Books
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There is no author with whom I feel greater kinship than with Michel de Montaigne and there's none with whom I've passed more hours and days, except for Shakespeare. For many years, Montaigne's Essais has been my bedside companion, first in the old Everyman Library edition as translated by John Florio, a book which I…
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I just completed another long stroll through Bleak House. It's either my fifth or sixth time through — or almost once a decade since 1958. During this reading, which will no doubt be my last, I felt that I was imprisoned by the novel, hogtied; that I couldn't do anything or read anything else until…
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I read all 599 pages of Neil Price's just-published Children of Ash and Elm, a detailed history of the Vikings, and I'm mighty proud of myself for persevering. It's a long book bristling with details and data. The author, an archeologist, has made his own original contributions to Viking research. To produce this synthesis, he…
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The nation is in an uproar — the Covid-19 pandemic, mass unemployment, racial reckoning, disorder in the streets, Russians sabotaging our elections, ignorant authoritarian leadership. We ourselves are sheltering at home, and are healthy, thanks to the masks and the cooperation of friends and neighbors, but there's little hope of a getaway. We certainly can't…
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In this Our Life, the novel by Ellen Glasgow is richer, deeper, and less bound by convention than the film. Film Life follows the inherited story for its first forty-five minutes but then sharply diverges. In the film version, bad daughter Stanley is less conflicted and complicated a character and eventually devolves into a stereotypical…
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I read Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell's North and South (1854) on the Kindle. It's a long novel, but I don't know how long because when I don't have a book to heft, I don't know how many pages I've read and how many more are left. I can only say that I became impatient after…
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Today's contribution, Little Jimmy Hurt his Arm, was written by Ralph Ganesha Jefferson, the author of the best-selling children's book Leonardo, the Enlightened Lion (2017). "Little Jimmy hurt his arm. He said to his mother, my arm hurts. His mother said, let us pray over it. So they prayed. But it still hurt. So his mother took him…
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I don't read much fiction, but when I do, it's usually one of the 19th-century classics. However, the "international bestseller" The End of Innocence (2016) by Benedict Wells came highly recommended, so I gave it a shot. It's pretty good, not bad, not great, and certainly a novel for today and not for all time — not…
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We watched Notting Hill, a cute 1999 "rom-com" or "date movie" with cute couple Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. (It's hard to believe that the film is almost twenty years old. It's so slight and fluffy that I can't remember whether or not I saw it last millennium, but frankly, it wouldn't make much difference…
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I've been reading the novels of Thomas Hardy. Some of them are familiar old friends, like Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native; some I've read so long ago that they're new again (Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd); and then there are a few that I know I've never looked at…