adam's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:14:04 -0700 60 adam's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors]]> 223246 256 Harry E. Shaw 0801415926 adam 0 a-exam 3.33 1983 The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors
author: Harry E. Shaw
name: adam
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: a-exam
review:

]]> Sense and Sensibility 14934 Sense and Sensibility is Austen's first published novel and the one now most scrutinized by historicist and feminist scholars, who offer new, complex readings of the work.

The text is that of the 1813 Second Edition (the origins of which can be traced back to 1795). The text is fully annotated and is accompanied by a map of nineteenth-century England.

"Contexts" explores the personal and social issues that loom large in Austen's novel: sense, sensibility, self-control, judgment, romantic attachments, family, and inheritance. Included are writings by Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Moore, and Maria Edgeworth.

"Criticism" collects six early and twelve modern assessments of the novel. Contributors include Alice Meynell, Reginald Farrer, Jan Fergus, Raymond Williams, Marilyn Butler, Mary Povey, Claudia L. Johnson, Gene Ruoff, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Isobel Armstrong, Mary Favret, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Eve Sedgwick, and Deborah Kaplan.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.]]> 416 Jane Austen 039397751X adam 4 a-exam 4.03 1811 Sense and Sensibility
author: Jane Austen
name: adam
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1811
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2021/04/16
shelves: a-exam
review:

]]> Wuthering Heights 204791
First published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where the drama of Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff's cruel revenge against Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the promise of redemption through the next generation is enacted.

� INTRODUCTION � TEXTUAL NOTE � CHRONOLOGY � GENEALOGICAL TABLE � DEFINITIVE CLARENDON EDITION TEXT � APPENDICES � EXPLANATORY NOTES
--back cover]]> 330 Emily Brontë 0192833545 adam 5 3.80 1847 Wuthering Heights
author: Emily Brontë
name: adam
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1847
rating: 5
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2020/12/08
shelves:
review:
"I want to die today... And make love to you, in the grave... Oh Oh Oh Oh"
]]> Pride and Prejudice 1886 This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780141439518

Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.]]> 367 Jane Austen adam 4 4.29 1813 Pride and Prejudice
author: Jane Austen
name: adam
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1813
rating: 4
read at: 2008/02/01
date added: 2017/02/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Science of Logic (Muirhead Library of Philosophy)]]> 151846 844 G W F Hegel 041529584X adam 5 germanidealism 4.67 1812 Science of Logic (Muirhead Library of Philosophy)
author: G W F Hegel
name: adam
average rating: 4.67
book published: 1812
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/03/28
shelves: germanidealism
review:

]]> War and Peace 290979
War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.

Pevear and Volokhonsky have brought us this classic novel in a translation remarkable for its fidelity to Tolstoy’s style and cadence and for its energetic, accessible prose. With stunning grace and precision, this new version of War and Peace is set to become the definitive English edition.]]> 1296 Leo Tolstoy 0307266931 adam 5 a-exam ]]> 4.32 1869 War and Peace
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: adam
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1869
rating: 5
read at: 2008/05/03
date added: 2014/10/10
shelves: a-exam
review:
You would think that I could let this wait until after my exam; but since I've been thinking about the historical novel, I somehow feel compelled to read the best historical novel...

]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)]]> 93124
]]> 607 J.K. Rowling 0747581088 adam 4 horcruxes!! 4.56 2005 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: adam
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2014/04/28
shelves:
review:
horcruxes!!
]]> The Guermantes Way 18798 In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to, and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world. This elegantly packaged new translation will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary richness of Marcel Proust.
First time in Penguin Classics


A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with french flaps and luxurious design


Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time is the first completely new translation of Proust's masterwork since the 1920s]]> 619 Marcel Proust 0143039229 adam 3 In Search of Lost Time , mainly because it comprised almost entirely of depicting the French salon society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Unless you're really interested in the impact of the Dreyfus affair on Parisian society, you will probably not find this book all that stimulating. That being said, there are some great sections, like the section where Marcel describes the illness and death of his grandmother. Also, the last five pages of the novel are utterly astounding, primarily because there's about 50 pages that build up to a short scene. It's just really cool. ]]> 4.29 1920 The Guermantes Way
author: Marcel Proust
name: adam
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1920
rating: 3
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2014/03/16
shelves:
review:
This book has been my least favorite of In Search of Lost Time , mainly because it comprised almost entirely of depicting the French salon society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Unless you're really interested in the impact of the Dreyfus affair on Parisian society, you will probably not find this book all that stimulating. That being said, there are some great sections, like the section where Marcel describes the illness and death of his grandmother. Also, the last five pages of the novel are utterly astounding, primarily because there's about 50 pages that build up to a short scene. It's just really cool.
]]> The Turn of the Screw 12947 271 Henry James 039395904X adam 5 3.53 1898 The Turn of the Screw
author: Henry James
name: adam
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1898
rating: 5
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2013/07/08
shelves:
review:

]]> The History of Tom Jones 1281362

   • Includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, notes, glossary, and an appendix of Fielding's revisions
   • Introduction discusses narrative tecniques and themes, the context of eighteenth-century fiction and satire, and the historical and political background of the Jacobite revolution
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 911 Henry Fielding 0140430091 adam 4 a-exam 3.73 1749 The History of Tom Jones
author: Henry Fielding
name: adam
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1749
rating: 4
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2013/04/26
shelves: a-exam
review:
This book is funny. Seriously.
]]> Adam Bede 20563 The story of a beautiful country girl's seduction by the local squire and its bitter, tragic sequel is an old and familiar one which George Eliot invests with peculiar and haunting power.

A bestseller from the moment of publication, Adam Bede, although on one level a rich and loving re-creation of a small community shaken to its core, is more than a charming, faultlessly evoked pastoral. However much the reader may sympathize with Hetty Sorrel and identify with Arthur Donnithorne, her seducer, and with Adam Bede, the man Hetty betrays,it is George Eliots's creation of the distant aesthetic whole - the complex, multifarious life of Hayslope - which so grips the reader's imagination. As Stephen Gill comments: 'Reading the novel is a process of learning simultaneously about the world of Adam Bede and the world of Adam Bede.']]> 624 George Eliot 0375759018 adam 3 3.81 1859 Adam Bede
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1859
rating: 3
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2012/08/03
shelves:
review:

]]> The Driver's Seat 668282 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0141188340

Lise is thin, neither good-looking nor bad-looking. One day she walks out of her office, acquires a gaudy new outfit, adopts a girlier tone of voice, and heads to the airport to fly south. On the plane she takes a seat between two men. One is delighted with her company, the other is deeply perturbed. So begins an unnerving journey into the darker recesses of human nature.]]> 103 Muriel Spark adam 5 3.62 1970 The Driver's Seat
author: Muriel Spark
name: adam
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2012/04/01
date added: 2012/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Phineas Finn (Palliser, #2) 374352 752 Anthony Trollope adam 4 3.98 1869 Phineas Finn (Palliser, #2)
author: Anthony Trollope
name: adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1869
rating: 4
read at: 2012/04/24
date added: 2012/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Amsterdam 6862 Amsterdam is "a dark tour de force, perfectly fashioned" ( The New York Times ) from the bestselling author of Atonement.

