Wuthering
Expectations

One great, tangled novel, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916/1922), and two collections of sketches, stories and miscellanea by humorists, let’...

Maybe I should have put Franz Kafka in this category.   I organize literature by language, mostly, but it was Klaus Wagenbach’s little biogr...

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell. Let’s just assume that I did not understand this ...

I forgot a couple.   Perversely, pathetically, since one of them is The Fighter (2018) by Michael Farris Smith, and I am a quarter way into...

The Custom of the Country (1913), Edith Wharton Wharton’s divorce novel.   She had gone through it herself, but here she uses it as a com...

The strange thing about reading Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was seeing a literary tradition suddenly gel, the one that is Hemingway and Faulkner...

Strange sensations reading American fiction lately.   Positive and negative.   The negative is that I am having a bit of an allergic reactio...

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) was pretty much what I hoped it would be – hard, really difficult.   Readers less interested ...

I’ve been making notes on each book of D. H. Lawrence poetry as I have gone along.   I suppose I enjoy his poetry as much or more than anyth...

I find it easy to imagine a slightly different D. H. Lawrence, healthier, less weird, maybe a little less ambitious, who is happy to be the ...

The Citadel of Fear was the second Aztec “lost world” fiction I read in the last year.   D. H. Lawrence wrote one, “The Woman Who Rode Away...

Along with Jules Verne, I read another pulpy fantasy recently, a real pulp novel, Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (1918), pen name of Ge...

A culture, a literary tradition, emphasizes its own writers more than anyone else does.   It’s normal and natural.   Exceptions are of the h...

That was useful. I have settled on a hybrid plan.   More logical.   More German. A few shorter books to see how things go, then Mimesis ...

My fifth idea is to read some literary criticism.   Classics of.   Books that are great in their own way, perhaps even works of art of some ...

Why would anyone care, but I have to remind myself how to write, so here we have this bit of self-indulgence.   What do I want to read in th...

I am going to make some comments here that are likely wrong.   They are based on my observations at the moment, that is all.   Please sprink...

Since I could read, I read.   I studied French in the winter and spring mostly by reading French, lots of it, in many forms, constrained onl...

What did I read when I was, in French terms, 9 years-old?   Just some examples, aside from Le Petit Prince and Petit Nicolas and Asterix ...

What do I do, I read, right, so I was reading French from the beginning.   French books and French bookstores identify reading level clearly...