Member: Pepys

Library131 books — see library

Reviews32 reviews — see reviews

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

TagsPaperback (61), Folio Society (47), 20c. (37), Novel (30), 19c. (24), Leatherbound (23), London (21), 17c. (20), Hardback (18) — see all tags

Groups18th Century British Literature, 18th-19th Century Britain, Annus mirabilis, Bienvenue aux lecteurs du Monde!, Folio Society devotees, I Survived the Great Vowel Shift, It's a LondonThing, Oulipo's Virtual Headquarters, The Turk's Head, Trollope lovers unite or fight — show all groups , Vaillantes

Favorite authorsJames Boswell, Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Anatole France, Graham Greene, J. K. Huysmans, Pierre Loti, W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, Samuel Pepys, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Stefan Zweig (Shared favorites)

About me French, b. 1952. Geophysicist. I like l'humour anglais, especially the Monty Python's—sorry for those who hate them.
Picture credit: John Hayls painted my portrait in 1666, long before the computer era. I have allowed The National Portrait Gallery, London to display it in their room 7.

About my library Thanks to my subscription to The Folio Society from 2003 onward, I discovered classics I had never heard of before—easy enough: I'm illiterate. I'm amazed by the genre diversity of English literature, especially in the 17c. & 18c. I never read books twice. (So why do I keep them?) There are so many works to discover, & I'm such a slow reader that I'm doomed to die facing a mountain of books I would have liked to read. (This last sentence influenced by my reading of The Anatomy of Melancholy. ;-) However, I don't buy too many books in advance. I try to keep my TBR pile minimum.
    My main interest lies in diaries & biographies, sometimes—but not always—linked to scientific discoveries or explorations.
    We (my wife & I) own an indeterminate number of books in French (she's a much quicker reader than I), plus some books in German. Since most books I read now are in English, my LT catalogue includes only those books. I feel ashamed of my poor collection as compared to some others'...

Currently reading: La Petite Vie de Samuel Pepys, Londonien, by J. Lucas-Dubreton; Diary 1662, by Samuel Pepys; Schott's Original Miscellany, by Ben Schott; The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, by Robert W. Burchfield.



Just finished: Touché, by Agnès Catherine Poirier; Diary 1661, by Samuel Pepys; Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gaul, by Charles Timoney; Mahu ou Le Matériau, by Robert Pinget; Diary 1660, by Samuel Pepys.



My rating
Some books are left unrated. The reason is that either I read them too many years ago, or I haven't read them yet. I don't see the point in rating all books with 4 or 5 stars. The following guidelines allow me to keep the average rating between 2.5 & 3:
————————————————————
***** = if this book were stolen, I'd rush to buy a new copy
  **** = I might consider a second reading (a special treat for me)
    *** = I recommend this book
      ** = Some passages were interesting
        * = Dull
     1/2 = Boring: on the fringe to give up
————————————————————
For reference books:
***** = daily use
  **** = more than once a week
    *** = once a week
      ** = once a month
        * = once a year

Real nameFrançois

LocationGrenoble, France

Account typepublic, lifetime

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/Pepys (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Pepys (library)

Member sinceDec 5, 2006