Good-Bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton
Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays.
And speaking of goodbyes, I'm ready to give up Book Beginnings. I forgot to post again last week, even though I put it on my calendar. It's like now that I've retired from work, I have no time to blog. Crazy! My time as host has run it's course.
Does anyone want to take over this weekly event to host and make it your own? Please let me know in a comment if you are willing and interested.
Alternately, we can call it good and bring down the curtain. Those interested can continue sharing opening sentences on First Line Friday, hosted by Carrie at Reading is My Super Power.
I'll keep posting until September 4 (assuming I remember). If someone volunteers to take over after that, wonderful. If not, I'll see you on First Line Friday!
MEANWHILE, MY BOOK BEGINNING
When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.
-- from Good-Bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton. This classic book has been siting on my TBR shelf for a long, long time. I recently went through my shelves and pulled out a stack of short books, mostly novellas, to read when I need a quick book as a break between the chunksters I've been reading lately.
I didn't realize just how short this one is until I started reading it. It's 144 pages, which makes it a novella. But the font and spaces between lines are oversized. It's easy to understand how it was originally published as a short story in the April 1934 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It is a sentimental and bittersweet story of a beloved, now aging, housemaster at a British boys' school.
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
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What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past— problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation!
Throughout his forty-three-year tenure at Brookfield, "a good public school of the second rate" in eastern England, Arthur Chipping has been Mr. Chips to his students. From his unpolished first years during the Franco-Prussian War through the radical changes of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the First World War, Mr. Chips has shaped many young lives. But Chips has been inspired as well--by the unremarkable and the extraordinary alike, by his colleagues, by a woman who will change him forever, and not least, by his children, "thousands of them, all boys."
Since it was first published in 1934 to international success, Goodbye, Mr. Chips has never been out of print. It was followed by a collection of stories, To You, Mr. Chips, and provided the basis for two award-winning feature films, a stage musical, a radio play, and two television adaptations. Based on author James Hilton's experiences as a student at the Leys School, Cambridge, this short novel endures as a revelation of the difference one good teacher can make, and "what the better emotions do toward making people important."
