文秋芳编
7 The Time Traveller’s Wife is the story of a man who has a strange and inexplicable genetic disorder. (mysterious) 1 If you have had a disconcerting experience, do you feel a bit (a) tired, or (b) confused?
2 If you have a vista of something, can you (a) see or imagine it, or (b) go and visit it?
3 Would you express great wrath by (a) smiling at someone, or (b) shouting at them?
4 If you feel enchanted by a book, do you (a) like it a lot, or (b) not like it at all?
5 Is a writer who is supremely talented (a) very good, or (b) quite good at his job?
6 If reading fosters an understanding of certain problems, does it (a) help understanding, or (b) prevent it?
7 If you are desperately trying to get a job, are you (a) trying very hard to get it, or (b) caring little whether you get it or not?
8 Is a sensation (a) a certainty, or (b) just a feeling?
Active reading (2)
They were alive and they spoke to me
Background information
This is from The Books in My Life by Henry Miller (1861–1980), an American novelist, writer and painter. Miller was born in New York, lived in Paris 1930–1939, and then in California. His
best-known works blend fiction, autobiography, social criticism and mysticism: Tropic of Cancer (1934 published in France) describes his life and loves in Paris and because of its sexual frankness it was not published in the USA till 1961; Black Spring (1936) has ten autobiographical stories; Tropic of Capricorn (1939) is about his years with the Western Union Telegraph Company; The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), considered by some critics to be his best work, is a travel book about people from his stay in Greece.
In The Books in My Life (1969) Miller looks at 100 books that influenced him. His list includes children‘s books written originally for adults (eg Alice in Wonderland, The Arabian Nights, Greek Myths and Legends, Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers); many French novels and poetry (eg by Balzac, Hugo, Giono, Nerval, Proust, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Maeterlinck), German novels (by Mann, Hesse, Dreiser) and the Chinese Lao Tse and Fenollosa‘s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, besides work by American writers (Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman), Dostoievshy, Nietzsche, Joyce and writers on spiritual topics.
Culture points
August Strindberg (1849–1912): A Swedish playwright and a prolific writer of novels, short stories, satires, essays and poems, and a photographer, who tried various jobs before becoming assistant
librarian at the Royal Library in Stockholm and established an experimental theatre. He is best known for his plays, including The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), and for his vitality, vigour, and brilliant use of language.
Miller cites Strindberg‘s autobiographies, The Confession of a Fool (vol.2), a passionate love story and account of problems in his marriage, and The Inferno (vol.3), a study of his religious conversion, delusions and neuroses which reflect Strindberg‘s periods of mental instability.
Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) is the pen name of Frédéric Sauser, a Swiss-born French novelist, shortstory writer, poet, and film-maker, who led a life of constant travel (he was born in an Italian