Wuthering
Expectations

An English merchant living and working in Egypt, likely in the mummy export business , although he never specifies,  writes the strange stor...

I will go one more day pretending everyone knows what happens in Great Expectations , perhaps because they read an extended summary of it in...

The problem I have with Great Expectations is that it was the first Dickens novel I read and yet it was not.  A mangled carcass identified ...

I have been working backwards here.  The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Icelandic poems written – likely, at some point, spoken – by va...

Snorri Sturluson’s Edda , written early in the 13th century, should not be a book anyone reads any more, anyone who is not a linguist specia...

The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki , written in the 14th century, author Icelandic but otherwise unknown.  Although not of the quality of the fine...

What Sebald did for me was to say that a particular voice was allowed.  That voice was very internal, very quiet and credible across a whole...

Edmund de Waal is a potter, so sensitive to the fell of objects, to their place in a room, to their use.  The little Japanese sculptures tha...

Edmund de Waal is a high-end ceramicist and a descendant of the Ephrussi family, Jewish merchants and financiers who were never as rich as t...

Trollope’s Barchester novels have no villains.  They have some especially foolish fools, like Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope, but even these cha...

Reviewing a later Trollope novel, The American Senator (1877), Tony of Reading List fame mentioned its fox-hunting scenes – its many fox-h...

Can You Forgive Her? is built from three love triangles, each featuring one fellow who is a solid citizen, wealthy and dullish, and the oth...

This new novel of Mr. Trollope’s has nothing to teach us either about Mr. Trollope himself as a novelist, about English society as a theme f...

The title is from Chapter 36 of Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864-5), the first of the six Palliser novels, and just the eighth...

Today I review a review of a book I have not read.  So many good ideas in one place. The book is current sensation The Goldfinch by Donna ...

O Pioneers! is pretty good as novelistic sociology – the mix of immigrant groups in late 19th century Nebraska, their speech patterns, thei...

Novels about Scandinavian immigrants to the United States are common enough to form their own little genre.  Karl Moberg’s Emigrants series ...

Literature can’t be all fun and Moomins, can it?  So in the tradition of the 2010 readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel and the 2011 Anythi...

2014 is the centennial of the birth of Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson. Jansson wrote the Moomin books, which are in some important...

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with Engl...