Check out my latest review for The Front Table, of Linda Ferri’s novel Cecilia, which tells the coming-of-age and conversion story of St. Cecilia of Rome.
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Now, Katri Kling, protagonist of Tove Janssons’s 1982 novel The True Deceiver, is a female written by a female I can relate to. She is as comfortless as the winter in the tiny Scandinavian village she inhabits. Katri is an outsider who refuses to fall in with the polite nothings and other social niceties [...] The other day I was pointed by Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes to a post kicking off Tiger Beatdown’s “What We Read When we Don’t Read the Internet” series, where The Rejectionist guest-blogged about “manfiction.” As an unredeemed lover of manfiction—read the post for the criteria, but think Hemingway—and reader of relatively little fiction [...] In the opening scene of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Japanese midwife Orito Aibagawa is called in to a difficult labor. In 1799 Nagasaki she is unique: the only woman with the training and knowledge of the Dutch language that’s let her read about the unusual presentation in a book, [...] I read The Sorrows of Young Werther as part of my long-lingering (malingering?) epistolary literature project, and in this respect it was rather on the disappointing side. The novel is, like Evelina, not really epistolary. That is to say, I’d argue it doesn’t really gain much from the structure. The bulk of the novel [...] The problem with being a trendsetter is that the more successful you are, the less original you’ll seem. Thus is the trouble with The Sorrows of Young Werther, at least for me. Goethe’s influence was so great, and I’ve read so many influenced by him, that Werther seems almost derivative. He so epitomizes the [...] It’s been a bit of an interesting weekend over here. Some personal issues have caused me to drown myself in books, and I’ve gotten a ton of reading done in the past two-three days. I absolutely blew threw the forthcoming David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and to anyone who may [...] This week has been all about The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Amateur Reader’s challenge format has been great fun. Everyone should play along! I’m certainly looking forward to more of the clishmaclaver as the year progresses. In case you’ve missed anything: I got under way with a brief [...] James Hogg was a bit of a country mouse, who barely went to school and worked as a shepherd in addition to writing in both English and Scots. He doesn’t leave his fellow country folk out of The Private Memoirs and Confessions, which includes several scenes of dialogue between the English-speaking gentry and their [...] John Carey’s introduction to my Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner cautions against the too-easy view that Hogg is simply a man of sense, against enthusiasm, and therefore writing a tract against the sort of fanatical Calvinism displayed by Wringhim.* How wrong is that view? We’ll [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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