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is a newspaper editor. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen�

Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons .]]> 208 Ian McEwan 0385494246 adam 3 3.46 1998 Amsterdam
author: Ian McEwan
name: adam
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2012/04/25
date added: 2012/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means]]> 45637 752 William T. Vollmann 0060548193 adam 0 currently-reading 4.17 2003 Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
author: William T. Vollmann
name: adam
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/01/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower]]> 28385 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story lies his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family. As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull M. de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures who for better or worse are to dominate the narrator’s life—the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine.
First time in Penguin Classics


A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition


The first completely new translation of Proust's novel since the 1920s, following Lydia Davis's brilliant translation of Swann's Way


Ěý±Ő±Ő> 533 Marcel Proust 0143039075 adam 3 4.42 1919 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
author: Marcel Proust
name: adam
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1919
rating: 3
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2011/07/20
shelves:
review:
Not as good as Volume I, but still bitchin'.
]]> <![CDATA[The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women]]> 635410 180 Edward Carpenter 1425348858 adam 1 3.45 1908 The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women
author: Edward Carpenter
name: adam
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1908
rating: 1
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2011/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> A Journal of the Plague Year 128977
"Backgrounds" encourages comparison of 1665 documents with those of the early 1720s, when England feared a new outbreak of the plague.

Included are official government orders and newspaper accounts as well as writings by Defoe, John Graunt, the College of Physicians, and others.

"Contexts" includes eight comparative pieces united by the theme of a community in crisis.

From Thucydides to Boccaccio to modern accounts by Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Susan Sontag, this collection represents some of the most celebrated observers and critics in western civilization who have seen what plagues reveal about human nature.

"Criticism" reprints seven of the best essays on the novel, including interpretations by Sir Walter Scott, Maximillian E. Novak, John J. Richetti, and John Bender, among others.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.]]> 384 Daniel Defoe 0393961885 adam 3 a-exam 3.29 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year
author: Daniel Defoe
name: adam
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1722
rating: 3
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2010/04/19
shelves: a-exam
review:

]]> Dubliners 23290
"Contexts" is a rich collection of materials intended to bring Dubliners to life for twenty-first-century readers. The Irish capital of a century ago is captured through photographs, maps, songs, newspaper items, and advertising. Early versions of two of the stories and Joyce's satirical poem about his publication woes provide additional background.

"Criticism" includes eight interpretive essays, that illuminate some of the stories most frequently taught and discussed - "Araby," "Eveline," "After the Race," "The Boarding House," "Counterparts," "A Painful Case," and "The Dead." The contributors are David G. Wright, Howard Ehrlich, Margot Norris, James Fairhall, Fritz Senn, Morris Beja, Roberta Jackson, and Vincent J. Cheng.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

(back cover)]]> 369 James Joyce adam 5 irish-lit 3.99 1914 Dubliners
author: James Joyce
name: adam
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1914
rating: 5
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves: irish-lit
review:
I hadn't read this in years, to the point where I had sort of forgotten how "The Dead" ends; let's just say it was a good feeling being able to read something so brilliant as if for the first time. I can't wait to teach this later in the semester.
]]> Sartor Resartus 52998 Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored) is ostensibly an introduction to a strange history of clothing by the German Professor of Things in General, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh; its deeper concerns are social injustice, the right way of living in the world, and the large questions of faith and understanding.

This is the first edition to present the novel as it originally appeared, with indications of the changes Carlyle made to later editions.]]> 320 Thomas Carlyle 0192836730 adam 5
So begins the fictional editor of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus ("The Tailor Re-Tailored"), who proceeds to make it his job to introduce to the British public just such a Philosophy of Clothes which has been written by an largely unknown German, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (last name translates as "devil's s**t"). The problem for the editor, however, is that he can not simply translate the work and present it to a British audience, as he believes that in order to transplant the work into foreign soil, it is necessary to present the man as well as his work. Thus, the editor must not only present Teufelsdrockh's ideas, but an account of life; however, this project itself is compromised when an associate of Teufelsdrockh's offers to send the editor his autobiographical writings but instead he receives "Six considerable Paper-Bags... the inside of which sealed Bags, lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdrockh's scare-legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it, but of his own personal history only at rare intervals, and then in the most engimatic character!"

The editor's attempt to weave together fragments of Teufelsdrockh's Philosophy of Clothes along with fragments of his history is absolutely hilarious. This book is not only funny, but philosophically engaging, as Teufelsdrockh's writings and the editor's challenges engage with problems explored by the German Enlightenment as well as Utilitarianism and other contemporary thought. Sartor Resartus is not for the faint of heart, but it is certainly as rewarding as it is challenging; a truly important work of the 19c, it is an unique and outstanding piece of creative prose in line with Swift, Sterne and Fielding.

Finally, I think it provides what will be my epithet (which Teufelsdrockh's was asked to compose for a Count: "Here lies... Who during his sublunary existence destroyed with lead five thousand partridges and openly turned into dung, through himself and his servants, quadrupeds and bipeds, not without tumult in the process, ten thousand million pounds of assorted food. He now rests from labour, his works following himn. If you seek his monument, look at the dung-heap. He mad his first kill on earth [date]; his last [date]."]]> 3.65 1834 Sartor Resartus
author: Thomas Carlyle
name: adam
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1834
rating: 5
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
"Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards... so that not the smallest cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated, -- it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes."

So begins the fictional editor of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus ("The Tailor Re-Tailored"), who proceeds to make it his job to introduce to the British public just such a Philosophy of Clothes which has been written by an largely unknown German, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (last name translates as "devil's s**t"). The problem for the editor, however, is that he can not simply translate the work and present it to a British audience, as he believes that in order to transplant the work into foreign soil, it is necessary to present the man as well as his work. Thus, the editor must not only present Teufelsdrockh's ideas, but an account of life; however, this project itself is compromised when an associate of Teufelsdrockh's offers to send the editor his autobiographical writings but instead he receives "Six considerable Paper-Bags... the inside of which sealed Bags, lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdrockh's scare-legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it, but of his own personal history only at rare intervals, and then in the most engimatic character!"

The editor's attempt to weave together fragments of Teufelsdrockh's Philosophy of Clothes along with fragments of his history is absolutely hilarious. This book is not only funny, but philosophically engaging, as Teufelsdrockh's writings and the editor's challenges engage with problems explored by the German Enlightenment as well as Utilitarianism and other contemporary thought. Sartor Resartus is not for the faint of heart, but it is certainly as rewarding as it is challenging; a truly important work of the 19c, it is an unique and outstanding piece of creative prose in line with Swift, Sterne and Fielding.

Finally, I think it provides what will be my epithet (which Teufelsdrockh's was asked to compose for a Count: "Here lies... Who during his sublunary existence destroyed with lead five thousand partridges and openly turned into dung, through himself and his servants, quadrupeds and bipeds, not without tumult in the process, ten thousand million pounds of assorted food. He now rests from labour, his works following himn. If you seek his monument, look at the dung-heap. He mad his first kill on earth [date]; his last [date]."
]]> Daniel Deronda 374414 Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. And while Gwendolen loses everything and becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage, Deronda's fortunes take a different turn. After a dramatic encounter with Mirah, a young Jewish woman, he embarks on a search for her lost family and finds himself drawn into ever-deeper sympathies with Jewish aspirations and identity. 'I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else', wrote George Eliot of her last and, perhaps, most ambitious novel, and in weaving her plot strands together she created a bold and richly textured picture of British society and the Jewish experience both within and beyond it.]]> 850 George Eliot 0140434275 adam 4 4.00 1876 Daniel Deronda
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1876
rating: 4
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
there needs to be a "to re-read" shelf
]]> <![CDATA[The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner]]> 87580 272 James Hogg 0192835904 adam 5 3.70 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
author: James Hogg
name: adam
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1824
rating: 5
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
This book is really cool. I would recommend the Broadview edition, as it has a solid introduction and interesting appendices.
]]> <![CDATA[Howards End (Norton Critical Editions)]]> 217416
"Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.

The critics include Edward Garnett, A. C. Benson, Katherine Mansfield, Frieda Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, and six interpretations by Wilfred Stone, Barbara Rosecrance, Perry Meisel, Kenneth Graham, Elizabeth Langland, and Fredric Jameson.

