Anthony Trollope’s book felt like a trainwreck waiting to happen for much of its 802 pages. It seemed glaringly obvious from the beginning that there was going to be a gigantic, completely inevitable blow-up, and I feared that the characters I was coming to know and like were going to be casualties. The writing is excellent (Anthony Trollope is considered one of the first major modern novelists in the English language), the pacing is good, and the characters, including the necessary caricatures, serve their creator’s purposes (mostly) well. Reading this book reminded me of childhood reading experiences when I increasingly [...] Read more »

(Disclaimer: I am not an English literature professor, nor do I play one on TV. Therefore, this book review reflects my own personal opinion, not necessarily the opinions of the latest and greatest academic critics who specialize in Henry James.) Whew. Henry James had a thing for writing about fixated characters, didn’t he? One could even say hyper-fixated characters. His protagonists have one goal in mind, and they stick to it—obsessively and exhaustively. (Sometimes I become exhausted just from reading the extensive accounts of their single-minded obsessions.) For this reason I certainly wouldn’t classify this book as a rapid page-turner—because [...] Read more »

As some of you may recall, I said last fall that I planned to be doing book reviews every several weeks or so, and that the next one would be Henry James’ classic The Aspern Papers. Now it’s four months later, and you may have noticed that didn’t happen, and maybe you were one of the seven-and-a-half people who actually wondered why. Did she forget? Did she get bored with the book and lose interest? Is she undergoing the early stages of dementia or some other condition that causes her to not remember what she said she was going to [...] Read more »

Note: I’ll be doing book reviews of classics every two or three weeks for the next several months. I have chosen the Barnes & Noble paperback classics series for several reasons: the prices are among the most affordable available; B&N has completely redone the print typeface for each book (making it easier to read); and an excellent introduction, notes, and follow-up questions written by a literature specialist specifically for each classic have been included. In short, the B&N classics line has the most value for the dollar of any classics book series I’ve seen. My first book review (for this [...] Read more »

Not long ago, when I blogged about reading the classics, my fellow chorister Andy wrote a very articulate and thoughtful response to my post about why she, too, reads the classics. (You can read her excellent comments here.) Inspired by Andy, I have been trying to squeeze in a book review or two on this blog, but life hasn’t been cooperating.  To start with, I apparently thought it was a good idea to try to read classics of 700+ pages during a time period when I was also reading books for 4 or 5 other classes plus 2 competency exams. [...] Read more »