Wuthering
Expectations

Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Hum...

Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but...

One of these books is 1,100 pages long.  It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time. FICTION...

My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read.  I read Alison Ent...

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion ...

Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza .  Always interesting to see what people a...

The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romant...

How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions.  I have finished The Story of the Stone , 2,500 pages in five v...

What did I read in 2024? The best book I read last year was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE).   Best books, really, in translations by Arthur ...

A different kind of month with a different category of reading. CHINA Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (5th-13th...

At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone (c. 1760 / 1791).  First, David Hawkes, ...

  Thank goodness I write these down. FICTION The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower Club (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – written up lo...

Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read, obviously , The Female Quixote (1852) by Charlot...

I am two-thirds through Cao Xueqin’s enormous The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), volume 3 of the David Hawkes translation, and the next twen...

One last book for Norwegian November, Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer (1927), a memoir covering the polar explorer’s entire career....

I should do one of these “what I read” bits before October becomes too distant. I should also mention my health.   A little over a year ag...