Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
My LibraryThing group (called Group Reads – Literature) read The Forsyte Saga in March and April; I’m rather behind. I’m now midway through the second of the three novels. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy tells the story of the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s: the cusp of modernity. The younger generation
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
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley on the 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers list, and I know I’ve seen it on many other “must-read” lists. I never read it in high school when many people apparently did, so I thought I should give it a go now. But I just cannot. I’ve listened
When I was in eighth grade, I had a reading class in school each day. My teacher often assigned the entire class the same book to read, and we read during each class period. Then we’d discuss it. One particular time, I think we were reading a children’s novel, like My Brother Sam is Dead
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
I loved reading Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, despite the fact that it was written with 1700s archaic language, with long sentences stringing thoughts together, with essentially no dialog and no characters (beyond Robinson Crusoe himself), and with basically no plot. And yet, I loved it. Putting in to words why I loved it is
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
The Once Upon a Time III Challenge has a “Short Story Weekend” mini-challenge, so I thought I’d visit some fairy tales. To my surprise, the copy of Charles Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales that I found was less than 200 pages and written for children, so I breezed through all of them very quickly. Many of
Phileas Fogg, a proper Englishman in 1870s England, gambled his life savings on the supposition that he could go around the world, from London to London via France, India, China, Japan, and America, in just eighty days. An amazing number of things hold him up as he travels by train, boat, carriage, and even an
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino was a book that confused me from beginning to end, and yet I am glad I read it. Calvino was trying to do something creatively strange, and I think I missed it, but the strangeness was a bit rewarding in the end. All that said, I am struggling to say
When I mentioned at the beginning of the month that I don’t like science fiction, someone reminded me that “dystopias” are a type of science fiction. Since I have enjoyed the few dystopias I’ve read, I thought I should continue to give the genre a try. In response to my post about Anthem, Stewart suggested
How many times have you reread the same story? Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau is a collection of the same story, written 99 different ways. Some of the stories are fascinating retellings in various styles. Some are stereotypes (feminine, cockney, Gallacism, exclamations), some are in different perspectives (past, present, blurb, ignorance), some are different
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