A debate on the successes and shortcomings of cinematic adaptation is presented through "Reviews of the Merchant-Ivory Film."]]> 496 E.M. Forster 0393970116 adam 4 3.89 1910 Howards End (Norton Critical Editions)
author: E.M. Forster
name: adam
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1910
rating: 4
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
This has been by far my favorite of the Forster novels and well worth the read.
]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)]]> 2
Harry has had enough. He is beginning to think he must do something, anything, to change his situation, when the summer holidays come to an end in a very dramatic fashion. What Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down...]]> 912 J.K. Rowling adam 4 this book is scary! 4.50 2003 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: adam
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
this book is scary!
]]> <![CDATA[The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)]]> 2052
This is an alternate cover edition.]]> 231 Raymond Chandler 0394758285 adam 2 Teaching this... 3.96 1939 The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)
author: Raymond Chandler
name: adam
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1939
rating: 2
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Teaching this...
]]> Principia Ethica 2ed 129923 352 George Edward Moore 0521448484 adam 1
This is one of those highly influential books that is better left unread.]]> 3.83 1903 Principia Ethica 2ed
author: George Edward Moore
name: adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1903
rating: 1
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
G.E. Moore is the father of analytic philosophy, which is why you shouldn't read this book. It is basically a 200-page treatise on ethics that fails to actually give a definition of "the good" (since Moore believes it to be a simple concept that is beyond definition) and instead only outlines the ways in which one must define the realm of ethics. My favorite part is when he is debunking the Darwinists and says that evolution is a "temporary historical process" and therefore "more evolved" does not mean "better."

This is one of those highly influential books that is better left unread.
]]> A Room with a View 3087
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.

Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?]]> 119 E.M. Forster 1420925431 adam 3 3.91 1908 A Room with a View
author: E.M. Forster
name: adam
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1908
rating: 3
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
This book is the light version of Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady."
]]> Where Angels Fear to Tread 3677 148 E.M. Forster 1419193775 adam 3 3.62 1905 Where Angels Fear to Tread
author: E.M. Forster
name: adam
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1905
rating: 3
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Forster's first published novel, this is a short and gripping novel that explores the clash between English and Italian cultures and examines questions of morality and ethics.
]]> <![CDATA[Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 12749 In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust’s masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis’s internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way.]]> 468 Marcel Proust 0142437964 adam 5 Swann's Way should be read by... well... everyone. I only wish I could read French well enough in order to read it in the original (someday, hopefully). While Proust's style can be dilatory to the point of being annoying, it's charm is undeniable. For example, one of my favorite sections of the novel is in the first part, where the narrator describes Legrandin. Instead of saying, "he had recently become a bit of a snob," the narrator instead provides a 6-page example which illustrates the particular nature and character of that snobbishness.

If nothing else, reading Proust will force you to recall memories which you had no idea you had.]]> 4.12 1913 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: adam
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2006/12/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
This is, hands down, one of the top five or six novels I've ever read. As a key text of the early twentieth century, Swann's Way should be read by... well... everyone. I only wish I could read French well enough in order to read it in the original (someday, hopefully). While Proust's style can be dilatory to the point of being annoying, it's charm is undeniable. For example, one of my favorite sections of the novel is in the first part, where the narrator describes Legrandin. Instead of saying, "he had recently become a bit of a snob," the narrator instead provides a 6-page example which illustrates the particular nature and character of that snobbishness.

If nothing else, reading Proust will force you to recall memories which you had no idea you had.
]]> <![CDATA[Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy]]> 409558 Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory. A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, it both develops the arguments outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the themes and theses that were to dominate his great later work Capital Here, for the first time, Marx set out his own version of Hegel's dialectics and developed his mature views on labour, surplus value and profit, offering many fresh insights into alienation, automation and the dangers of capitalist society. Yet while the theories in Grundrisse make it a vital precursor to Capital, it also provides invaluable descriptions of Marx's wider-ranging philosophy, making it a unique insight into his beliefs and hopes for the foundation of a communist society.

This major translation conveys the clarity and intensity of Marx’s original notebooks, while the foreword considers the work in relation to Hegelian philosophy and contemporary socio-political theory.
—from the back cover]]> 904 Karl Marx 0140445757 adam 0 currently-reading 4.27 1857 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
author: Karl Marx
name: adam
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1857
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/10/24
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review:

]]> The Mayor of Casterbridge 56759 Librarian note: The same ISBN is now being used here with a new cover.

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled â€A Story of a Man of Characterâ€�, Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.]]> 393 Thomas Hardy adam 4 3.85 1886 The Mayor of Casterbridge
author: Thomas Hardy
name: adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1886
rating: 4
read at: 2008/10/01
date added: 2008/10/24
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]]> Martin Chuzzlewit 1990 Martin Chuzzlewit - his sixth novel - Dickens declared it 'immeasurably the best of my stories.' He was already famous as the author of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

Set partly in America, which Dickens had visited in 1842, the novel includes a searing satire on the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates of moral redemption and worldly success for one, with increasingly desperate crime for the other. This powerful black comedy involves hypocrisy, greed and blackmail, as well as the most famous of Dickens's grotesques, Mrs Gamp.]]> 829 Charles Dickens 0140436146 adam 3 to-read 3.83 1844 Martin Chuzzlewit
author: Charles Dickens
name: adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1844
rating: 3
read at: 2008/09/01
date added: 2008/10/24
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]]> The Pickwick Papers 229432 The Pickwick Papers�-a comic masterpiece that catapulted its 24-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle &, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, & his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtor’s prison, characters & incidents sprang to life from Dickens’s pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour & literary invention.]]> 801 Charles Dickens adam 3 3.83 1837 The Pickwick Papers
author: Charles Dickens
name: adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1837
rating: 3
read at: 2008/09/01
date added: 2008/10/24
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review:
Dickens's first "novel," though it's more picaresque than a novel. Its episodic nature is both its virtue and downfall: the invididual adventures are priceless, though the book doesn't have the complex Dickensian plot to drag you along. This book is fairly consistently hilarious. It's an important book historically seeing that it launched Dickens's career, but I wouldn't say it's an absolute must-read.
]]> Demons 5695 0679734511. (ISBN13: 9780679734512)

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.]]> 733 Fyodor Dostoevsky adam 0 currently-reading 4.31 1872 Demons
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: adam
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1872
rating: 0
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review:
I read this a long time ago as a freshman in a Dostoevsky class and figured I probably didn't appreciate it fully. I was right; this book is grimly humorous. Who doesn't love a bunch of anarchists and athiests running amok in Russia?
]]> <![CDATA[A Call: The Tale of Two Passions]]> 2904825 304 Ford Madox Ford 088001072X adam 3 to-read 3.43 1910 A Call: The Tale of Two Passions
author: Ford Madox Ford
name: adam
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1910
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/06/08
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]]> Père Goriot 59145 Père Goriot is the tragic story of a father whose obsessive love for his two daughters leads to his financial and personal ruin. Interwoven with this theme is that of the impoverished young aristocrat, Rastignac, who came to Paris from the provinces to hopefully make his fortune. He befriends Goriot and becomes involved with the daughters. The story is set against the background of a whole society driven by social ambition and lust for wealth.]]> 384 Honoré de Balzac 039397166X adam 3 to-read 3.89 1835 Père Goriot
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: adam
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1835
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/06/08
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]]> The Rash Act 3409362 320 Ford Madox Ford 085635399X adam 3 post-a-stuff 3.88 1933 The Rash Act
author: Ford Madox Ford
name: adam
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1933
rating: 3
read at: 2008/06/01
date added: 2008/06/08
shelves: post-a-stuff
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Time, Narrative, and History (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)]]> 101325 "For description and defense of the narrative configurations of everyday life, and of the practical and social character of those narratives, there is no better treatment than Time, Narrative, and History.... a clear, judicious, and truthful account, provocative from beginning to end." -- Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

