{"id":10714,"date":"2007-11-06T16:20:28","date_gmt":"2007-11-06T21:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/06\/10714.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:41","slug":"book-report-cold-comfort-farm-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/06\/book-report-cold-comfort-farm-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Cold Comfort Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An odd thing about blogging everything I read is that I find the blogging seeps into the reading. I read the book knowing that I’m going to be blogging the book, and in the back of my mind, often enough, is the question what am I going to say about this book?<\/i> This question moves closer to the front of my mind if I’ve read the book before, particularly if I’ve read it several times, which we all know happens a lot. Oh, it’s not a terrible thing, and of course I reserve the right to just say I’ve read the book and move on. But it’s there, and it affects my experience.
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So. I was in a foul mood at some point fairly recently and picked up Cold Comfort Farm<\/a> in an attempt to cheer myself up. A successful attempt. Much cheerfulness resulted. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.
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Here’s what I was thinking I might write to the blog, though, as I went through it this time: why did Stella Gibbons make this book specfic? It’s written in the early thirties (and\/or the late twenties) and set in the mid-fifties, as far as I can tell. After the 1948 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, anyway. There is no particular point to it, other than throwing in a few jokes about visiphones and air taxis. I suppose there’s a joke in the idea that Sussex farm life, already a relic of an earlier time, will be essentially unchanged a couple of decades hence. Mostly, though, it just seems odd. You could leave out every indication that it’s set in what was then the near-future without harming any part of the rest of the novel, and in fact the magnificent film version does so. So did Ms. Gibbons put the specfic stuff in as a E.M. Forster reference? Or just a general joke on futurism in the sorts of writing she was mocking? Or what?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger sees something nasty in the woodshed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,208],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-specfic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18157,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10714\/revisions\/18157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}