Wuthering
Expectations

To the left, we see the back cover of the 1964 Bantam edition of Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), which I purchased for $...

Steven Millhauser won a Pulitzer for his novel Martin Dressler (1996) and somewhere around that time I read a review that must have impres...

I fear I need a system, a structure, to get writing again.  What if I work backwards?  Let’s see, what is the last book I finished.  Oh no, ...

“The great Gaboriau said, didn’t he? – ‘always suspect that which seems probable, and begin by believing what seems incredible.’” “If he s...

What I read in November, in list form, with light opinionation.  No idea what good this is to me, except psychologically, and I doubt that, ...

One last gesture towards German Literature Month: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) and Galileo (1947), both read in...

Young Joseph (1934) is the second novel of four in Thomas Mann’s biblical YA fantasy series Joseph and His Brothers .  It is the cute littl...

Some interesting things in or about Joseph d’Arbaud’s The Beast of Vaccares (1926). The framing narrator, a young Camargue cowboy, is giv...

We all enjoyed our trip, several months ago, to the Rhone River delta, the Camargue, when we poked around in in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (19...

When I was first learning to root around in literature, Vintage International was the publisher with the spines that caught my attention.  T...

John Gunther’s memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949), the account of his teenage son’s illness and death from a brain tumor, was one of the smal...

John O’Hara wrote  Appointment in Samarra in 1934, but it is set in 1930.  The main character in 1930 is just about O’Hara’s age in 1934, c...

Appointment in Samarra has the restless energy that a jumpy 28-year old pours into a first novel.  The three-day crash of a doomed protagon...

  Dolce Bellezza suggested a readalong of John O’Hara’s first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), and although I did not do much to prom...

Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (1948, although mostly published 1935-7) is a short novel about the sad, hard life of a hot springs prosti...

When I read Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936), about a walk through the Liberian forests, I wondered about the pointlessness of ...