Wuthering
Expectations

One of the new books I read last year, Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2017 in German, 2020 in Ross Benjamin’s English) was from the future.   I ac...

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (2019) is as good as everyone says, so what do I need to say.   It’s a travel book where the locations are ca...

One angle I might take, if I were to write something about reading not fewer books but fewer great books, would be a “pop” approach.   It d...

How I enjoy “year in review” posts on book blogs.  I read all of yours.  Well, I was celebrating the holiday and then on vacation, and my re...

My reading is tipping towards London, which I will visit for the first time in January – if you are there, let me buy you a pint.   The Lond...

The thing itself, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin as translated by Michael Hofmann. Franz Biberkopf (BBK, Beaverhead) is an...

The yakuza in Confessions of a Yakuza takes over the gambling racket in 1920s Asakusa, a part of Tokyo I, like most tourists, had visited ...

I’ve been spending my time in the 1920s, and the German Reading Month organizers kindly picked Alfred Döblin’s fragmented, jittery, pessimis...

3. The Magic Mountain is a novel of Ideas.   A Dialectical Novel.   An Anti-Dialectical Novel. Characters spend a lot of time, and pages,...

  2. The Magic Mountain is a novel about time. Can one narrate time – time as such, in and of itself?   Most certainly not, what a foolish ...

“Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.” (Ch. 3, “Satana,” 59) Given that in...

I’ve been reading heavily, over the last year or two, in the literature of the 1920s, and that means one thing: gangsters.   Criminals who o...

Now, something about the French reading Americans, rather than me reading the French. In July, I counted the titles by American fiction wr...

One good reason that these posts do not get written is that I start poking around in the texts themselves, and since I now want to race thro...

What happens next?   The French novel, French fiction as we know it, finally comes to life in a blast of coffee-fueled energy.   Balzac, San...

I have in front of me The Oxford Book of French Verse , first published in 1907, “Chosen by St. John Lucas,” a 500 page collection of French...

I’ll race through the 18th century.   I think I have read just one 18th century text in French.   The issues are: 1.   The French classics...