This is not a love story! That’s the first thing any potential first-times reader of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë must understand, lest they be as disappointed as I was when I first read this book as part of my English class my senior year of high school. I was expecting an epic romance that [...]
Archive for the ‘Classics’ Category
Wuthering Heights (audio, reread)
Posted in Audiobooks, Classics, Fiction on November 2, 2009 | 21 Comments »
All Quiet on the Western Front
Posted in Classics, Fiction on October 5, 2009 | 9 Comments »
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s disturbing and memorable book about German trench life during World War I, was published in 1928. It’s a novel, but in its honesty it reads like a memoir: Remarque doesn’t worry about whether his audience will enjoy hearing what he has to say, he simply gives [...]
A Slight Misunderstanding
Posted in Classics, Fiction on September 11, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Prosper Mérimée’s novella, A Slight Misunderstanding, paints a subtle, detailed picture of 19th-century French salon life. For such a slim volume (it clocks in at just over a hundred pages) it is surprisingly engaging, incisive, and dramatic. By the end of it, I felt I’d read something like a condensed version of Madame Bovary, but [...]
The Master and Margarita
Posted in Classics on September 7, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Ever since Jenny reviewed The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov last year, I’ve been eager to read this completely new-to-me classic. When OneWorld Classics gave me the opportunity to receive a review copy of a Hugh Aplin’s new translation, I just couldn’t say no.
To get an overview of what this book is all about, go take a look [...]
War and Peace
Posted in Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, History on September 3, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Wow. I see I have been absent from Shelf Love for nearly three weeks. That time has included a vacation to Chicago (with Teresa!) and the very busy start of my school year, but mostly I have been entirely absorbed in completing my Summer of Long Classics by reading Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.
War and [...]
The Portrait of a Lady
Posted in Classics, Fiction on August 6, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Henry James is one of a handful of Victorian authors that I’ve never been able to get along with. How can I possibly become attached to a writer who makes a story of a governess, creepy children, ghosts, and paranoia as boring as Turn of the Screw? And Daisy Miller made no impression on me [...]
Wives and Daughters (film)
Posted in Bookish films, Classics, Fiction on July 22, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Earlier this summer, I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s lovely long novel Wives and Daughters (you can read my review of it here.) In the comments, several of you told me that I would enjoy the BBC adaptation of it, so when I had a sick day last week, I got in bed with my knitting and [...]
Spoon River Anthology
Posted in Classics, Poetry on July 19, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Edgar Lee Masters published the Spoon River Anthology in 1915. It’s a collection of free-verse poems, but it’s meant to be read as a novel: each poem is in the voice of a different person who lived and died in Spoon River, Illinois, and now speaks from beyond the grave.
The anthology caused an instant sensation, [...]
The Pursuit of Love
Posted in Classics, Fiction on July 16, 2009 | 4 Comments »
When Nancy Mitford wrote The Pursuit of Love in 1945, it caused a sensation. Her family and friends were shocked, the public was titillated, and everyone was hugely entertained. Yet at first sight, it’s certainly a good novel, but nothing to cause so much fuss: through the eyes of Cousin Fanny, it follows the pursuits [...]
The Story of the Stone, vol. 5
Posted in Classics, Fiction on July 11, 2009 | 2 Comments »
As Cao Xueqin’s immense 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone begins to wind to its close, ill omens are gathering around the Jia family. The twelve Jinling beauties who began the novel living together in the marvelous Prospect Garden built for the Imperial Concubine have been dispersed by death, by marriage (mostly ill-fated), and [...]