"... a superior work of philosophy that tells a unique and insightful story about narrative." -- Quarterly Journal of Speech

]]> 300 David Carr 0253206030 adam 5 post-a-stuff 3.91 1986 Time, Narrative, and History (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)
author: David Carr
name: adam
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2008/05/01
date added: 2008/06/08
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]]> The Third Policeman 27208 The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.]]> 200 Flann O'Brien 156478214X adam 3 post-a-stuff 4.00 1967 The Third Policeman
author: Flann O'Brien
name: adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2008/05/01
date added: 2008/06/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Taming Of Chance (Ideas in Context)]]> 309552 284 Ian Hacking 0521380146 adam 0 post-a-stuff, to-read 3.88 1990 The Taming Of Chance (Ideas in Context)
author: Ian Hacking
name: adam
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/05/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness]]> 320899 340 Robert B. Pippin 0521379237 adam 0 post-a-stuff, to-read 4.10 1989 Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness
author: Robert B. Pippin
name: adam
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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]]> Old Mortality 699603 Old Mortality is a swift-moving historical romance that pits an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland - the period notorious as "the killing time." Its central character, Henry Morton, finds himself torn between his love for a royalist's granddaughter and his loyalty to his oppressed countrymen.]]> 608 Walter Scott 0140430989 adam 0 post-a-stuff, to-read 3.74 1816 Old Mortality
author: Walter Scott
name: adam
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1816
rating: 0
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740]]> 1103534 560 Michael McKeon 0801869595 adam 0 post-a-stuff, to-read 3.71 1987 The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740
author: Michael McKeon
name: adam
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> Robinson Crusoe 2934 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780393964523

The Second Edition of the Norton Critical Edition of "Robinson Crusoe" is based on the Shakespeare Head Press reprint of the first-edition copy in the British Museum, with the "Errata" listed by Defoe’s publisher, William Taylor, incorporated into the text. Michael Shinagel has collated the reprint with all six authorized editions published by Taylor in 1719 to achieve a text that is faithful to Defoe's original edition. Annotations assist the reader with obscure words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms.

"Contexts" helps the reader understand the novel’s historical and religious significance. Included are four contemporary accounts of marooned men, Defoe’s autobiographical passages on the novel’s allegorical foundation, and aspects of the Puritan emblematic tradition essential for understanding the novel’s religious aspects.

"Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Opinions" is a comprehensive survey of early estimations by prominent literary and political figures, including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.

"Twentieth-Century Criticism" is a collection of fourteen essays (five of them new to the Second Edition) that presents a variety of perspectives on "Robinson Crusoe" by Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, Eric Berne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn.

A Chronology of Defoe’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.]]> 436 Daniel Defoe adam 3 a-exam 3.11 1719 Robinson Crusoe
author: Daniel Defoe
name: adam
average rating: 3.11
book published: 1719
rating: 3
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]]> The Bride of Lammermoor 49495
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 346 Walter Scott 0140436561 adam 4 a-exam 3.68 1819 The Bride of Lammermoor
author: Walter Scott
name: adam
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1819
rating: 4
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]]> Waverley 539025 Waverley is set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which sought to restore the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles Edward Stuart (or 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'). It relates the story of a young dreamer and English soldier, Edward Waverley, who was sent to Scotland in 1745. He journeys North from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England (alleged in an English Heritage notice to refer to Waverley Abbey in Surrey) first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the 1745 Jacobite uprising and aftermath.]]> 491 Walter Scott 0140621482 adam 3 a-exam 3.46 1814 Waverley
author: Walter Scott
name: adam
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1814
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2008/05/03
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review:
On a second, more leisurely read, I've come to appreciate the brilliance of Scott. In the end, this remains a difficult novel to get into, but understanding Scott's objectives and how he carries them out really adds a layer of depth to the reading of the novel.
]]> <![CDATA[Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions]]> 326870
The text is divided into two parts: a doctrine of truth or reason, and a doctrine of appearance. A central feature of the text is its performative dimension. Philosophy, for Fichte, is something we enact rather than any discursively expressible object of awareness; a philosophical truth is not expressible as a set of propositions but is a spontaneous inwardly occurring realization. Therefore, he always regards the expression of philosophy in words as strategic, aiming to ignite philosophy's essentially inward process and to arouse the event of philosophical insight.]]> 324 Johann Gottlieb Fichte 0521270502 adam 2 a-exam 3.69 1794 Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions
author: Johann Gottlieb Fichte
name: adam
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1794
rating: 2
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The lastest selection of the Hegel Reading Group.
]]> <![CDATA[Joseph Andrews with Shamela and Related Writings: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism]]> 110168
"Backgrounds" contains generous extracts from works that Fielding satirized―Pamela and Conyer Middleton’s Dedication to the Life of Cicero ―and emulated―Gil Blas and selections from Don Quixote , the Roman Comique , and Le Paysan Parvenu .  The section concludes with a general explanation of the political and religious contexts in which Joseph Andrews was written.

"Criticism" offers a broad range of responses to the novel.  Contemporary assessments include selected letters of Thomas Gray, William Shenstone, Samuel Richardson, and others as well as commentary from The Student, or Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, by William Hazlitt, James Beattie, and Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier.

Modern assessments are by Mark Spilka, Dick Taylor, Jr., Martin Battestin, Sheldon Sacks, Morris Golden, Brian McCrea, and Homer Goldberg.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.]]> 512 Henry Fielding 0393955559 adam 2 a-exam 3.31 1742 Joseph Andrews with Shamela and Related Writings: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism
author: Henry Fielding
name: adam
average rating: 3.31
book published: 1742
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)]]> 136251
In this final, seventh installment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.]]> 759 J.K. Rowling adam 4 4.61 2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: adam
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2008/04/28
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]]> The God of Small Things 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]> 321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 adam 3 3.97 1997 The God of Small Things
author: Arundhati Roy
name: adam
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900]]> 1090056
In the decades following the revolutions in British North America and France, the major novelists distinguished themselves as authors by questioning the fantasy of a self-made individual. To show how novels by Defoe, Austen, Scott, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Haggard, and Stoker participated in the process of making, updating, and perpetuating the figure of the individual, Armstrong puts them in dialogue with the writings of Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Malthus, Darwin, Kant, and Freud. Such theorists as Althusser, Balibar, Foucault, and Deleuze help her make the point that the individual was not one but several different figures. The delineation and potential of the modern subject depended as much upon what it had to incorporate as what alternatives it had to keep at bay to address the conflicts raging in and around the British novel.]]> 191 Nancy Armstrong 0231130597 adam 2 a-exam 3.80 2005 How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900
author: Nancy Armstrong
name: adam
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2005
rating: 2
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date added: 2008/02/21
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]]> The Heart of Mid-Lothian 699484 The Heart of Mid-Lothian and began immediately to shape from historical fact the story of Jeanie Deans, a dairymaid who, while refusing to lie to save her sister’s life, journeys to London to beg for a reprieve. Set in the 1730s in a Scotland uneasily united with England, the novel dramatizes different kinds of justice: that meted out by the Edinburgh mob in the lynching of one Captain Porteous, and that encountered by a young girl on trial for infanticide.

A bestseller from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg, an inspiration to succeeding novelists from Balzac to George Eliot, The Heart of Mid-Lothian is the seventh and finest of Scott’s â€Waverleyâ€� novels. This edition, based on the first edition of 1818, incorporates many new corrections from the manuscript and from other sources.

