Wuthering
Expectations

I suppose this will fall into the category of Subjects for Future Research.  Almost all of this is from the last chapter.  It is especially ...

What I was wondering, when I asked if there is anything in The Confidence-Man except argument, is what to do with all of the argument, all ...

What I was wondering, when I asked if there is anything in The Confidence-Man except argument, is how to treat a novel like this as a work ...

I find it helpful to think about the layers of The Confidence-Man .  Not that the layers are so different than in many other novels.  But: w...

Kim was original, and full of ideas and words I did not instantly understand, and significant parts of the book slipped from my grasp to th...

I cannot escape the feeling that writing too much about Kim after reading it once, or making too strong of a claim about it, is a mistake. ...

Kipling packs in the characters, the rush of life, all kinds of sensory detail, place names.  And languages, too.  He enjoys scenes where ch...

The Grand Trunk Road scenes in Kim are spectacular.  They are so full of variety, of life, that they seem to sprawl outside the bounds of t...

Having nothing to say about a book makes the writing kind of hard.  I will pick a passage and see what happens.  The book at hand in Rudyard...

American poet John Hollander just passed away.   I was tempted to say “Yale poet” John Hollander.  He was an institution of American poetry....

I thought I was going to write a bit about Gregor von Rezzori’s The Snows of Yesteryear (1989) a couple of days ago.  Luckily for me, time ...

Six to eight months, that is how long it takes for a reading project to wear me down.  I do not know why my course of Austrian reading has t...

How about one more rummage through D. H. Lawrence’s little book. A couple of years ago I puzzled over a strange book by William Carlos Wil...

D. H. Lawrence pulls out the strangeness in the writers he covers in Studies in Classic American Literature , even in writers not commonly c...

Why do I read?  To remind myself that any good idea I might have is not original to me, as when D. H. Lawrence begins Studies in Classic Ame...

Guess who this is?  D. H. Lawrence launching into Herman Melville in Chapter 10 of his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature : Melvill...

Tortoises, I was going to write something about the tortoises in “The Encantadas.”  I suppose television has made Galápagos tortoises less e...

“The Encantadas” (1954) is a strange hybrid of fiction and travel writing, or strange for writers besides Herman Melville, who had been writ...

I wonder if I have anything else to say about The Piazza Tales (1856)? Herman Melville followed the failure of Moby-Dick (1851) and cry ...

I saw something new in “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853).  New to me, of course; old news to previous re-readers.  Maybe not even new to me.  ...