Reading Attempt 1, Age 9: Brain bluescreened within 2 chapters. Comprehended nothing.
Reading Attempt 2, Age 15: High school American Lit. Hated the GUReading Attempt 1, Age 9: Brain bluescreened within 2 chapters. Comprehended nothing.
Reading Attempt 2, Age 15: High school American Lit. Hated the GUTS of this book and everyone in it. Read it, but still struggled with some of the more abstruse imagery and language. Brain occasionally bouncing off and skidding by entire passages at a time.
Reading Attempt 3, Age 30: Not a difficult read, though it did still tempt me to zone out through some of the descriptions. There is still something deeply wrong with everyone in this book, though I'm much less angry about it than I was as a teenager. Ultimately, I was hoping that my grown age would reveal to me depths and value in this story that my younger self was unable to grasp, and unfortunately that did not happen. It's a gaping hole of a book - a book about nothingness....more
This was super fun. Lady Susan was evil, and a highly entertaining main character. Epistolary format is alShort, epistolary, and absolutely ruthless.
This was super fun. Lady Susan was evil, and a highly entertaining main character. Epistolary format is always so effortless to read. It might have been more fun if Mrs. Vernon had engaged in warfare against Lady Susan rather than trusting to fate to rescue her brother and Frederica from her clutches, but alas. When good people are dealing with evil people, it's sometimes not an even playing field.
Regardless, it made me LAUGH when Reginald's mother writes to Mrs. Vernon saying re: Reginald breaking off his engagement to Lady Susan, "This is the most joyful hour he has ever given us since the day of his birth." LOL. Sad. Many such cases....more
This was a quick, cute read! Seems kind of wrong to say that about Jane Austen, but it was.
Catherine is a sheltered young woman traveling to Bath for This was a quick, cute read! Seems kind of wrong to say that about Jane Austen, but it was.
Catherine is a sheltered young woman traveling to Bath for the first time with family friends. She is naïve, artless, sincere, and (as the narrator takes great pains to impress upon us) of no particular outstanding or interesting character.
What she lacks in real-life experience, Catherine makes up by having read a great many Gothic romances. This, while woven into the entire structure of the prose, doesn't become REALLY important until the second half, when she goes to stay at the abbey with the Tilneys. The first half of the book is the trials and tribulations of Bath, where Catherine makes friends. (Or DOES she?)
I must say, I did like Catherine as a character. She's very young, but that's almost her only real fault. It took her one time of being shanghai'd against her will to cotton on to Isabella & Co.'s manipulative coercion, and then the second time she physically struggled and ran away from them when they were trying to manhandle her. Well done, Catherine! She's taken in by Isabella, the snake, but later on learns the truth of her character and doesn't hesitate to accept it right away. When she is letting her imagination run away with her, all it takes is a fairly brief 'girl, please get ahold of yourself' from Mr. Tilney to instantly and finally return her to common sense.
I also like Mr. Tilney pretty well! He's very funny and will go on for paragraphs with his skits, but he's smart too and kind and loves his sister. The paragraph where the narrator remarks on a naïve girl with little education being almost guaranteed to attract a clever man was pretty on the nose.
The whole thing did seem very abbreviated. Catherine's stay at the abbey came crashing down, and then hardly a chapter later the whole thing was explained and neatly tied up with a happy ending. It seemed like the kind of thing one of the other Austen books would have taken a lot longer to resolve. In addition, it was unkind of the narrator to tease us with Miss Tilney's happy ending and refuse to explain it! Honestly, Miss Tilney's plight at home was a wrenching one, and I would have been quite happy to read another entire book about how she broke free.
My goodness there's a lot of chicanery going on here.
Somehow I always remember the end, but don't ever remember the whole plot leading up to it. The My goodness there's a lot of chicanery going on here.
