Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Frankenstein is one of those stories that everyone knows, even if you haven’t read it. Except once you do read it, you realize that the version in the popular imagination has little to do with Mary Shelley’s actual creation. There, you will find no mad scientists robbing graves for body parts; […]
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) This year, I decided to add some categories to my Classics Club list. Though I’m still aiming to read 50 books in 5 years, there are now 80 books on my list from which I can pick and choose. This helps me feel a little less constrained. One […]
Everyone has an individual way of dealing with all the bad things going on in the world. For me, it’s very important to stay connected to a spiritual point of view, which helps to restore perspective, awaken hope, and foster joy and gratitude in the face of darkness and despair. In fact, it’s been a […]
Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921) After watching the 1952 movie of Scaramouche, with its brilliant fencing matches between Mel Ferrer and Stewart Granger, I became curious to read the book. How would the author deal with these exciting action sequences? And would the book give more context and background for the historical and political aspects of […]
George Packer, The Unwinding (2013) This post is part of a series based around the New York Times’s list of “books to understand Trump’s win.” Rachel of Hibernator’s Library suggested doing a readalong of these six books, and I thought it was a great idea. So did several other people, and I hope that we’ll […]
Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1943) I’m not very well-versed in world literature, and when I do read works in translation they tend to be from Europe. But I really want to do something about that, and as I looked for great novels from other continents to broaden my horizons, The Makioka Sisters kept coming […]
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness! (1933) Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) Before I embarked on the Reading New England challenge, I had no awareness of Eugene O’Neill as a Connecticut author. My experience of his plays was limited to a reading of Mourning Becomes Electra […]
John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (1984) When I said I planned to read The Witches of Eastwick for the Reading New England challenge, I also said I didn’t expect to enjoy it — and I was right, I didn’t. So this is going to be one of the rare times on this blog when […]
Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain (1942) M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (2006, 2008) A few weeks ago, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where there is a room full of portraits of prominent Boston revolutionaries. Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Joseph Warren, and others — […]
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954) Lucky Jim came up recently as my Classics Club Spin book, and I was glad, because it’s a book I’ve tried to read a few times without success. Still, I was determined to find out why Amis’s debut novel has been hailed as one of the funniest books of all […]