Category: Review
You need these reviews in your life.
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The Heart of Midlothian
Review: A good adventure yarn, lots of daring escapes in the moonlight. Way too long. Waaaaaaay too long. Needed an editor. A good exposition of the Scottish religious fanaticism, the Covenanters, the Cameronians. A terrible waste of lives. Hard going with reading all the dialogues in Scots dialect. A classic, perhaps with flaws, but deservedly… Read more
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Great Expectations
Review: The life and adventures of Pip the Orphan. It made me feel like it was always raining. Always grey, and dismal as can be imagined. Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Mr. Jaggers, Wemmick the Clerk, Pumplechook, the characters are so engaging, all slightly tragic and flawed. Loved this book. Would never read it in the summertime.… Read more
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Review: Brilliant in every sense. This book sparkled from cover to cover. If I had read this first I would have been a little less confused when reading Ulysses. Which I will read again at some point. Ireland, politics, religion, alcohol, and the glorious countryside. Youth, education, and the ways of young men. A boy… Read more
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The Adventures of Roderick Random
Review: A merry romp through 18th century England, France, South America, and the high seas. Good read, well written, solid prose. Needed an editor, but the novel was a new art from and readers craved this kind of long-winded adventure yarn. Like Tom Jones, but with more sailing and battles. This book made me want… Read more
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The Decameron
Review: Called a masterpiece, and deservedly so. 10 young people, 7 women and 3 men, set out for their country villas to escape the plague in Florence. They elect one of their number as King for the day and he or she sets the rules of the day and the subject of the tales they… Read more
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The Essays of Francis Bacon
Review: An enlightening book for the 21st century. The more things change, the more they remain the same. A collection of little short essays about how people think and operate. A hard read due to the archaic language, like Shakespeare without the rhyme and meter. On kings, on love, on rumors, on youth, on old… Read more
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The Giver
Review: A Newberry Prize winner and for good reason. Heartbreaking, heartwarming, dystopian, utopian. A book written for children that will challenge every adult that reads it. I won’t even summarize it here (sorry Brant 🙂 ), it just needs to be experienced. Will definitely check out the author’s other books. I award it the rare… Read more
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The Lady from the Sea
Review: Ibsen at his finest. Ellida, raised on a rocky spit of land in a lighthouse in love with the sea, and… The stranger, a metaphor for the sea. Married to Doctor Wangel, a good man but kind of a pussy. Hilde and Bollette, daughters from a previous marriage, both seemingly play hard to get… Read more
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‘Tis Pity she’s a Whore
Review: Dark! Incest, murder, eyes gouged out, blasphemy, sketchy characters abound doing nefarious deeds. Tough to read the archaic verse, but after a dozen pages you get into the rhythm of it. I’ll have to read it again, maybe after reading a commentary on how it all works together. By that I mean there is… Read more
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The Name of the Wind
Review: Superb! Finally an epic fantasy series that is not a hack reworking of LOTR! Magic is not magical, more like science and a bit of alchemy with a little bit of supernatural thrown in to make things glow a little. Thought it was going to devolve into Harry Potter for a bit, but it… Read more