Howard SpringBesprekingen

Romance

Recently, a dear friend of mine passed away. His wife, knowing that we both shared many interests, said that I should come by the house and pick up some books. "My children will throw them away when I'm gone; they don't read."

Back at her house, while I was browsing my friend's shelves, she picked up a book from one of her own shelves and said, "This author writes as it should be! One gets lost in his books." It was the way she said it that stuck in my mind, and I decided later to buy "My Son, My Son" – not from her, as she would not sell it. I opened the first page the day the book arrived, just out of curiosity since I had no intention to read it then; I had plenty on my reading list already. A few minutes later, I was no longer standing, and two weeks later, I had finished it.

Since then, three additional books have found their way into my collection, and I'm confronted with a delightful dilemma: to succumb to the temptation of reading them right away or to resist and preserve them for later. So far, it seems highly likely that I will miserably fail the Stanford marshmallow experiment!

I found this little gem at a library sale. A number of sweet tales of the author's growing up. Nice illustration. I enjoyed it as I read it, but the book doesn't stick with me.

257/39

Hard Facts is about several characters and how their lives become involved with each other. The main character Theodore Chrystal is sent to be a curate to help a vicar in Manchester, England. He was the only character in the book I really didn't care for. He seemed ill- suited to his chosen profession, lacking compassion, judgmental, and selfish. He meets the Dunkersly family, who own a struggling printing company. Mr. Dunkersly has a good heart, hiring a young boy, Alec Dillworth, who is growing up in deplorable conditions with his sister Elsie, as a means to get them out of the slum and better their lives. Theodore Chrystal watches the birth of 'Hard Fact' paper the Mr. Dunkersly creates and ends up making the Dunkersly family immensely wealthy. Through the course of this, Theo believes he has fallen in love with Elsie Dillworth, not knowing the circumstances of her past, and once he does learn the facts-- cannot except Elsie. I thought it was a good book and enjoyed reading it, with good character development and about these people with intertwining lives through the passage of time.

Howard Spring was a popular author, with his first book being published in 1932, and his popularity increased until his death in the '60's. Many of his books later were made into movies or t.v. series. In his early career as a journalist for the Guardian, editor C. P. Scott ' apparently regarded Spring's reporting skills highly; he wrote of Spring that: "Nobody does a better 'descriptive' or a better condensation of a difficult address." ' Wikipedia cites " he combined a wide understanding of human character with technical skill as a novelist. His method of composition was painstaking and professional. Each morning he would shut himself in his room and write one thousand words, steadily building up to novels of around 150,000 words. He rarely made major alterations to his writings." I look forward to reading more by him.

I read this book for #Club1944 and twogalsandabook.com

An absolute blockbuster of a novel, narrated by author William Essex. Recalling his childhood as the unwanted son of a Manchester washerwoman, he remembers too his early – and lifelong – burning ambition to become rich.
While in lodgings he becomes friends with Dermot, a gifted carpenter with strong patriotic feelings for the Irish, suffering under English rule. And as the narrative follows the personal and professional lives of the two men, Essex describes a conversation they have on the birth of their respective sons on the same day: Dermot resolves that his son shall achieve what he has not – “I shall never be satisfied with the position of Ireland under the muddy feet of your bloody country. My son shall not be satisfied with it. He shall go to Ireland, he shall learn to be an Irishman as I am not … now you know what I want most passionately in this world for my son.” Essex also wants to realise in his son what he has missed himself: “I’ve been poor in a way that even you have never known … I just want him to have everything. I’ll work my fingers to the bone to give him every damn thing he asks for.”
The two families are always close, but the results of the different input from the fathers into their sons’ upbringing makes for a riveting read, nail-biting to the last. Not, perhaps, great literature, but Howard Spring writes with style and keeps the reader enthralled from the first sentence. I loved his memory – prophetic of things to come - of swimming on a Cornish holiday just before the First World War “The sight of all others most fascinating in those waters: a horde of tiny silver fish, swimming in a long thin procession, ten or a dozen abreast, like a small marine army on the move. Endlessly they went by, never changing their formation, wheeling now to the right, now to the left, but always precise, regimented, moving as by a common will. A small cloud drifted before the sun and the water, still pellucid, turned grey. And the silver fish turned grey. I could still see them: a grey endless army, moving to some unknown encounter across the grey floor of the sea.”
A really good read - I've just bought another of Spring's novels on the strength of it!

The story of Daniel Dunkerley, printer and entrepreneur and Alec Dillwoth, would-be-poet, his sister Elsie, and their respective families and Theodore Crystal, curate, set in Manchester from 1885.

WARNING: Contains Spoilers

This novel is a woman's reflection and retelling of her life. It's likeable though very slow. She outlives all the original characters and two world wars in Cornwall, Great Britain. Euphemia Emmett is her doll and the novel's opening line hooks the reader; 'Euphemia Emmett was buried at dawn on May, the twenty-first, 1881.' There are vivid and very believable scenes but many of the characters don't cause the reader to care because their introductions are too brief

Highly recommended as an excellent pre-war anthology of classic detective stories.

this was quite boring, but had nothing else to read at the time.½