Somehow I always remember the end, but don't ever remember the whole plot leading up to it. The "false Aslan" plot with ape, donkey, and Calormene just feels so strange. It feels so like something that doesn't belong in a Narnia book. I'm not sure why.
Once Eustace and Jill get there, the action is interesting enough to read, but the whole meat of this book is the end, I think. People have written entire essays for decades on the end, so I won't be doing that. I am trying to take it in exactly the way Lewis intended the children reading this to take it: with simple hope and joy. ...more
Puddleglum is not my favorite. Having zero Pevensies in evidence isn't the greatest. The journey is alThis is for sure not my favorite of the series.
Puddleglum is not my favorite. Having zero Pevensies in evidence isn't the greatest. The journey is all right, but once they get underground their escape seems to take forever. I actually get what the allegory is with the witch's mesmerizing music this time, but that doesn't mean it's any more fun to read. On to the next....more
This is not my favorite Narnia, mostly because of its nature as a series of isolated, island-hopping adventures only loosely connected by a central quThis is not my favorite Narnia, mostly because of its nature as a series of isolated, island-hopping adventures only loosely connected by a central quest.
Eustace's introduction and transformation is the part of this book I always remember, and after we get past that part I feel like I'm waiting for it to end and it's taking forever.
Still though, it's good. Lots of interesting symbolism and, as always, Aslan is there....more
When I read these as a kid I thought they were fun, if a little cutesy. Now it's the same except I cry every time Aslan speaks. When I read these as a kid I thought they were fun, if a little cutesy. Now it's the same except I cry every time Aslan speaks. ...more
Possibly my favorite Narnia book. Also possibly the point where the allegory starts to break down. I do love the tiny glimpses of the Pevensies as rulPossibly my favorite Narnia book. Also possibly the point where the allegory starts to break down. I do love the tiny glimpses of the Pevensies as rulers, and following "in universe" characters Shasta and Aravis is an unusual treat....more
I finished this book in two quick swallows. Fundamentally, it's an odd, homey creation allegory. It's not my favorite of the series, but it's impossibI finished this book in two quick swallows. Fundamentally, it's an odd, homey creation allegory. It's not my favorite of the series, but it's impossible not to take Aslan seriously and I love the cabby. ...more
It is I, your local reader of classics back with yet another meaningless 3-star review. I, your local vampire-hater once again reading a book about vaIt is I, your local reader of classics back with yet another meaningless 3-star review. I, your local vampire-hater once again reading a book about vampires. I, your local hypocrite who, disliking Gothic literature, once more chooses a book in that genre.
Full disclosure, I read this because of the Dracula Daily memes. And because it's epistolary, and that by nature makes things easier to read.
And actually? It was a lot more fun than I expected.
Jonathan Harker goes to Transylvania as a young lawyer to help a local nobleman with his property acquisition in England. There, he finds himself trapped by the Count, who seems to only show up at night, never eats, and has suspiciously sharp teeth? I'm really not sure why Dracula didn't make Jonathan one of his victims during this period, especially since it seemed like he was intending to ("This man is MINE.") but just drew it out for a ridiculously long time?
Anyway, he escapes, and then we adjourn to England where an assortment of odd characters stand ready to be sucked into the mounting vampiric struggle:
1. Mina, Jonathan's soon-to-be wife, who is a perfect angel, a loving and conscientious wife, so smart that she is said to have a "man's brain," the subject of a truly shocking amount of benevolently fawning sexism, the train fiend, etc.
2. Van Helsing, a doctor?? Maybe? Supposedly he is a doctor, but also he somehow has extensive experience with vampires. This man is always talking but somehow never saying anything, just going on and on in weirdly affected broken English. He's the only one who knows anything but manages to be incredibly unhelpful regardless.
3. Jack, who runs an insane asylum, also probably a doctor. Blood types? Never heard of her.
4. Lucy, who for a brief moment is beautiful, rich, a good friend, loved by all, etc. before she spends the rest of her time as a helpless victim. This whole episode is incredibly frustrating. How many times must Van Helsing and Jack pronounce her saved and then come back the next day to find her once again dying? Come on, guys.
