Aug 5, 2012

H.G. Wells for Breakfast

H_G_Wells_pre_1922I only work three days a week (and boy do I work on those three days) and on those mornings when I don’t have to get up in the dark, myself and Mrs Bookonaut engage in a leisurely breakfast. 

We have been eschewing the television in the mornings because its:

a) too cold and expensive to run the heater in the entertainment room

b) the Olympics is on and I am tired of commentators and sports people being sour about not winning gold.

So we have taken to old fashioned entertainment, reading books out loud to one another.

Our current enjoyment is H.G. Wells The Invisible Man. 

What I am finding interesting is that it sounds very good to the ear when read aloud.  I find the phrasing to have a considered quality to it.  Almost as if it was written to be read to an audience.  Wells, going against the convention of using syntax to add flavour to a characters voice or accent, instead uses phonetic spelling and thus we have.

A couple of minutes after, he rejoined the little group that had formed outside the "Coach and Horses." There was Fearenside telling about it all over again for the second time; there was Mrs. Hall saying his dog didn't have no business to bite her guests; there was Huxter, the general dealer from over the road, interrogative; and Sandy Wadgers from the forge, judicial; besides women and children, all of them saying fatuities: "Wouldn't let en bite me, I knows"; "'Tasn't right have such dargs"; "Whad 'e bite 'n for, then?" and so forth.

I have been entertaining Mrs Bookonaut with my devon farmer impression (whether or not it fits the dialogue I don’t know).

What do you read for breakfast?


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