30 day book meme: Day 9
Jun. 3rd, 2019 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeDay 9. Film or TV tie-in.
A slightly ironic question today, seeing as I was just complaining about TV/film adaptations of books I love. However, I'm not going to do any more of that here. Instead, I'm going to talk about South Riding by Winifred Holtby.
South Riding, published posthumously in 1936, is a wide-sweeping story set in what's actually a thinly fictionalised version of the East Riding of Yorkshire (where Holtby was from—this worked because there was no South Riding historically, but of course it's slightly more confusing nowadays). The story follows a large and various cast of characters from across this society through the dramas of their everyday lives—the structure is a sort of twentieth-century version of Middlemarch, and Holtby pulls off this ambitious project very well indeed. All sorts of issues personal and social—local politics, education, poverty, illness, etc.—are touched on and examined, and despite having so many different things going on it still feels very much a cohesive whole.
I read it about four years ago and loved it immediately, although I now think I was probably a bit too young to appreciate it properly. I've recently read another of Holtby's books, The Crowded Street, which is utterly brilliant, and it's pushed South Riding quite a bit further up my 'to re-read soon' list.
Anyway, relevance to the question: the edition I own is a tie-in with a TV adaptation, the cover proclaiming 'NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMA' and featuring several actors dressed in interesting period costumes. I don't really care about this—I've not watched the TV show, and from what little I've heard about it this seems to have been a wise choice. In any case, it is a very good book, highly recommended.
A slightly ironic question today, seeing as I was just complaining about TV/film adaptations of books I love. However, I'm not going to do any more of that here. Instead, I'm going to talk about South Riding by Winifred Holtby.
South Riding, published posthumously in 1936, is a wide-sweeping story set in what's actually a thinly fictionalised version of the East Riding of Yorkshire (where Holtby was from—this worked because there was no South Riding historically, but of course it's slightly more confusing nowadays). The story follows a large and various cast of characters from across this society through the dramas of their everyday lives—the structure is a sort of twentieth-century version of Middlemarch, and Holtby pulls off this ambitious project very well indeed. All sorts of issues personal and social—local politics, education, poverty, illness, etc.—are touched on and examined, and despite having so many different things going on it still feels very much a cohesive whole.
I read it about four years ago and loved it immediately, although I now think I was probably a bit too young to appreciate it properly. I've recently read another of Holtby's books, The Crowded Street, which is utterly brilliant, and it's pushed South Riding quite a bit further up my 'to re-read soon' list.
Anyway, relevance to the question: the edition I own is a tie-in with a TV adaptation, the cover proclaiming 'NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMA' and featuring several actors dressed in interesting period costumes. I don't really care about this—I've not watched the TV show, and from what little I've heard about it this seems to have been a wise choice. In any case, it is a very good book, highly recommended.