5. Arthur, Lucy's former fiancé and the moneybags of the group. Finances the whole vampire hunt and uses his title as nobility to smooth everything over. Also, for some reason, a steamboat enthusiast and mechanic?
6. Quincey, Token American™. "I propose that we add Winchesters to our armament. I have a kind of belief in a Winchester when there is any trouble of that sort around." MURICA.
7. Jonathan, the former mild-mannered lawyer's clerk turned white-haired avenger who for some unexplained reason wields a Ghurka knife from India?
Seriously, is it just me or did Stoker just fully not explain the Kukri knife? It just came out of nowhere.
Also, why did Dracula seem to only target women? Clearly vampires can target men, or Dracula himself wouldn't have been created, so this is odd. I'm wholesale glossing over all the weird sexual undertones. They're vague enough to be easily glossed over but there clearly enough that if you try to look closer at anything, you can't avoid seeing them.
AND ANOTHER THING, how did Jonathan's last valiant slash with his knife successfully kill Dracula? By all the lore we've so far learned from Van Helsing, that shouldn't have worked.
The lore here in general is just very fascinating. I love the strict limitations of vampire power, which commonly only get used in part in modern vampire stories. We're all familiar with vampires having to be invited in, but lying there completely helpless all day, unable to be woken? Being limited by the bounds of their home territory, i.e. the boxes of dirt? Now that's intriguing....more
I have to apologize to Emma, because THIS is actually the most intensely uncomfortable Austen.
The problem here is that there is no one likable in thisI have to apologize to Emma, because THIS is actually the most intensely uncomfortable Austen.
The problem here is that there is no one likable in this whole story besides Fanny's brother, who is a tertiary character at best.
Edmund is a numbskull. Sure he's nice, but he's so arrogant without at any point really justifying his self-opinion. Miss Crawford is a big yikes. Mr. Crawford is an even bigger yikes and also confusingly portrayed. Everyone else is one-dimensional and annoying.
Fanny? Potentially the worst of them all.
It's hard to say, really, because there is nothing wrong with Fanny. She's right and kind and good almost all of the time. But her extreme shyness, biddableness, and inability to stand up for anything ever under any circumstances almost render her good qualities moot.
When she goes to visit her family is an especially uncomfortable part of the story. She's SO hideously uncomfortable because of how dirty, unorganized, and uncouth everything is. But she just sits in the parlor and shrinks into uncomfortableness? Like, clean a dish! Wipe down a table, if you think it's so gross!
If she were just selfless and a bit of a pushover that would be one thing, but it almost seems like she is incapable of taking ANY self-driven action. At a certain point my pity and sympathy evolved into irritation and near-contempt.
Finally, the whole story of the book is basically the not-romance of Edmund and Miss Crawford. When it at last ends for good, so does the book. Everything else, which is actually the part of the story I want to see (Edmund realizing Fanny's true value, mending his ways, becoming more humble, Fanny growing into a woman willing to take up her own space) happens in a throwaway epilogue of a couple paragraphs.
I avoided reading this book for a long, long time, worried about how heavy and painful the subject-matter would be. It both was extremely heavy, but aI avoided reading this book for a long, long time, worried about how heavy and painful the subject-matter would be. It both was extremely heavy, but also... wasn't.
I was thinking about the explicit and terrifying brutality of shows like Underground. This is not that. Uncle Tom's Cabin shines a light on the human cruelty of breaking up families, racist condescension, Christian hypocrisy, sexual crimes against slaves, etc., but it does so in a way that could have been written by Louisa May Alcott.
There are more philosophical conversations recorded between white people, taking a microscope to the moral inconsistency and negligence of the "well-meaning," than there are scenes of action or anything else. Over anything else, this book is a work of Christian evangelism -- meant to indict common, unremarkable selfishness, and in contrast show true, humble Christ-like choices under the worst possible circumstances.