Tony Inglis provides a full introduction to the historical background, and to the novel’s rich use of language and dialect, its themes and narrative modes.]]> 793 Walter Scott 0140431292 adam 4 3.71 1818 The Heart of Mid-Lothian
author: Walter Scott
name: adam
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1818
rating: 4
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]]> Redgauntlet 2360690 Redgauntlet (1824) tells of Darsie Latimer, a student of law who becomes embroiled in a plot to put Prince Charles Edward (aka, Bonnie Prince Charlie) on the British throne. The events in Redgauntlet never actually took place, but they are probable, and form the culmination of Scott's series of Jacobite novels.]]> 544 Walter Scott 0140436553 adam 4 a-exam 3.60 1824 Redgauntlet
author: Walter Scott
name: adam
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1824
rating: 4
read at: 2008/02/01
date added: 2008/02/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture]]> 322417
The Way of the World , with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman  as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman  in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at The Way of the World  in the light of his more recent work.]]> 288 Franco Moretti 1859842984 adam 0 a-exam 4.11 1986 The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture
author: Franco Moretti
name: adam
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2008/01/25
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]]> The Historical Novel 189609 363 György Lukács 0850363780 adam 4 a-exam 3.98 1937 The Historical Novel
author: György Lukács
name: adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/16
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy]]> 1497611 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780140430769 can be found here.

Written immediately after Vanity Fair, Pendennis has a similar atmosphere of brooding disillusion, tempered by the most jovial of wits. But here Thackeray plunders his own past to create the character of Pendennis and the world in which he lives: from miserable schoolboy to striving journalist, from carefree Oxbridge to the high (and low) life of London. The result is a superbly panoramic blend of people, action and background. The true ebb and flow of life is caught and the credibility of Pen, his worldly uncle, the Major, and many of the other characters, extends far beyond the pages of the novel. Held together by Thackeray's flowing, confident prose, with its conversational ease of tone, Pendennis is as rich a portrait of England in the 1830s and 40s as it is a thorough and thoroughly entertaining self-portrait.]]> 816 William Makepeace Thackeray adam 3 a-exam 3.68 1850 The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy
author: William Makepeace Thackeray
name: adam
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1850
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/01/16
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel]]> 832485

Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice , Great Expectations , and Le Père Goriot , Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The "character-space," as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel's very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation.


Woloch's discussion of character-space allows for a different history of the novel and a new definition of characterization itself. By making the implied person indispensable to our understanding of literary form, this book offers a forward-looking avenue for contemporary narrative theory.]]> 408 Alex Woloch 0691113149 adam 5 a-exam 4.24 2003 The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
author: Alex Woloch
name: adam
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2008/01/16
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review:
One of the best of books of lit crit I've ever read and something I'll be working with for a long time to come. Woloch's writing is frighteningly clear and his readings of individual texts are magisterial and nuanced. This is critical writing at its very best.
]]> David Copperfield 58696 882 Charles Dickens adam 3 a-exam 4.02 1850 David Copperfield
author: Charles Dickens
name: adam
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1850
rating: 3
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]]> Opened Ground 19186
Born and raised in Northern Ireland, where any hint of Gaelic tradition in one's speech was considered a political act, Heaney is all too aware of the dire consequences of speaking one's mind. Indeed, during times of crisis, he has been expected to appear on television and dispense political wisdom.

Most often, however, he stays out of the fray and opts for a supreme sense of empathy to guide his words. As excavator--of earth, of his beloved Gaelic, of his own life--Heaney is unmatched. In "Bone Dreams", the archaeologist's task is synonymous with reaching for a cultural past: I push back through dictions, Elizabethan canopies, Norman devices, the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied Latins of churchmen to the scop's twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.

And in early poems like "Blackberry Picking", Heaney's images--deftly, delightfully--carry us back to childhood fields: At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full... Opened Ground is a pleasure and a triumph. These three decades of work confirm Heaney as one of the most important poets of his time. --Martha Silano]]> 464 Seamus Heaney 0374526788 adam 3 4.26 1996 Opened Ground
author: Seamus Heaney
name: adam
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/11/30
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Who ever thought bogs could be so metaphorically rich?
]]> The Picture of Dorian Gray 9122 460pages. in8. broché. 462 Oscar;Lawler Donald L. Wilde 0393955680 adam 5 4.25 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray
author: Oscar;Lawler Donald L. Wilde
name: adam
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1890
rating: 5
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]]> Tess of the D’Urbervilles 32261 here and here.

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her â€cousinâ€� Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.]]> 518 Thomas Hardy adam 4 3.83 1891 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
author: Thomas Hardy
name: adam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1891
rating: 4
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2007/11/30
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review:
What I remember most about the first time I read this book five years ago was that I really hated it... I must've been stupid or something back then. Hardy is a genius.
]]> No Great Mischief 14273
Generations after their forebears went into exile, the MacDonalds still face seemingly unmitigated hardships and cruelties of life. Alexander, orphaned as a child by a horrific tragedy, has nevertheless gained some success in the world. Even his older brother, Calum, a nearly destitute alcoholic living on Toronto's skid row, has been scarred by another tragedy. But, like all his clansman, Alexander is sustained by a family history that seems to run through his veins. And through these lovingly recounted stories-wildly comic or heartbreakingly tragic-we discover the hope against hope upon which every family must sometimes rely.]]> 304 Alistair MacLeod 0375726659 adam 3 3.97 1999 No Great Mischief
author: Alistair MacLeod
name: adam
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2007/11/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / The Girls of Slender Means / The Driver's Seat / The Only Problem]]> 37387
Spark's most celebrated novel, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher's catastrophic effect on her pupils. THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. THE DRIVER'S SEAT follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And THE ONLY PROBLEM is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.

Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.]]> 512 Muriel Spark 1857152743 adam 4 3.79 1999 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / The Girls of Slender Means / The Driver's Seat / The Only Problem
author: Muriel Spark
name: adam
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/25
date added: 2007/11/10
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]]> The Theory of the Novel 189603 The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukacs's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.

The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukacs's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.]]> 160 György Lukács 0262620278 adam 0 a-exam 3.90 1916 The Theory of the Novel
author: György Lukács
name: adam
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1916
rating: 0
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]]> Great Expectations 2626
"Backgrounds" provides readers with an understanding of Great Expectations's inception and internal chronology. A discussion of the public-reading version of the novel is also included. A wonderfully rich "Contexts" section collects thirteen pieces, centering on the novel's major themes: the link between author and hero and, relatedly, Victorian notions of gentility, snobbishness, and social mobility; the often brutal training, at home and at school, of children born around 1800; and the central issues of crime and punishment.

"Criticism" gathers twenty-two assessments of Great Expectations, both contemporary and modern, which offer a range of perspectives on Dickens and his novel.]]> 776 Charles Dickens adam 4 a-exam 3.79 1861 Great Expectations
author: Charles Dickens
name: adam
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1861
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/11/04
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Around the office, I would note that Great Expectations, while a gem of a novel, is nowhere near as great as Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend; while the greatest of Dickens's "shorter novels" (O.T., Two Cities, etc.), GE is on a different level than Dickens's longer masterpieces. But to give you my Walworth sentiments: I simply love this book.
]]> <![CDATA[Sunset Song (A Scots Quair, #1)]]> 1203812 272 Lewis Grassic Gibbon 0862411793 adam 5 3.96 1932 Sunset Song (A Scots Quair, #1)
author: Lewis Grassic Gibbon
name: adam
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2007/10/01
date added: 2007/11/04
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This is a hidden gem of the twentieth century. Voted the best book of Scottish Literature, it certainly lives up to its unknown fame. Lyrical and moving, this novel tells of young woman's life as it is torn apart by the coming of womanhood, modernity, and, ultimately, the Great War.
]]> <![CDATA[Doctor Thorne (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #3)]]> 414295 here and an older one here.

