This week begins with my contribution to the Wuthering Expectations Scottish Literature Reading Challenge and Clishmaclaver, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Amateur Reader is kindly reading along with me, so visit Wuthering Expectations for his posts as I spend the next three days with this delicious Scottish Gothic [...]
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East-facing bedroom windows have meant I’ve been up bright and early for the past several weekends, which I don’t regret, but let’s just say it’s probably not healthy to be catching up on work at 7am on a Sunday. A three-day weekend is supposed to be three days of relaxation, isn’t it? So I’m [...] At the beginning of this year, one of the ideas I was mulling was a Latin American literature project. It promised to be even more superficial than the Russian one (which had not yet been conceived anyhow); I was thinking that the best I could really do was try for one book from each [...] My whirlwind (and extremely superficial and incomplete) tour of Russian literature is now at an end. I have a longer list of unread books now than when I began, and it was all very unplanned. But that’s part of the fun too. I’m sure I’ll be reading a few more things that could fall [...] “The Cosmorama” and “The Salamander” are the longest and most substantial of the stories in The Salamander and other Gothic tales, translated (and possibly edited) by Neil Cornwell. Both are excellent examples of the Romantic tale and very much in the style of Hoffmann; “The Golden Pot” and “The Sandman” both come to mind [...] Some of Odoevksy’s stories are less in the Gothic or Romantic mold and more in the Gogolian framework of the grotesque as seen in the Russian countryside. “The Tale of a Dead Body, Belonging to No One Knows Whom” is a nice swipe at the bureaucracy with a bit of a ghost story thrown [...] The stories in The Salamander and other Gothic tales by Vladimir Odoevsky are full of familiar Romantic themes: rational young nineteenth-century men ready to explain anything with science; disarmingly innocent maidens; alchemy; folklore and superstition; enchantment and intoxication; rivers, stones, the sun, the moon; ghosts; strange dreams. One thing that appeares to be a [...] As late in the year as it is, I finally got around to doing some spring cleaning this weekend. This has made it much more apparent there is a bit of a book problem, and I feel like I need to get through a few unreads and do a purge. I also feel like [...] After enjoying Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, I wanted to move on immediately to some of her other work but victimized myself with the “aboutness fallacy”—it didn’t seem like any of her novels would interest me. For example, her third, My Happy Life, is a “poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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