Wuthering
Expectations

Wuthering Expectations will be on Christmas vacation for a while.  All of next week, and then a little more.  Before I forget, Merry Christm...

The best book I read all year was, easily, incontestably, Moby-Dick .  The closest competitors, in audacity, scope, intensity, were the Comp...

The worst things I read in 2010: The delusion – as he now thought of it – had lost its power over him, and so the books only magnified his ...

When I imagine the Top 10 lists of two centuries ago, long before, it seems, the invention of the Top 10 list, I rarely come up with anythin...

I have to start my year end roundup a bit earlier than I would like this year. Calendar, vacation, etc. 1810 was a thin year for great lit...

When I paw through The Book of Tea to rummage around its ideas about art, I’m following an old path.  I am dissatisfied with my culture’s a...

If only Nathaniel Hawthorne had been familiar with Japanese aesthetics.  I suspect he would have been pleased with the Japanese understandin...

The Marble Faun marks the end of a Nathaniel Hawthorne project that began more or less when I started Wuthering Expectations.  I am now off...

For some reason, I have been reading a lot of fiction about painters.  The Marble Faun , Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1854), a true “por...

The Marble Faun (1860) is a book about Rome.  It’s a novel in the sense that some fictional characters, pale as ghosts, slip through the ac...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Italian notebooks are a conscious act of art appreciation.  Hawthorne, prodded by his wife, spent much of his year and...

I asked, and with a bit of research, I received.  I have now read the entirety of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks, maybe 2,000 pages in the ...

Perhaps I should mention that, whatever yesterday’s post might have suggested, I’m not so sure that Henry Esmond is William Thackeray’s bes...

Kind-hearted commenters have directed me to many other writers who have expressed their high opinion of The History of Henry Esmond .  Vir...

An idly curious question, to begin, for any English professors who wander by: is William Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (185...

I posted a recipe yesterday, a first here.  I had to consider how to write the recipe - the rhetoric of recipes.  Although I chose, in the e...

My first foray into recipe blogging!  If you have access to the Cook's Illustrated recipe database, go there and search for Skillet Gree...

Update: the recipe is here . Since it's Thanksgiving Week, and my mind is elsewhere, Wuthering Expectations will postpone its ponderat...

My town’s public library has a Religious Fiction section, over by the Mystery and Science Fiction shelves, and about the same size.  I have ...

A recent John Henry Newman argument, step by step.  Roger Scruton , in The American Spectator , argues for “a wholly new kind of university”...