British Author Challenge July 2025: Dodie Smith & Mervyn Peake

I have fond memories of staying up past my bedtime to read The Hundred and One Dalmatians, hoping the batteries in my flashlight would last until I got to the end. Now I have a reason to finally read something by Dodie Smith that doesn't feature dalmatians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodie_Smith

Selected Works
101 Dalmatians
I Capture the Castle
The New Moon with the Old
The Town in Bloom
Dear Octopus
Dodie Smith's Autobiography

I'm featuring Mervyn Peake because of my deep love of Gormenghast; the books can be demanding at times, but Peake created a fantastical world unlike any other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervyn_Peake

Selected Works
Gormenghast series
Mr Pye
Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor
Letters from a Lost Uncle
Peake’s Progress
Figures of Speech

I have The Town in Bloom on the shelves and of course the Gormenghast Series but I think that I will read Mr. Pye.

Since I completely missed out on the BAC in June - I was finishing up May's challenge! - I am going to be reading a book by both authors. For Dodie Smith I will be reading I Capture the Castle and for Melvyn Peake, who I have never read before, I am going to give Titus Groan a try.

I had planned to read works by both authors, but someone had borrowed the only copy of the Gormenghast trilogy my library has, and is refusing to return it even though I’ve put a reservation in. So I’ll have to postpone that one and will only be reading Dodie Smith. It’s 101 Dalmatians for me - I read the Disney adaption after seeing the movie as a child by have never read the original before. I need a light read this summer so am looking forward to it. Couldn’t get hold of I Capture the Castle so that will be some other time.

>3 PaulCranswick: I've requested Mr Pye from the library, so I'll be joining you once it arrives.

>4 alcottacre: I'll be reading I Capture the Castle, too.

>5 PawsforThought: A pox on people who don't return library books!

>1 amanda4242: i capture the castle I tried to read as a kid but seeme it wasnt a kids book and took till college when I read it, and loved it . town in bloom looks good, as I love alll things theatre

I've just started I Capture the Castle and the first paragraph ends with this wonderful sentence: "I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it." If only more would-be poets would follow her lead!

I just finished I Capture the Castle. I had read the book before, but it has been at least 15 years ago. I had forgotten just how very good it is. Thanks, Amanda, for giving me a chance to re-read it!

I am continuing on with Titus Groan too although I am finding it a bit, lol.

>2 amanda4242: I picked up the Gormenghast books back in high school (late 1970s) partly because everyone was reading LOTR and I wanted something ... else. Peake blew my young mind. I've long wanted to re-read him.

>11 alcottacre: I'm glad you enjoyed your re-read! I just finished reading it for the first time and found it a delight. The characters are neither saccharinely sweet, nor unbearably odious: everyone is flawed, but still endearing in their own ways.

Titus Groan does require a certain amount of patience. It's not so much about plot as it is descriptions of place and characters, but I find the descriptions absolutely breathtaking, like this one of Lord Sepulchrave's library:

The library appeared to spread outwards from him as from a core. His dejection infected the air about him and diffused its illness upon every side. All things in the long room absorbed his melancholia. The shadowing galleries brooded with slow anguish; the books receding into the deep corners, tier upon tier, seemed each a separate tragic note in a monumental fugue of volumes.

>12 tungsten_peerts: Gormenghast is certainly different from LOTR! I hope you enjoy revisiting it.

>13 amanda4242: To keep the comparisons going, The Fellowship of the Ring also requires quite a lot of patience, as very little seems to happen for approximately the first half of the book (the first time I read them it took me three weeks to read the first half of Fellowship and another three weeks to read the last half plus the other two books…)

>15 PawsforThought: I've only read LOTR once, but I don't remember it requiring much of my patience...well, except for Tom Bombadil. *shivers*

I probably had an easier time with LOTR than I did with Gormenghast because I'd grown up with the movies--first the animated ones and then the Peter Jackson films--and I wasn't constantly reaching for my dictionary, as I was with Gormenghast.

>16 amanda4242: I’m not a Bombadill fan either.

I read LOTR the autumn before the first Peter Jackson movie came out. I wanted to form my own idea of places and people before I wanted the movies.

You reached for the dictionary with Gormenghast? Because you needed to to understand the plot or did you just want to know every word?

>17 PawsforThought: I came across a lot of words I'd never seen before, or at least never seen used in that way, in Gormenghast. Most books I read *may* have one or two words I don't know and can't figure out from context, but Titus Groan had at least a dozen; looking up definitions slowed my reading, but I learned words like "abactinal" and "crapulous."

>18 amanda4242: Ah, okay. I’m too impatient do usually just steamroll ahead even if I don’t really understand what a word means (I’m yet to come across a word I don’t understand that’s proven to be crucial). But I know what crapulous means, at least!

I listened to the audio of The 101 Dalmatians read by Martin Jarvis and loved it. I can't imagine a better narrator. Somehow I managed not to read this book during my childhood, although I've seen the movie adaptations.

I have Titus Groan checked out from the library and I'm hoping to squeeze it in before the end of the month.

>13 amanda4242: I finished Titus Groan tonight. I am still not sure exactly what I make of it! I agree about needing patience for it - the book seems to be almost a character study of Gormenghast more than anything else.

>19 PawsforThought: Words that are crucial do either get explained or become clear from context; it was the sheer number of new to me words in Gormenghast that made me want to look them up--and now I can (but probably won't) use words like flexuous and ullage in conversation.

>20 cbl_tn: I'm glad you enjoyed it! I have very fond memories of reading it in childhood and was so happy that I held up when I re-read it.

>21 alcottacre: the book seems to be almost a character study of Gormenghast more than anything else.

That is actually a perfect way to describe it.

I managed to get hold of the copy of Gormenghast after all! (Bullied my brother into borrowing it for me when I saw that it had finally been returned to the library.) I won’t be able to read it this month so will have to read it later.

I had never read anything by Dodie Smith so I read I Capture the Castle and I enjoyed it!

>25 PawsforThought: Glad it finally got returned and you were able to get it. Now don't keep it out past its due date. ;)

>26 Kristelh: I Capture the Castle has been on my radar for years before I finally sat down and read it this month; now I'm kicking myself for not having read it sooner!

I managed to read two Mervyn Peake books: Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, a very weird picture book about a pirate who befriends a yellow creature, and Letters from a Lost Uncle, a fully illustrated epistolary novel about the fantastical adventures of a Polar explorer. Both recommended.

The August thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/372681