in England & Europe. Before WW2, Saki provided an excellent introduction to the mysterious world of English humor. His work influenced: A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, & P. G. Wodehouse.
A sample Saki witticisms: “We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart." Another brings that era into focus: “To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening”, “Good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good public school” & useful for certain bloggers: “A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.”
He was born in Burma on this day in1870, & was killed by a sniper in November 1916, near Beaumont-Hamel, France. His last words were "Put that damned cigarette out!" Saki was an author whose dismissive wit was used as satire of the pretensions & stupidity of early 20th Century society. Ironically he died in a war costing nearly half a million lives, organized by the upper class that he satirized.
In Burma he raised a tiger cub & was always interested in wild creatures. He would later use the material of wild animals & unsympathetic guardians in my favorite Saki story Sredni Vashtar, in which a boy keeps a pet polecat which he trains to kill his domineering aunt. Munro was also a historian, travel writer, political satirist & writer of novels & plays. His complete short stories can be found in one fat volume. I recommend it.
Munro was guarded about his homosexuality except in a few of his stories. Most of the readers of his era would probably have been shocked had they known that his pen name refers to a beautiful boy in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam & carries esoteric homoerotic connotations. In the social climate of Edwardian Britain, in the years after the downfall of Oscar Wilde, Munro would have had every reason to keep silent about the love that dares not speak its name.
I enjoy short story collections for the train because, well… they are short. Hector Hugh Munro wrote under the pen name Saki. He is considered to be one the masters of the short story form. He wrote most of his best work for newspapers, which was common for his era. The Stories would be later gathered into anthologies & sold as books. Saki wrote of a vanished & jaded world of upper class rural & metropolitan life in England & Europe. Before WW2, Saki provided an excellent introduction to the mysterious world of English humor. His work influenced: A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, & P. G. Wodehouse.
A sample Saki witticisms: “We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart." Another brings that era into focus: “To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening”, “Good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good public school” & useful for certain bloggers: “A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.”
He was born in Burma on this day in1870, & was killed by a sniper in November 1916, near Beaumont-Hamel, France. His last words were "Put that damned cigarette out!" Saki was an author whose dismissive wit was used as satire of the pretensions & stupidity of early 20th Century society. Ironically he died in a war costing nearly half a million lives, organized by the upper class that he satirized.
In Burma he raised a tiger cub & was always interested in wild creatures. He would later use the material of wild animals & unsympathetic guardians in my favorite Saki story Sredni Vashtar, in which a boy keeps a pet polecat which he trains to kill his domineering aunt. Munro was also a historian, travel writer, political satirist & writer of novels & plays. His complete short stories can be found in one fat volume. I recommend it.
Munro was guarded about his homosexuality except in a few of his stories. Most of the readers of his era would probably have been shocked had they known that his pen name refers to a beautiful boy in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam & carries esoteric homoerotic connotations. In the social climate of Edwardian Britain, in the years after the downfall of Oscar Wilde, Munro would have had every reason to keep silent about the love that dares not speak its name.
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