Back from the Reading Party

I'm back in Oxford after a five-day trip to Downside Abbey, near Bath. The reading party with some of the Dominican friars was great! We all stayed at a cute little guest house with several bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room. During the stay, we took a few walks in the English countryside, which is quite beautiful. The whole time I just kept imagining Jane Austen characters taking long walks through the meadows.

Downside Abbey

 

 The retreat house where we stayed

We took a nice little walk through the countryside

We also all a lot of work done in addition to reading for fun. Actually, most of them were studying philosophy and theology books, and translating texts from Latin. I'll admit that all I did was read for pleasure. I brought along two books: Northanger Abbey and The English Patient.

I finished those two and enjoyed them very much. Northanger Abbey is about a young girl who gets invited to spend some time with family friends in Bath, then subsequently at an old abbey near Bath. As a fan of Gothic horror novels, she secretly hopes that the abbey she will be staying in will be full of the excitement she reads about. Of course, as a Jane Austen novel, she and her love interest spend the novel hiding their feelings from each other. It's pretty good.

The English Patient was extremely entertaining and well-written/well-researched. It's about the lives of an Indian sapper, an Italian nurse, and a Hungarian (not English) cartographer who are thrown together towards the end of WWII. The story looks back on each character's experience during the war and how it shaped them into the people they are. Fantastic read!

 

Luckily, the retreat house where we were staying had a little library in the sitting room and so I read a few of their books. One of them was Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It's been on my to-read list for quite a while and it was the perfect opportunity to cross it off. It takes place in England over a span of about twenty years, starting from the early 1920s through the war. It's about a young man named Charles Ryder and his friendship with an exciting and eccentric young aristocrat named Sebastian Flyte. As the two grow closer, Charles becomes aquainted with Sebastian's wealthy but troubled family. The rest of the novel revolves around Charles' relationship with them and how each person struggles to find happiness. The novel is really interesting in its exploration of divine grace. I highly recommend it.

The next book I read was Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body?, a Lord Peter Wimsey novel. I have recently discovered her murder mysteries and I have fallen in love with her gentleman sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. The four that I read before this one were the ones with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane (his love interest). However, Whose Body?was the first novel Sayers wrote with Lord Peter Wimsey in it, and Harriet does not appear until several novels later. I'll admit I miss the romantic tension and the witty banter between the two characters, but the sheer genius of Whose Body? stands on its own merit. Lord Peter Wimsey is called to investigate an unidentified naked body found in an aquaintance's bathtub. The corpse is wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez. No one seems to know who the victim is, so Peter must discover its identity before he can unmask the killer! Very exciting stuff.

The last book I read this weekend was Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote. It's a hysterical novel about the modern-day adventures of the descendants of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. As the two characters fight their modern-day battles, they experience and discuss several serious moral problems in very humorous ways. It's my first Graham Greene novel, but it certainly won't be my last.