There is an interesting amount of essentializing and making absolute statements about Black people by the author. She obviously hates the institution of slavery, and so it took me aback to hear Ms. Stowe make extremely regular, sweeping statements about the "nature of the African race."
There are certainly plenty of examples of this book staring cruelty right in the face, so I'm not sure what it is that makes me feel as if it flinches from being as true as it might. It could be because most of the slave-owners we meet are kind and paternalistic. I kind of think, though, that it's because SO much time is spent on the St. Clares. I think we know more about Augustine and his daughter Eva than we do about Tom.
Eva is the kind of character that it's a bit hard to deal with. Imagine if Beth from Little Women were eight years old and almost LITERALLY an angel from heaven.
All the old-timey, romantic melodrama in the book rests here, with Eva's fate and then Augustine's extremely random subsequent fate. The book's sort of obsession with Eva's beauty and soulful eyes, and her position as an avatar of the righteous, soul-saving love of God kind of punctuates the middle of the entire story in a bit of an odd way. If there is anything to criticize, I think it is this.
Overall, this book was both more and less than I was expecting. It is one of those not-entirely-common books that are both an engaging story, but also make you instantly start thinking of the half dozen or so essays you could easily write on it. I'm very glad I read it....more
This is an Austen I had never before consumed in ANY form. A rare delicacy!
I did enjoy it a lot. It's different, moving very very slowly at first and This is an Austen I had never before consumed in ANY form. A rare delicacy!
I did enjoy it a lot. It's different, moving very very slowly at first and then almost seems a little fast and hasty at the end. I liked Anne, and the story of meeting again after having grown up and learned a lot about yourself, who you are, and what you value. Overall, I continue to imbibe Jane Austens and ask for more....more
This is the weirdest book I have read in a long time. It made me briefly feel not just benevolent, but even ADMIRING of the Catholic church, so with tThis is the weirdest book I have read in a long time. It made me briefly feel not just benevolent, but even ADMIRING of the Catholic church, so with that you already know some chicanery is afoot.
Essentially, I am back yet again with another meaningless, three-star review of a book I'm not qualified to evaluate. Yee haw.
A Canticle For Leibowitz is a science fiction meditation on the post-nuclear-war fall of civilization. It is an artefact of the 1950s and 60s, and the understandable melancholia of someone who had experienced a total world war and then afterward stared down the barrel of what looked increasingly like the willful careening self-destruction of the dawning nuclear age... really jumps out.
Realistically, I would be writing stories about the irredeemably selfish spirit of humanity as well.
The premise is that the world as we know it has ended after a nuclear war, leaving only few survivors and a horrendously irradiated planet. Technology, history, and understanding of anything that came before is forgotten, except what can be scrounged up from archaeological digs in the rubble left behind. Somehow, the monks of Leibowitz become the guardians of these scraps of pre-apocalypse knowledge, in a savage and primitive world.
There are three novellas, essentially, that combine to make this book. Each one focuses on an important point along fallen civilization's slow journey to rebuild. With the time jumps in between each section, the story spans hundreds of years.
It is:
• Very not only religious, but Catholic. It was a little suffocating at first, but as the book went on I got used to it. Honestly, it was an interesting exercise in perspective and kind of a nice change from the worldview filtering I do with the usual aggressively secular books.
• Brutal. Don't get attached to any of the characters, because lol. THEY understand what kind of world they live in, but do you?
• Extremely creepy in a strange, philosophical and moral way. There is violence, gore, body horror, birth defects and deformities, etc. but it was really something disturbing about the despairing-yet-impotently-yearning emotion in the story that had me staring vacantly into space after finishing it.
