D.c bookshops & first edition of "She"

[veritas]

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I've fallen into my usual routine.. checking out nooks and crannies.. I went to a couple second hand bookshops today and was impressed by the collections. I dislike reading but I love literature. Scored a first edition of "She" by Haggard. Freud and Jung used to recommend this book to patients.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/haggard.htm

Amazon.com Review
Ayesha is She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, a 2,000-year-old queen who rules a fabled lost city deep in a maze of African caverns. She has the occult wisdom of Isis, the eternal youth and beauty of Aphrodite, and the violent appetite of a lamia. Like A. Conan Doyle's Lost World, She is one of those magnificent Victorian yarns about an expedition to a far-off locale shadowed by magic, mystery, and death.
Tim Stout writes, in Horror: 100 Best Books, "As the plot takes hold one has the fancy that [Ayesha] had always existed, in some dark dimension of the imagination, and that [H. Rider] Haggard was the fortunate author to whom she chose to reveal herself." Haggard did, in fact, write this book in a six-week burst of feverish inspiration: "It came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down," he later said.

This edition of the 1887 classic features an introductory essay by literary critic Regina Barreca, who likens Ayesha to Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--"literally fantastic female figures who must be stopped before they love again." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

http://www.amazon.com/She-H-Rider-Haggard/dp/1497303982

Available online freely here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3155

[veritas]

D.C. doesn't feel haunted to me. San Francisco felt haunted.

http://dc.curbed.com/archives/2013/10/dcs-haunted-and-otherwise-scary-as-hell-locations.php

[MOON Ki]

Welcome back.  It's been a while since we heard of your weird adventures in America.  But stop reading Haggard, who was one heck of a racist SoB. 

[veritas]

Was he racist? Had no idea. What are you reading?

[MOON Ki]

Was he racist? Had no idea.

Is this the first of his books you are reading?    There's a book out there---published by either Oxford or Cambridge University Press---that did a good job on exploring his unsavoury attitudes, but I can't recall its title right now.   But perhaps these comments on King Solomon's Mines will give you some idea:

"'Mines' strikes one as more of a colonialist curiosity; it is a shallow, self-satisfied and profoundly racist book, which not only fails as piece of entertainment but is so mired in it's particular prejudices that it's difficult to come away from it without feeling, well, revolted.
...
He [Haggard] protrays the African natives as vicious and blood-thirsty caricatures, alternately praising them in the most patronizing way only to turn around and insult them in sweeping generalizations."

http://www.wetasphalt.com/content/review-king-solomons-mines

To the extent that anyone cares to read his books, it should be done for a look into the mind of a racist prick---not for entertainment or anything that might be uplifting.

[veritas]

Get off your high horse. Everyone holds a degree of prejudice irrespective of skin color. I haven't read a single book including academic textbooks devoid of being bound to their own limited education and experiences. You can't please everyone.

[veritas]

I haven't read it yet. I hate reading, let alone "enjoy" the writings of some gangly old vanilla brit. I'm not an uber dork like you getting worked up over a book. It's a book. It looks intelligentsia on my 8 meter long bookshelf, and will no doubt generate mixed reactions when I host parties. What do you have on your bookshelf? Oprah Winfrey? Kofi Annan? Ethno world peace texts? Anne of Green Gables? Little women? Eat pray love? I sometimes think you're such a chic. Ooooooo ooooo racism, controversy, politics, oh no, anxiety, anxiety, sweat sweat! I had bubble tea at DC Chinatown today, I enjoy that.

[veritas]

I bet you have NYT bestseller jokes adorning your bookshelf, dear MK.

[veritas]

Plus science nancies like Dawkins, and other celeb hogwash. Feuerbach, Foucault, Hegel, Sartre, Woolf... I have an arts degree in philosophy. I don't judge a book by its cover, author, or content. Truth isn't wrapped up in limits. You need to learn to feel the immortal to appreciate truth.