Eight years of sickness, idleness, and ignorance - happy birthday to Wuthering Expectations!

The “eight years of my adolescence comprise a period of sickness, idleness, and ignorance” writes Vittorio Alfieri in his Memoirs (1806).  A few days ago Wuthering Expectations turned eight!  Health, activity, and knowledge may be on their way.

I feel that I have not had a single good idea in the past two years, but I have read a couple hundred good books which makes up for a lot.  Every two years, inspired by the title of a great Sonny Rollins album, I remind myself of what I have been doing.  This Is What I Do, Part 4.

The most popular, and also unpopular, thing I wrote was my best bad idea: a review of a review of a novel I have not read.  Although completely sympathetic with Francine Prose, on her side aesthetically, I could see that her review of The Goldfinch had serious problems of argumentation and evidence.  So the post was like a self-corrective.  It attracted terrific comments.  Always read the comments.

The basic aesthetic approach of Wuthering Expectations is best seen in a series on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters from two years ago and a series on Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education that began last week.  And in between, a week on W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country.  I’m only linking to the first posts.  You can move forward from them, day by day, until either you or I are sick of the topic.

Other series that were fun to write:  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (those posts had especially good titles), Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian. Big significant books.

Not that smaller books are less fun.  H. G. Wells’s The First Men on the Moon, Herman Bang’s Tina, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (well, this one is big).  A ramble through some shorter and longer early works of Henry James.

I can’t complain about all of the readalong opportunities of the past two years.  Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries, John Crowley’s Little, Big, Nicanor Parra’s Poems and Anti-poems, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, all great books to share with other readers.  Worst yet best of all was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, read by more people than I possibly would have guessed not just at that time but subsequently – I still see ripples from the readalong on other book blogs.  Maybe that was my best bad idea.  Many thanks to everyone who invited me along or joined in.

I splash around with Algernon Swinburne.  Authors I have read and not read.  Who is this Dino Campana character?  Who is this John Davidson character?  Who is this Sidney Lanier character?  Book bloggers have more freedom to just ask that question.  No professional need to pretend to expertise we do not have.

I say farewell to D. G. Myers.

How can I thank all of the book bloggers I read, or who stop by Wuthering Expectations to read, skim, comment, collaborate, or correct?  My writing is better as a result, my “thinking,” and especially my reading, which is where the blog begins, every day.  Thank you!