Son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne, despite her illegitimacy and apparent poverty. Frank's ambitious mother and haughty aunt are set against the match, however, and push him to save the family's mortgaged estate by making a good marriage to a wealthy heiress. Only Mary's loving uncle, Dr Thorne, knows the secret of her birth and the fortune she is to inherit that will make her socially acceptable in the eyes of Frank's family - but the high-principled doctor believes she should be accepted on her own terms. A telling examination of the relationship between society, money and morality, Dr Thorne (1858) is enduringly popular for Trollope's affectionate depiction of rural English life and his deceptively simple portrayal of human nature.]]> 557 Anthony Trollope 0140433260 adam 3 4.15 1858 Doctor Thorne (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #3)
author: Anthony Trollope
name: adam
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1858
rating: 3
read at: 2007/11/04
date added: 2007/09/25
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]]> <![CDATA[John Halifax, Gentleman (Broadview Edition)]]> 1892249 592 Dinah Maria Mulock Craik 155111500X adam 2 3.73 1856 John Halifax, Gentleman (Broadview Edition)
author: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
name: adam
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1856
rating: 2
read at: 2007/09/25
date added: 2007/09/20
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]]> The Wee Book of Calvin 1828848
'A work of contemporary shamanism, with all the bluff, poetry, deranged humour, sleight-of-hand and real magic that implies.' - Don Paterson.

This is the first (and maybe the last) self-help guide that promises to make you feel a lot worse after you read it. A hilarious satire on freeze-dried mysticism and off-the-shelf enlightenment, it is also a haunting and lyrical reflection on places, voices and memories - a literary journey into the heart of North-East darkness.

'A perfect evocation of Scotland's mysterious love affair with loss and sorrow. A powerful dram of Zen Calvinism.' - Richard Holloway]]> 224 Bill Duncan 0141019727 adam 2 3.77 2004 The Wee Book of Calvin
author: Bill Duncan
name: adam
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2007/09/14
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If you have 90 minutes and want a laugh, this book is perfect. A collection of sayings from the "north-east" (of Scotland), this book pairs sets of aphorisms with short chapters by the author reflecting on his memories of his grandparents and "the old ways." Although it turns sentimental toward the end, it's poignant in a way.
]]> <![CDATA[Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit]]> 9456 Phenomenology of Spirit, lays the groundwork for all his other writing by explaining what is most innovative about Hegel's philosophy.

This new translation combines readability with maximum precision, breaking Hegel's long sentences and simplifying their often complex structure. At the same time, it is more faithful to the original than any previous translation.

The heart of the book is the detailed commentary, supported by an introductory essay. Together they offer a lucid and elegant explanation of the text and elucidate difficult issues in Hegel, making his claims and intentions intelligible to the beginner while offering interesting and original insights to the scholar and advanced student. The commentary often goes beyond the particular phrase in the text to provide systematic context and explain related topics in Hegel and his predecessors (including Kant, Spinoza, and Aristotle, as well as Fichte, Schelling, Holderlin, and others).

The commentator refrains from playing down (as many interpreters do today) those aspects of Hegel's thought that are less acceptable in our time, and abstains from mixing his own philosophical preferences with his reading of Hegel's text. His approach is faithful to the historical Hegel while reconstructing Hegel's ideas within their own context.

"]]> 240 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 0691120528 adam 5 germanidealism 4.20 1807 Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: adam
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1807
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/09/12
shelves: germanidealism
review:
Yovel's commentary on the Preface is superb (even if a bit too thorough), and his introduction is a clear introduction to Hegel's philosophy.
]]> Translations 859500
In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, engaged on behalf of the Britsh Army and Government in making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes ofr cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and transliterated - or translated - into English, in examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group of people, Irish and English, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the unexperctedly far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative and harmless. While remaining faithful to the personalities and relationshiops of those people at that time he makes a richly suggestive statement about Irish - and English - history.]]> 70 Brian Friel 0571117422 adam 3 irish-lit 3.84 1981 Translations
author: Brian Friel
name: adam
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1981
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/09/12
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]]> Phenomenology of Spirit 9454 640 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 0198245971 adam 0 germanidealism 3.96 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: adam
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1807
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/09/12
shelves: germanidealism
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]]> <![CDATA[Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit]]> 345778 609 Jean Hyppolite 0810105942 adam 0 germanidealism 4.31 1947 Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
author: Jean Hyppolite
name: adam
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at: 2008/01/25
date added: 2007/09/12
shelves: germanidealism
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]]> In Memoriam 294399
The original title of the poem was "The Way of the Soul", and this might give an idea of how the poem is an account of all Tennyson's thoughts and feelings as he copes with his grief over such a long period, including wrestling with the big philosophico-scientific questions of his day. It is perhaps because of this that the poem is still popular with and of interest to modern readers. Owing to its length and its arguable breadth of focus, the poem might not be thought an elegy or a dirge in the strictest formal sense.

The poem is not arranged exactly in the order in which it was written. The prologue, for example, is thought to have been one of the last things written. Critics believe, however, that the poem as a whole is meant to be chronological in terms of the progression of Tennyson's grief. The passage of time is marked by the three descriptions of Christmas at different points in the poem, and the poem ends with a description of the marriage of Tennyson's sister.

"In Memoriam" is written in four-line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetrameter, and such stanzas are now called In Memoriam Stanzas. Though not metrically unusual, given the length of the work, the meter creates a tonal effect which often divides readers - is it the natural sound of mourning and grief, or merely monotonous? The poem is divided into 133 cantos (including the prologue and epilogue), and in contrast to its constant and regulated metrical form, encompasses many different subjects: profound spiritual experiences, nostalgic reminiscence, philosophical speculation, Romantic fantasizing and even occasional verse. The death of Hallam, and Tennyson's attempts to cope with this, remain the strand that ties all these together.

Excerpt:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove ;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade ;
Thou madest Life in man and brute ;
[...]]]> 280 Alfred Tennyson 0393979261 adam 2 4.06 1850 In Memoriam
author: Alfred Tennyson
name: adam
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1850
rating: 2
read at: 2007/09/20
date added: 2007/09/12
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]]> Poetry, Drama and Prose 138165 This brand new collection, impeccably edited by James Pethica, presents a comprehensive selection of Yeats's major contributions in poetry, drama, prose fiction, autobiography, and criticism.

"Criticism" includes twenty-four interpretive essays by T. S. Eliot, Daniel Albright, Douglas Archibald, Harold Bloom, George Bornstein, Elizabeth Cullingford, Paul de Man, Richard Ellman, R. F. Foster, Stephen Gwynn, Seamus Heaney, Marjorie Howes, John Kelly, Declan Kiberd, Lucy McDiarmid, Michael North, Thomas Parkinson, Marjorie Perloff, James Pethica, Jahan Ramazani, Ronald Schuchard, Michael J. Sidnell, Anita Sokolsky, and Helen Vendler.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.]]> 518 W.B. Yeats 0393974979 adam 5 irish-lit 4.27 2000 Poetry, Drama and Prose
author: W.B. Yeats
name: adam
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2007/09/20
date added: 2007/09/09
shelves: irish-lit
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]]> The Poor Mouth 59641 The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on narratives of Gaelic Ireland, this work brought down on the author's head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.]]> 128 Flann O'Brien 1564780910 adam 3 irish-lit 4.09 1941 The Poor Mouth
author: Flann O'Brien
name: adam
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1941
rating: 3
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2007/08/27
shelves: irish-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot]]> 1138698 304 Harry E. Shaw 0801436729 adam 0 3.33 1999 Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
author: Harry E. Shaw
name: adam
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/08/27
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]]> <![CDATA[On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History]]> 705331 142 Thomas Carlyle 140694419X adam 0 3.75 1841 On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
author: Thomas Carlyle
name: adam
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1841
rating: 0
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2007/08/27
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]]> Modern Ireland, 1600 - 1972 195520 Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 looks at how key events in Irish history contributed to the creation of the 'Irish Nation'.

