Well, it’s been a bit of a rough week here. Children’s stories by Richard Hughes did make a good distraction from my frustrating professional and personal life. And since I was starting to feel the weight of all that Dicken’s, after work on Friday I rewarded myself with a nice short book, A Month [...]
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In addition to four adult novels, Richard Hughes was a children’s writer. In The Spider’s Palace and other stories, he gives us a series of dreamlike vignettes, mostly involving children, animals, toys, or some combination thereof. They are fairy tales—things come to life, people turn into dolls, there are castles in the sky. But [...] While on my Dombey and Son journey, I’ve also been reading a bit about Bleak House. Mostly because it’s included in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, and I felt like flipping throught that. Before getting into things, he says, “If it were possible I would like to devote the fifty minutes of every class meeting [...] Starting in on a new (to me) author, I have a bit of a tendency to choose some atypical work that’s probably not a very good introduction at all (e.g., the only Stephen King I have ever read is The Colorado Kid—given, in that case I don’t think I’m suffering too badly, as it [...] Anyone who has seen “There Will Be Blood” and not read Oil! will be hard-pressed to remember Paul Watkins, Bunny’s hero (that’s H.W.’s hero, for all you movie-watchers)—but they most certainly will remember Eli Watkins, Paul’s younger brother and child preacher. The Eli of the film is a huge, imposing character. He’s got a [...] Warm, sunny weekend weather has called me away from Dombey and Son far too much. And the past week has been a busy one, so my progress is doubly slowed. That’s actually really bad for me; a 925-page book hurts momentum enough even without interruptions, and this is the exact kind of slowdown that [...] The moral education of Bunny Ross is a central focus of Oil!, but its thrust is weakened by the structure of his Bildung. You see, Bunny’s most salient feature is his softness, his willingness to absorb any idea and admire its originator. He doesn’t just get involved with fads, or go along with the [...] In 1927, 21 years after The Jungle, Upton Sinclair published Oil!, a Bildungsroman about Bunny Ross, heir to an oil fortune. Bunny’s father is a self-made man, so the boy grows up pulled between worlds: that of the well-to-do, the fancy social circles that his sister aspires to; that of his father, a no-nonsense, [...] Though I finished up my maritime posting with Conrad and Joshua Slocum, this has been a pretty slow reading week for me. Oil! took me days and days, partly because I was busy and partly because it was sort of a slog through a political tract. Not really, but sort of. You’ll hear about [...] It so happens that this week’s Book Bench Lit Spirits drink is maritime themed—and also sounds pretty tasty—so I thought I’d share. It’s inspired by Ishmael from Moby-Dick: Call me Michael. If you are about to set sail, and you find yourself in Massachusetts, cold, and alone, I’ve just the thing for you. A [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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