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Inspired by Amateur Reader’s discussion of having read 16 books by Robert Louis Stevenson, I decided to tally my own reading, extremely unscientifically, and figure out which authors I’ve read most of. The results are not super surprising. The list is heavy on mysteries and light fiction (especially series, especially by prolific authors). It’s [...] Twenty years after Stevenson’s Falesá, Joseph Conrad published Freya of the Seven Isles, centered on the more civilized—or, better, more trafficked—islands of the East Indies. Its narrator is spurred by a letter from a friend still in the Eastern islands to reminisce about old Nelson, more properly called Nielsen but vaguely posing as an [...] It was a big Raymond Chandler week on the blog last week, but in my own reading I’d moved on to Moby-Dick. I sort of just decided to actually pick it up and realized within about ten pages what a good decision that was. So I’m getting pretty psyched up for continuing my path [...] I don’t often find myself to interested in writers’ love lives, but Raymond Chandler’s does have a bit of intrigue. His marrying a woman 18 years his senior is at least unusual. So with Philip Marlowe’s chivalry in mind, I thought Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved would [...] Reading about P.D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction, I found a post at A Work in Progress that excerpted James on hard-boiled American fiction, catching my eye with it’s description of Dashiell Hammet: Hammett had a rough upbringing and supported his family by writing short stories for the pulp magazines. Interestingly (but maybe not [...] The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is the first in Gilbert Adair’s series of Evadne Mount detective novels, and if you know much Agatha Christie, you’ll notice right away that this is a send-up of one of her best-known works. It’s sort of the ultimate in Mayhem Parva, English country house, locked-room, upstairs/downstairs murder mysteries. [...] Although there are a couple things I really meant to read that I didn’t, I’ve decided it’s time to call an end to the epistolary literature project. After nearly eleven months, I’ve done what I’m going to do, for a while at least. I think it was mostly a good run: I started in [...] Almost 50 years after Herman Melville wrote Typee, which drew from his own experiences in Polynesia a few years earlier, Robert Louis Stevenson published The Beach of Falesá, one of its recognizable but much-altered descendants. In many ways the two books seem nearly opposite. Typee‘s Tommo is afraid of the natives and bent on [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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