Overall, this was an Experienceᵀᴹ. And I still don't know WHO the old hermit is....more
In the already-saccharine genre of "unwanted little girl transforms the life of well-known curmudgeon" literature, Pollyanna stands out as possibly thIn the already-saccharine genre of "unwanted little girl transforms the life of well-known curmudgeon" literature, Pollyanna stands out as possibly the MOST saccharine.
I said possibly. There are a lot of candidates for the throne, after all. But good grief. It's hard to even imagine anything more twee, if people at the turn of the century could do twee.
The glad game swamps the ENTIRE book. The entire book is just Pollyanna explaining the glad game to sixteen different neighbors. Then the author blatantly handwaves a mysterious accident for the pathos, milks the pathos shamelessly, and uses it to simultaneously untangle the star-crossed love of both Pollyanna's aunt's AND her mother's old beaus. AND THEN handwaves the miraculous cure, while deigning to discuss zero medical facts the entire time.
The whole thing is a bold, bold move.
It's an easy read, and yes I will be back again many more times I'm sure. Quality-wise I want to give this three stars, but here I am, re-reading it for the bazillionth time and I had a blast yet again. So what is the truth?
Almost every other "unwanted girl vs. curmudgeon" genre book offers deeper content, but there is certainly something uniquely enjoyable about this one....more
Yes, we're back with another, slightly different edition. This one doesn't include his anti-pretentious landscaping poem, but instead has an iconic onYes, we're back with another, slightly different edition. This one doesn't include his anti-pretentious landscaping poem, but instead has an iconic one called "An Essay On Criticism."
Some gems:
• "Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill / Appear in writing or in judging ill"
• "Some neither can for wits nor critics pass / As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass"
• "Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see / Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be / In every work regard the writer's end / Since none can compass more than they intend; / And if the means be just, the conduct true / Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due"
• "'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; / Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do / Men must be taught as if you taught them not / And things unknown proposed as things forgot"
• "Others for Language all their care express / And value books, as women men, for dress" (L O L)
Look at this. This man has been harshly reviewed by somebody and is SO SALTY he wrote an entire multi-page poem about it. I freaking love Pope. What a legend. (Also, apparently the saying "to err is human, to forgive divine" is from this poem??)...more
Not sure what I was thinking when I gave this three stars on my last reread, but it probably went something like, Please, there is only so much you caNot sure what I was thinking when I gave this three stars on my last reread, but it probably went something like, Please, there is only so much you can say about crocuses.
Anyway, I think this book is the anti-particle of Heidi. They are in many ways shadows of each other, and I'm sure if they ever met they would instantly obliterate one another.
A lot of the themes are consistent (Fresh Air Is Literally Next To Godliness, a poor needlessly wheelchair-bound child, a lot of time spent outdoors probably makes you a good person as well as healthy) but there's a lot of inversion as well. In Heidi, everyone except Dete (and occasionally Peter) is well-meaning and as kind as they know how to be. In this book, Dickon and Martha's whole family are the Heidis who spread love and cheerful healthiness everywhere they go, but almost everyone else in the story is selfish and petty. Heidi literally quotes Bible stories to people, whereas Mary and Colin are both nearly small pagans.
The Secret Garden is the story of two selfish children and how they grow. It's great. I love it. And wow does it ever go on about gardening.
I have never felt a single iota of the rapturous adoration the author clearly has for nature. "The things which happened in that garden! If you have never had a garden you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there," she says. Like, okay. I'll take your word for it. I've been forced labor for a whole lot of gardens, but clearly have not been initiated into the cult. I've never liked jumping rope, either, but every time I read this book I am transported into a land of whimsy and mystery where enjoying both of those activities seems possible.
The illustrations in my edition are fabulous, but Colin and Mary's interactions are the best part of this book. What I wish is that the story had kept Mary in the end as it had in the beginning. It becomes all about Colin's emotional resolution (which is great and needed) but I can't forget the scene the movie threw in between Mary and Mr. Craven. Very excellent. ...more
Here I am yet again, giving a meaningless rating to a book I am not educated enough to fully understand. ThToo much existentialism, not enough plague.
