Why Do I Continue To Read D H Lawrence When I Hate Him?

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well Sea and Sardinia is finished and well to a D H Lawrence hater like me nothing, and I mean nothing has changed.

The only real pleasure it gave me was it's shortness. Otherwise it really should have given the reader a truer sense of the fate that was going to befall him/her by retitling the book Twilight In Italy2 aka you thought no one could make Italy/Italians even more boring than I did the first time.

Lawrence is a man incapable on cutting down on paragraphs. As if using so many words hides the fact that for the most part he's writing pure unadulterated twaddle. That, and his racism ( he the inglese observing these unsophisticated people living their lives as if he's in some type of experiment sets me on edge) made it for me an awful book to read.

It was one of those books that gave you a palpable sense of relief when you finished.

(A quick aside. The next book I'm reading is Can Anyone Hear Me? by Peter Baxter. It's essentially anecdotes about doing the Test Match Special BBC radio cricket broadcasts abroad. In all the housemoving stuff I'd completely forgotten that the cricket season had started and that the quiet pleasure of listening to the sport on the radio has returned. I will listen to that tomorrow, whilst continuing to box or crate our lives away. It'll be either that or cutting the grass for what I intend to be the last time before we leave......all depends on the weather)

So then a writer that in this blog has a status of regular villain. And yet I still read him and will probably continue to do so in the future. The question came into my head. "Why"?

(A question that could also be asked of my attitude towards writers that I don't hate but am neutral towards such as F Scott Fitzgerald or Jane Austen)

So then is it peer pressure? Yes and no. If you are the person who is in the minority with regard to an author then you do as a reader want to plough on and think is this next book going to be different? Well remember in all the times I've criticised Lawrence I've always stressed that it's based on the books that I've read. It's not impossible that you can dislike a work by a writer but love the next book you read from him/her. In the course of this blog I've had that experience with Michael Palin and, probably more pertinently, outside of this blog Kingsley Amis.

But that I'm willing to read further books by someone with a reputation does not mean that I will necessary change my mind. It's just that as a reader I'm willing to change my opinion to some extent if the right book comes along. Call it literary blind date. In the case of D H Lawrence though the right book hasn't come thus far so to me he just should be grateful for Lady Chatterley's Lover or else he'd be forgotten aside from people using his books as a cheaper form of Valium.

Until the next time.