Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Random book recommendation

For reasons not worth going into here, I recently recommended to a friend one of my favorite books, Saki's The Unbearable Bassington.

Her review: "I thought it was great. Sad, funny, psychologically acute, and beautifully written."

I'll repeat that recommendation here, if only because (a) it's such a great book that not many people know about, and (b) Saki, a.k.a. H.H. Munro, is under-appreciated on Facebook (just as he is elsewhere). Only 7 "likes" on his Community Page, and no page for The Unbearable Bassington (hands down his best work, in my view).

Closest literary sibling to Saki: Oscar Wilde. But Bassington is much sadder than anything Wilde wrote before his destruction, and clearly better than anything he wrote other than (of course) The Importance of Being Earnest and (perhaps) Dorian Gray.

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