Here I am yet again, giving a meaningless rating to a book I am not educated enough to fully understand. This is the story of a mid-1900s Algerian town struck with an outbreak of the plague. Really, though, it's a portrait of humanity's reaction to suffering too big for us to understand, as seen through the experiences and thoughts of four different men.
There are two questionable sermons, many descriptions of how people go on living in the face of disaster, and quite a few meditations on meaning and if/how/where it can be found. I'm not sure exactly what was being said to me, except that it seems like a cry of pain from someone groping in the darkness. An expression of the "inward groan" of Romans 8.
This was definitely not a book that "read itself" so to speak -- I had to put in the work for every page.
The most interesting aspect of it, for me, was the way the narration treats people. Looking down on the collective people from above, the author almost always paints them as thoughtlessly living meaningless lives, variously pushed and pulled and crushed and exalted by massive forces to which they are only pawns. Looking at individual people, though, the author almost always paints them as peculiar and precious, with their own value and dignity even when they are absurd or incomprehensible to others....more
As an obsessed Phantom fan since I was old enough to listen to my mom's soundtrack CD, I had to get around to rAll in all, not as weird as I expected.
As an obsessed Phantom fan since I was old enough to listen to my mom's soundtrack CD, I had to get around to reading this eventually. Honestly, I expected the musical to have taken a thousand liberties and barely resemble the story from the book, because that's how things seem to go - but actually, it's quite similar. There are some deviations, but overall here we are with the same weird story and no music to make it worthwhile.
I absolutely annoyed my coworkers all day yesterday humming it, though. It's impossible not to.
The whole "should I hate or sympathize with the Phantom" debate is answered unequivocally on the side of hate. I have seen people saying that the book really makes you understand Erik better and feel for him, and the author makes that assertion too, but that was not at all my experience. "Poor disfigured little boy who grew up feral under the opera house" is much easier to woobify than "adult well-established criminal psychopath leaves international career to squat under the opera house for some reason."
Just listen to him:
"...I am very tired of it!... I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house and of living like a mountebank, in a house with a false bottom! I'm tired of it! I want to have a nice, quiet flat, with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else! A wife whom I could love and take out on Sundays and keep amused on week-days... Here, shall I show you some card tricks? That will help us pass a few minutes, while waiting for eleven o'clock to-morrow evening..."
I laughed out loud reading that part. Waiting for eleven o'clock, when you're going to blow up the whole opera house, killing everyone inside and yourself? That eleven o'clock? What a petulant numbskull moron. He's like a little baby, throwing fits. Whose fault is it that you have a torture-chamber in your house, huh?!???
Some notes:
• The Persian. Who even is this guy? Without him the whole story would have fallen to bits. He seems to be here simply as a vehicle of the plot, and a good thing too.
• Another reason why it's so hard to sympathize with the Phantom is the horrible effect he has on Christine. Apparently he's only been tutoring her for a few months, but she's completely terrified of and controlled by him and after Down Once More even resorts to attempting suicide.
• Raoul comes off as a bit of an idiot. I like how it seems that he just trots off with Christine to the wilds of Scandinavia without a second thought for his dead brother who raised him.
• Madame Giry also does not appear in a flattering light. Instead of playing the Persian's role as the Only One Who Knows Anything, she's more of a thoughtless lackey to the Phantom.
• Strangely, Joseph Buquet is probably the only one who is more sympathetic in the book than the play. Here he still dies, obviously, but he's apparently a good guy.
• Maybe I'm just not smart enough, but I do not comprehend the torture chamber at ALL. It apparently makes you hallucinate? And then kill yourself? But I still don't understand how?
• It just... really needs the music to make it anything other than a book you read and kind of scratch your head at after, thinking, 'Well, that was strange.'
D. B. Guin
>
Books:
classics
(66)
