From Amazon -
"The medieval beauty of Florence is the setting for the emotional awakening of Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman travelling abroad for the first time with her cousin Charlotte. On her return to England, in her relationships with her cousin, the unconventional Emersons and her supercilious fiance Cecil, Lucy is torn between lingering Victorian proprieties and the spontaneous promptings of her heart."

Although I love the Merchant Ivory film I found the book, with all those social niceties a bit tedious.
(This is a different edition of the book to the one shown.)

Chosen from TaxManager's virtual bookbox.

This came in the mail today. I immediately put on Tina Dico's Room With a View on Spotify - beautiful song.

Thanks raeliz64! :)

I found this book to be a slow starter, and not a particularly enjoyable read. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, especially since it’s been living in my bookshelf for so long.

Thanks for sharing!

Sent on as part of a fun game. Hope you enjoy!

A Room with a View arrived safely in Delphi, Greece today through the First Sentences VBB-Round 17!

First Sentence: “The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all.”

I believe I haven't read this book, I'm curious to see what I'll make of it.
Thank you very much for sharing!

I read this book in two afternoons and I think I've read it years ago too, because some scenes seemed familiar to me, but to be honest I found it rather bland. The writing was so and so most of the time, the characters felt dull and featured little development (yes, even Lucy) and the narration was rather fragmental. An elliptic writting style can be quite interesting, but few authors can really master it. E.M. Forster isn't one of them on my opinion.

Furthermore there are many phrases and references which I didn't quite catch the meaning of and according to the notes* they are a private joke of the author. But that's inconsiderate for the random reader, no? Interesting fact that not only locations, but many of the characters are based on real people, mostly E.M Foster's relatives and close aquaintances...
There are some concepts on this book that might have seem captivating or refreshing when it was first published, but all in all this book hasn't age very well...
Or I'm hard to please, I don't know!

* This is a 1980s blue hardback edition with a flowery dust jacket.
It includes editor's introduction, textual notes, general notes and also an appendix containing the thoughts of the author several decades later on what happened to his protagonists during the years after the novel's end...

This book will continue its travels, now to Australia and then... Who knows?

Good Luck little book and Don't forget to write your news from time to time : )

Arrived yesterday. Thank you! I wasn't expecting such a beautiful hardcover book, with a fabulous William Morris print cover design (not the cover shown above). I love William Morris's art. I love his quote 'If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'. I am still reading Virgil's Aeneid, but hope to get to this one soon after.

I finally finished this one. The only Forster I had read prior to this was his short story 'The Machine Stops', which I found quite intriguing and pertinent to the present day.

This book was quite different to 'The Machine Stops'; parts of it were quite poetic, and the whole thing bittersweet. All in all, an interesting glimpse into English upperclass life pre-WWI, especially the life of young people. The main characters were quite three-dimensional and convincing; some quite likeable, some less so. There is a contradiction or paradox in the character of Cecil, who scorns the social conventions of provincial England, with their formality and pettiness, yet by being aloof he becomes quite narrow in a different way (almost pharisaical, in a non-religious sense), unable to even play tennis with his peers. There is a good lesson here: life cannot always be 'deep', it needs lightheartedness, tennis (with ragged tennis balls), comic songs, and goofing around as well, to be complete. To live for an ideal or hold oneself to a standard is good, but we also need to accommodate each other and sometimes do things that we don't love doing... in other words, get out of our comfort zones, for the sake of friendship camaraderie or love. What we thought we wouldn't enjoy, might turn out to be good fun, and even if it doesn't, it might at least be memorable and add to the texture and adventure of our lives. That's probably my main takeaway from this book, even if it wasn't Forster's central theme in writing it.

I'm happy to mail this book (within Australia) to anyone who wants it.

Next, I plan to read The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson, which has been in my possession for a while. It might be good to dive into a lighthearted take on the USA, to counteract all the serious and sad things that are happening there now.

Lent to a friend.

Back to me again.

Now I'm reading Seeing Differently, Franciscans and Creation.

Left on picnic table.