Rebecca Reads

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is creepy. Dorian Gray, as an innocent and attractive young man, in a fit of passion exclaimed:
How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. … If [...]

My experiences with Victorian novels had been quite positive, so I jumped in to read a few more. I enjoyed both The Moonstone and North and South very much.
I did give up on A Tale of Two Cities this week. While Oliver Twist seemed intuitive and easy to breeze through, Two Cities has been confusing, [...]

I really like audiobooks sometimes because it gives a book a new edge. I absolutely loved listening to a selection of John Cheever’s stories via audiobook. The John Cheever Audio Collection was very well done.
As I listened to the stories, I kept recalling my time reading the short stories of Chekhov and Maupassant last year. [...]

The problem with reviewing a book I listened to on audio is that I cannot properly go back and quote for you the passages that made me shudder. Nor can I describe in detail the scenes that horrified me.
1984 by George Orwell is such a book. In some respects, listening to it reminded me of [...]

It was diverting to read, but Utopia by Thomas More was not a delightful, engaging read. It has essentially no plot: a world-traveler tells a man named Thomas More about a land called Utopia as they discuss various social problems.
And yet, Utopia was interesting to me as a commentary on “utopias” and “dystopias” in general. [...]

Often, I consider superior writing to be more important than a superior story: if it is written well, I don’t care so much about the story because the powerful writing can carry my interest in the book.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding, however, failed that test. I loved the writing: Golding’s prose is magical [...]