'The most brilliant and courageous Irish historian of his generation'
Colm TĂłibĂ­n, London Review of Books

'Remarkable ... Foster gives a wise and balanced account of both forces of unity and forces of diversity ... a master work of scholarship'
Bernard Crick, New Statesman

'A tour de force ... Anyone who really wants to make sense of Ireland and the Irish must read Roy Foster's magnificent and accessible Modern Ireland'
Anthony Clare

'A magnificent book. It supersedes all other accounts of modern Irish history'
Conor Cruise O'Brien, Sunday Times

'Dazzling ... a masterly survey not so much of the events of Irish history over the past four centuries as of the way in which those events acted upon the peoples living in Ireland to produce in our own time an "Irish Nation" ... a gigantic and distinguished undertaking'
Robert Kee, Observer

'A work of gigantic importance. It is everything that a history book should be. It is beautifully and clearly written; it seeps wisdom through its every pore; it is full of the most elegant and scholarly insights; it is magnificently authoritative and confident ... Modern Ireland is quite simply the single most important book on Irish history written in this generation ... A masterpiece'
Kevin Myers, Irish Times]]> 704 R. F. Foster 0140132503 adam 2 irish-lit 3.74 1988 Modern Ireland, 1600 - 1972
author: R. F. Foster
name: adam
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1988
rating: 2
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2007/08/27
shelves: irish-lit
review:
While I love Foster's 2-volume biography of Yeats, I find this book incredibly difficult to follow. I think part of the problem is that he describes many things in a manner which assumes some knowledge of them. In other words, this isn't the best book for the neophyte.
]]> George Eliot 256656 1968 Oxford Press 616 Gordon S. Haight 0195200853 adam 3 3.95 1968 George Eliot
author: Gordon S. Haight
name: adam
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1968
rating: 3
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2007/08/27
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review:
A solid biography of Eliot; while not the most enthralling account, it nevertheless avoids many of the pitfalls of other biographies, such as over-narrativization. Contains many long excerpts from letters, which are helpful for the enthusiast.
]]> <![CDATA[The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel]]> 890146


The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.]]> 224 Catherine Gallagher 0691123586 adam 0 3.68 2005 The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel
author: Catherine Gallagher
name: adam
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2007/11/10
date added: 2007/08/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals]]> 3109 What should we have for dinner? For omnivore like ourselves, this simple question has always posed a dilemma. When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life. Today, buffered by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is groundbreaking book, in which one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves?
To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.
The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.]]> 450 Michael Pollan 1594200823 adam 3 4.18 2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
author: Michael Pollan
name: adam
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/20
date added: 2007/07/29
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]]> Middlemarch 729335
"Backgrounds" helps readers understand Eliot’s ideas on life and art with generous selections from her letters, journals, essays, and other fictional works.

"Contemporary Reviews" records the impressions of Sidney Colvin, Henry James, Joseph Jacobs, and Leslie Stephen.

"Recent Criticism" collects eleven essays-seven of them new to this edition-which center on the novel's major themes. Contributors include Mark Schorer, Jerome Beaty, Cherry Wilhelm, Robert Heilman, Lee R. Edwards, Alan Mintz, T. R. Wright, Matthew Rich, Alan Shelston, and Claudia Moscovici.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.]]> 688 George Eliot 0393974529 adam 5 3.98 1872 Middlemarch
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1872
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/07/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Dublin Plays: The Shadow of a Gunman / Juno and the Paycock / The Plough and the Stars]]> 570738
Three early plays by Sean O'Casey--arguably his three greatest--demonstrate vividly O'Casey's ability to convey the reality of life and the depth of human emotion, specifically in Dublin before and during the Irish civil war of 1922-23, but, truly, throughout the known universe. In mirroring the lives of the Dublin poor, from the tenement dwellers in The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock to the bricklayer, street vendor, and charwoman in The Plough and the Stars , Sean O'Casey conveys with urgency and eloquence the tiny details that create a total character as well as the terrors, large and small, that the constant threat of political violence inevitably brings. As Seamus Heaney has written, "O'Casey's characters are both down to earth and larger than life . . . His democratic genius was at one with his tragic understanding, and his recoil from tyranny and his compassion for the oppressed were an essential--as opposed to a moral and thematic--part of his art."

A new production of Juno and the Paycock will transfer from the Donmar Theatre in London to New York in September 2000.]]> 272 Seán O'Casey 0571195520 adam 3 irish-lit 3.85 1969 Three Dublin Plays: The Shadow of a Gunman / Juno and the Paycock / The Plough and the Stars
author: Seán O'Casey
name: adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/07/29
shelves: irish-lit
review:

]]> Murphy 333314 288 Samuel Beckett 0802150373 adam 3 irish-lit 3.85 1938 Murphy
author: Samuel Beckett
name: adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1938
rating: 3
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/07/22
shelves: irish-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly]]> 33313 A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts

Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,� by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.]]> 312 Anthony Bourdain 0060899220 adam 3
While Kitchen Confidential is a bit self-indulgent at times ("yes, yes, Anthony, we know that you were really into scoring dope..."), it's an entertaining and informative read. Although I can't quite say that I was shocked by much of what he "reveals," I guess it's hard for anyone post-Fast Food Nation (or, should I say The Jungle) to be shocked by what goes on in the food service industry. This book lacks any real structure, but is a good book to pick up for a half-hour at time.]]> 4.17 2000 Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
author: Anthony Bourdain
name: adam
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/07/20
shelves:
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While Anthony Bourdain should, by all accounts, be an enemy of mine (seeing as he believes vegetarians to be sub-human), I can't help but say that I love him. Perhaps it's the giant machetes he always carries, perhaps it's his bitchin earrings, or perhaps it's that I can't help but envy a man who chain-smokes himself around the world, scarfing up a bucket of the finest local fish heads (or squeezle) wherever he may find himself. After all, there is a tiny part of me that wishes that I loved meat in all of its various God-created manifestions and levels of rawness.

While Kitchen Confidential is a bit self-indulgent at times ("yes, yes, Anthony, we know that you were really into scoring dope..."), it's an entertaining and informative read. Although I can't quite say that I was shocked by much of what he "reveals," I guess it's hard for anyone post-Fast Food Nation (or, should I say The Jungle) to be shocked by what goes on in the food service industry. This book lacks any real structure, but is a good book to pick up for a half-hour at time.
]]> The Last September 195990 The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.

In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching—the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.]]> 303 Elizabeth Bowen 0385720149 adam 2 irish-lit Jacob's Room in terms of theme and style), but... well.. a touch boring. Assigning this to freshman (which had been my hope) would be suicidal.]]> 3.47 1929 The Last September
author: Elizabeth Bowen
name: adam
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1929
rating: 2
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/21
shelves: irish-lit
review:
Eh... Has some high-modernist leanings; reminiscent of Virginia Woolf at times (especially Jacob's Room in terms of theme and style), but... well.. a touch boring. Assigning this to freshman (which had been my hope) would be suicidal.
]]> <![CDATA[A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783 - 1846]]> 915892
The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'.]]> 784 Boyd Hilton 0198228309 adam 4 4.21 2006 A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783 - 1846
author: Boyd Hilton
name: adam
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method]]> 620078
Adopting what is essentially a structuralist approach, the author identifies and names the basic constituents and techniques of narrative and illustrates them by referring to literary works in many languages.]]> 288 GĂ©rard Genette 0801492599 adam 0 3.94 1979 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method
author: GĂ©rard Genette
name: adam
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/15
shelves:
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]]> Felix Holt: The Radical 866301 545 George Eliot 0140434356 adam 4 Felix Holt: The Radical is one of Eliot's finer works and a great 19c. novel. In many ways, it's a shorter and much more readable version of Middlemarch , and, being the book which directly precedes it, can be read as its predecessor. In F.H., Eliot explores her constant concern: the tensions between the intricate and overpowering contingencies of historical circumstance which influence and determine human action and the innate spirit of sympathy and virtue that struggles to transcend those contingencies. This all takes place in a plot that is coherent, thoroughly compelling, and even suprising. Moreover, all of the characters in the novel are complexing drawn and thoroughly sympathetic. In short, Felix Holt has everything you could want: entail, intrigue, illegitimacy, electioneering, riots; in it, Eliot is reaching her peak of realist representation that is perfected in Middlemarch .

