The first thing that will strike you on reading this book will be the timelessness of its subject matter, no matter how dated the setting is. The Ivy League of Fitzgeralds indifferent hero, Amory Blaine, is a thing of the past, with only the faintest reminders of its aura of American royalty remaining today. Reading about Amorys days at Princeton is a bit like looking at the ancient photographs of 19th century football teams that every universit ...
Women in Love must be just about the most emotionally intense book you will ever read. D.H. Lawrence conjures his four main characters in what feels like the heat of a closed-room kiln. The writing is beautiful and amazingly perceptive, but is at times stultifyingly over-analytical. <p> Yet, despite the books combined length, density and decided lack of plot, Women in Love is surprisingly readable. What makes this book so good is the hon ...
One of the most entertaining novels ever. This Dickens book is up there with Great Expectations and David Copperfield as one of his most enjoyable novels. <p> The social axe that Dickens had to grind in this story is mans injustice to children. Modern readers my feel that his depiction of Dotheboys Academy is too melodramatic. Alas, unfortunately, it was all too real. Charles Dickens helped create a world where we cant believe that such ...
LE MORTRE DARTHUR (The Death of Arthur) was written by Sir Thomas Malory while he was imprisoned for some number of years. It was one of the very first times that the Arthurian legend was penned in English. There were some older Latin fragments of the myth floating around, but its thru Malorys account by which we know the stories most thoroughly. The most successful movie adaptation of the legend, EXCALIBUR, is based on elements taken from Malor ...
Flatland is a unique and brilliant treatise on a trifurcated level. It is a sociological statement, a mathematical statement and a religious statement all rolled into an incredibly astute number of pages. The book centers mostly on the differences between a two dimensional world and a three dimensional world; but comments on society, law, prejudice, religion, and proselytizing. <p> The book especially points out the difficulty in envisio ...
Kiplings JUST SO STORIES certainly rank in English-speaking childrens literature right along with A. A. Milnes WINNIE THE POOH and Kenneth Grahames WIND IN THE WILLOWS. They are fun to read to children 4-8, and even MORE fun for them to read for themselves at ages 7-11 (theyre marvelous vocabulary builders –the mariner of infinite resource and sagacity). My English-raised mother heard the stories when they were new and read them to me when I was ...
Absolutely the Best Book Ever Written…Bar None <p> First of all, one has a very difficult problem in defining exactly what this compendium is. Is it a book, a poem, a history, an epic? Well, it is all of those and many more. The Anatomy of Melancholy is, without a doubt, the best book ever written, bar none. <p> It was compliled from all the books of the 17th century and is not really about melancholy, per se. It is, rather, Robe ...
Petroniuss Satyricon is, loosely defined, the story of Encolpiuss odyssey through the Mediterranean world of the first century AD. Encolpius is a freeman and a scholar, whose distaste for popular culture, and disrespect for other peoples privacy leads him into a strange, twisted, sexually disorienting series of misadventures. <p> The action of the plot commences when Encolpius stumbles upon a secret ritual performed by followers of Priap ...
It is seven thirty on an August evening. The windows in the living room of the gray house are wide open patiently exchanging the tainted inner atmosphere of liquor and smoke for the fresh drowsiness of the late hot dusk. There are dying flower scents upon the air, so thin, so fragile, as to hint already of a summer laid away in time. <p> This is the story of a young couple Anthony and Gloria Patch living out their days to the hilt in New ...
