Fiction Reviews
The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was my first real Wharton (besides Ethan Frome and Bunner Sisters, two relatively short works). Gotta say I was impressed. It’s so nice to follow early Woolf (Night & Day) with a minor Wharton. They work in different, almost oppositional, ways. …
Night And Day by Virginia Woolf My rating: 3 of 5 stars Sort of a snoozer as Woolf goes. I can’t say if anyone but Mrs. Hilbery got my attention. The book was just so labored and overthought and… I don’t know… Sort of useless in it’s accumulation of activities and thoughts. Just never seemed …
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen My rating: 5 of 5 stars Swooped in for the reread and longed and thinned (sighed) as to howandwhy the arrangement of figurines so pleases me. In order to form a more perfect union and secure the blessings of liberty. Times four I have read pride and prejudice and …
The Trial by Franz Kafka My rating: 5 of 5 stars I picked up this book a few years ago and put it down because I got too Kafka-ed by the mazery. I just couldn’t put it together, couldn’t understand why sentences were written the way that that were. Thank goodness I gave it a …
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol My rating: 4 of 5 stars Having read Gogol’s Dead Souls after The Brother’s Karamazov, the final paragraphs of section one struck a particular chord. What a way to end a book! Well, it wasn’t the actual end, as Gogol spent the rest of his life writing and burning subsequent sections …
Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton My rating: 3 of 5 stars Another downer from Edith Wharton, but this one struck me as more interesting than Ethan Frome (probably an unpopular opinion, but…), it was less of a stretch into literary-ness and more character-based. The slow prose suited the slow spinsters. There was room to breath, …
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf My rating: 5 of 5 stars I was thinking while reading this that reading this is so natural. I can’t believe I haven’t read it before. I’m reading like I’m re-reading: I know everything and then she points it out and there’s the lighthouse. There’s the situation about the …
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton My rating: 3 of 5 stars A swift little book without being that nimble. But sort of endearing in parts. Wharton’s got a thing for people’s cousin’s, doesn’t she? I did enjoy the categorical *hush* that comes over characters when they talk about important things. View all my reviews
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald My rating: 4 of 5 stars Never have I been much of a Fitzgerald fan. Never. Not when I read Gatspy in high school (especially not the way it’s taught- ugh!). Not when I read Paradise in grad school. And now, post-damned, I’m still not sure I really like …
Middlemarch by George Eliot My rating: 4 of 5 stars Henry James said “Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.” And while I had a blast reading this and want to duke it out with him, I can’t exactly remark on the whole of it without, well, indifference. There’s no …
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf My rating: 4 of 5 stars Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white ribbons. These they wind round and round, round and round, assisted by five female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals, Mudie’s library, and friends dropping in. What a difficult book …
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence: 5 of 5 stars So exasper/exhilar/ated. Mostly ‘ated’ trying to put together what’s what in the extended monologue of this book. Methinks two Lawrence(s) in a row was a mistake. The drama gnaws at you after a while. The thinking just grinds away. Where The Rainbow is a romp, …
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars Don’t you think I should do something long for the Brothers Karamazov. One on one with their names which are tremendous to me. The portraits they make in the long hallway. I’m on this moving sidewalk down the hall. I’m on my new …
Silas Marner by George Eliot My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’m trying to come up with synonyms for ‘quaint’ to describe this little tale. Because it is a tale and it is sweet and it whips the ending in a blink and you are left to contemplate words for “quaint,” like mushroom or turtle …
The Plague by Albert Camus My rating: 4 of 5 stars To narrate. Er. To be narrated to. To exemplify a narrator on the condition that narration necessarily falters along. To ping death. To say there are no characters, only various responses to various feelings. To draw a line between one’s current place and the …
The Painted Room: A Tale of Mantua by Inger Christensen My rating: 5 of 5 starsInger Christensen does not fail me on the first day of 2010. She my patron saint of peeling paint and intrigue and loftiness. This is the plottiest plot I’ve ever loved and I love it for its swiftness and obliqueness …
The Voice That Was in Travel: Stories by Diane Glancy My rating: 5 of 5 stars I love Diane Glancy. I just do. I love the one that basically lists different types of fireworks. I love the one about the woman in her car (I thought of Barb driving to Detroit or New York). I …
The Field by Joanna Gunderson rating: 4 of 5 stars Another good one from Red Dust. Gunderson’s line-broken un-punctuated no-paragraph ‘novel’ is surprisingly novel-ish. The most continuous and recognizable element in the book is the place (in or around the mountains in NY): the house, landscape, seasons, etc. Certain events and relationships are repeated (with …
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence My rating: 5 of 5 stars When we’re gone we will be both D and H and H and D, simpering and stead. I’ll be a stake in the feild and you’ll be crap tumbling around. When we’re gone I’ll say this is just like Sons and Lovers. It …
Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein My rating: 4 of 5 stars She is a hen and being a hen is to hen. Hen next to hen in. In her hen hemmed nest of in. Her in. Next hen. Next. She is a “bullet in the back of the rooster.” That hen. She is pleasing …