Listened to the audiobook and loved the story even more than the movie.

A Room with a View - A real delight from beginning to end. Having seen the movie a few times and loved it each time, I wondered if I would discover new depths in the actual text. In fact, the film distilled all the best elements of the book in theme, character and setting. What you don't get in the film is the cheerful, ironic British voice of the writer. With delicious understatement he pokes fun at his upper middle class countrymen and women. In Edwardian England, most of the characters take themselves oh, so seriously. Their tea, their dress, their manners, what is said and what must never be said in company, there are rules for everything. Lucy Honeychurch tries so hard to be a "Rules Girl." It's only in her passionate piano playing that her real soul seeps out, and Forster, like a kindly uncle edges her gently along the way. The last chapter unveils in sweeping poetry the mystery and magic of Lucy's ultimate destination.

It was more educational than entertaining. By that I mean, I got a glimpse into past culture and a good look at a complex writing style. The author’s ability to represent the surface level chaos of life is mastery. It’s presentation and tone was very realistic and certainly takes talent to represent.

Again, I appreciate the work and this story was likely striking at the time. It just was really hard for me to keep with it on this one. I even read literature reviews and discussions to see if I’m missing something, I’m not. For me, it was educational not entertaining.

For GSHNJ Staff Healthy Living Challenge 2019.

A delightful book; Forster nails society and concerns with appearance. I should not have been surprised that the final scene was a bit different from the movie.

My version of this book is a beautiful green, hardcover, book of the month. It contains "A Room with a View", "Howard's End" and "Maurice". Loved A Room with a View, loved Howard's End but could not get into Maurice. Lovely description writing in the first 2. Nice to see the movie adaptations match the books closely. A Room with a View and Howard's End are perfect classic reads for fall or winter.

Phew. Not sad that’s done. I did not love this book. It felt laborious to me, to follow the myriad cast of characters, to care about what they thought, to translate whether they were being honest or snarky or what. I listened to a stage production before the novel; that helped me follow the story, and I could have left it at that… but maybe that complicated the reading: let’s just get to the end already! Lol
Rating: g
Recommend: readers of classics, jh and up for interest: it’s definitely a romance.

I consider A Room With A View to be Winnie-the-Pooh for adults and something that should be read often. It is the delightful story of Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman who eventually accepts responsibility for her own life and marries a man whose sense of freedom reminds her of a room with a view. The movie version of the book is charming and faithful to the story and (despite an amusing river bathing scene in which there is full male nudity) is rated PG.

Rooms stand for social conventions, deadening by themselves--views for naturalness, freedom, whatever makes it possible for the spirit to breathe and expand.

I’ve had these two on my list for a while and neither disappointed.

I’m coming to find that I’m a sucker for classics. “Howard’s End” is the first book of E.M. Forster’s I’ve been able to read, and his style is one I really enjoyed. This story at least was big on characterization; really fleshing them out and bringing them to life. The house at Howard’s end was actually one of the main characters. The way he writes about it brings it to life and gives it a magical feel, as if it has a pulse. He invokes this feeling without being over the top. We encounter the house throughout various stages. We see it lively and full of people, empty and abandoned, and then finally see it go through a rebirth after some time to be filled with people once more. If you’re looking to cross a classic off your list I recommend Howard’s End come next. Great plot line, interesting characters, and a few different settings that he writes about so well it’s as if his story is a painting.

“A Room with a View” always interested me because I knew it was set, at least partly, in Florence, which is my favorite place I’ve traveled to thus far. I loved this story. Similar to the house in “Howard’s End”, first Florence and then the main house in England are two of the main characters in Forster’s novel. He writes about his locations with such beautiful descriptions that it’s impossible not to detect personality in them. Having been to Florence a couple of times, he writes about it so accurately that even if you haven’t been there you’d be able to paint a picture of how it looks in your head quite easily. He gets the smells of the city correct even. Forster has a talent for characterization and this novel will show any reader that.

Although each of these novels are older, I can see why they’re considered classics and why they’re still popular, more than a century after being written. I highly recommend both of these books.

Honestly, I've read and reviewed both the novels here separately, so when I came across this collected edition in the library, I read the introduction - brief and unilluminating as it was - and came to log it here for completeness' sake.

I remember thoroughly enjoying both novels, giving them four stars each, although of the two I give the edge to Room, simply because it is funnier. In both, however, Forster's cuttingly observant writing absolutely shines as he skewers the middle-class pretensions around him. I can't help but think he would have been a wonderfully entertaining person to have at a dinner party. I'd like to read a biography of him one day... goodness knows the introduction in this volume was only minimally informative.

I'm not sure how I feel about these two novels. There's a kind of unevenness to Forster's writing which sometimes bothers me--his tendency to veer from realistic, even humorous representations (eg; the umbrella-filching scene) to overwritten meditations on the meaning of life. This tendency is most marked in Howard's End, though it appears in A Room With a View as well.

Also  Forster has a habit of suddenly snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in a way that strikes me as kind of unrealistic. Just at the last second, there's always some kind of salvation for even the dumbest of his characters (well, maybe not for Charles the "Oh-I-didn't-hit-him-with-the-sharp-end! Wilcox, who beans another character on the head with an heirloom sword).

Fabulous pair of stories! “Howard’s End” was even better than “A Room With a View.”

A perfect novel.