The two most difficult aspects of the novel are the complicated legal plot, and its deep enmeshment in history. Like Middlemarch , the novel is set in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, but, unlike the later novel, F.H. provides a denser and more precise historical account, making it a perfect read for anyone interested in that extremely important period of British history. If fractions were allowed, I would give this 4.5 stars. ]]> 3.70 1866 Felix Holt: The Radical
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1866
rating: 4
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/15
shelves:
review:
Felix Holt: The Radical is one of Eliot's finer works and a great 19c. novel. In many ways, it's a shorter and much more readable version of Middlemarch , and, being the book which directly precedes it, can be read as its predecessor. In F.H., Eliot explores her constant concern: the tensions between the intricate and overpowering contingencies of historical circumstance which influence and determine human action and the innate spirit of sympathy and virtue that struggles to transcend those contingencies. This all takes place in a plot that is coherent, thoroughly compelling, and even suprising. Moreover, all of the characters in the novel are complexing drawn and thoroughly sympathetic. In short, Felix Holt has everything you could want: entail, intrigue, illegitimacy, electioneering, riots; in it, Eliot is reaching her peak of realist representation that is perfected in Middlemarch .

The two most difficult aspects of the novel are the complicated legal plot, and its deep enmeshment in history. Like Middlemarch , the novel is set in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, but, unlike the later novel, F.H. provides a denser and more precise historical account, making it a perfect read for anyone interested in that extremely important period of British history. If fractions were allowed, I would give this 4.5 stars.
]]> Romola 835508 688 George Eliot 0140434704 adam 3 Romola marks a significant shift in George Eliot's career. At first glance, this shift appears radical. Whereas her first four works (Scenes of Clerical Life followed by the three early novels, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner) all document life in rural England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romola takes place in late 15c. Italy. That is to say, while her early works can all be read in line with the project of realism she outlines in her early essay, "The Natural History of German Life," Romola certainly marks a shift to new and different concerns.

At the same time, however, there is still much continuity with her earlier (and later) work in its exploration of human relationships, moral action, and religious sentiment. The shift is not one of tone or theme but rather of scope, as Romola has the same expansiveness of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

What makes this novel so difficult and rewarding (and perhaps why it is not widely read) is its dense historical embedment. Why Romola's life is fictional, the period of Florentine history that the novel presents is not. The complex social world that the novel presents is a rich portrait, though perhaps one that borders on overwhelming the reader rather than moving him or her.

Personally, I love Eliot's work, and this novel has all the lovely passages that characterize her greatest work. It is certainly a great and difficult work, and if it had been written by someone else, might actually be more widely read. It has everything the 19c. novel shouldh have and more: Niccolo Machiavelli as a character, a monkey riding a horse, Dominicans (almost!) walking through fire, and plenty of deceit and intrigue. However, considering that Eliot would later write two of the greatest novels in the English language, it is easy to see why this novel is relegated to obscurity. ]]> 3.77 1863 Romola
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1863
rating: 3
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/08
shelves:
review:
Romola marks a significant shift in George Eliot's career. At first glance, this shift appears radical. Whereas her first four works (Scenes of Clerical Life followed by the three early novels, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner) all document life in rural England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romola takes place in late 15c. Italy. That is to say, while her early works can all be read in line with the project of realism she outlines in her early essay, "The Natural History of German Life," Romola certainly marks a shift to new and different concerns.

At the same time, however, there is still much continuity with her earlier (and later) work in its exploration of human relationships, moral action, and religious sentiment. The shift is not one of tone or theme but rather of scope, as Romola has the same expansiveness of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

What makes this novel so difficult and rewarding (and perhaps why it is not widely read) is its dense historical embedment. Why Romola's life is fictional, the period of Florentine history that the novel presents is not. The complex social world that the novel presents is a rich portrait, though perhaps one that borders on overwhelming the reader rather than moving him or her.

Personally, I love Eliot's work, and this novel has all the lovely passages that characterize her greatest work. It is certainly a great and difficult work, and if it had been written by someone else, might actually be more widely read. It has everything the 19c. novel shouldh have and more: Niccolo Machiavelli as a character, a monkey riding a horse, Dominicans (almost!) walking through fire, and plenty of deceit and intrigue. However, considering that Eliot would later write two of the greatest novels in the English language, it is easy to see why this novel is relegated to obscurity.
]]> Silas Marner 374653 240 George Eliot 0141439750 adam 3
However, having read Eliot's other works, it's hard to read a novel this short by her, as it could very easily be a 400 page novel. The weakest parts of this novel are the visible seams where it seems that things are being moved along for the sake of brevity. Basically, Silas in no way approaches Daniel Deronda, and is not even in the same solar system as Middlemarch, but, in relation to her early work, is a brisk and complex summary. ]]> 3.69 1861 Silas Marner
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1861
rating: 3
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/01
shelves:
review:
This book's length is simultaneously its strongest and weakest aspect. On the one hand, at 200 pages, it's by far the shortest of Eliot's novels, meaning that it can be read in one or two days, rather than a week or two. Moreover, it has all of the delightful aspects of Eliot's early works: a cataleptic miserly weaver, gentlemanly fops who talk themselves into poor moral decisions only to repent later, astutely written dialect, complex narratorial reflection on existence, etc. Basically, if you want to understand Eliot's earlier concerns, Silas Marner presents those as well, if not better, than say Adam Bede & Mill on the Floss (and even though it's longer than "Janet's Repentance" in Scenes of Clerical LIfe, it much more developed).

However, having read Eliot's other works, it's hard to read a novel this short by her, as it could very easily be a 400 page novel. The weakest parts of this novel are the visible seams where it seems that things are being moved along for the sake of brevity. Basically, Silas in no way approaches Daniel Deronda, and is not even in the same solar system as Middlemarch, but, in relation to her early work, is a brisk and complex summary.
]]> The Butcher Boy 82965 231 Patrick McCabe 0385312377 adam 2 irish-lit
However, in spite of these things, I'm still not sure if I like this novel on the whole. Although Francie's style of narration is engaging at first, it starts to get on the nerves by the middle of the book. While this might be part of the point of the novel, it nevertheless ends up coming off as "and then this happened, ... and then this, ... and then this..." Many of the scenes in the middle of the novel are great on their own, but they end up giving the novel a bit of a bloated feel, as it never becomes clear what it quite all adds up to.

There is still a potential that I may teach this in the fall, but perhaps that's only because it's the first book I've read on a longer list of potential choices.
]]> 3.85 1992 The Butcher Boy
author: Patrick McCabe
name: adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1992
rating: 2
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/29
shelves: irish-lit
review:
This novel has several things going for it: a style that is both unique and engaging; a narrator that is as charmingly funny as he is frightening, and a beginning that hooks you immediately.

However, in spite of these things, I'm still not sure if I like this novel on the whole. Although Francie's style of narration is engaging at first, it starts to get on the nerves by the middle of the book. While this might be part of the point of the novel, it nevertheless ends up coming off as "and then this happened, ... and then this, ... and then this..." Many of the scenes in the middle of the novel are great on their own, but they end up giving the novel a bit of a bloated feel, as it never becomes clear what it quite all adds up to.

There is still a potential that I may teach this in the fall, but perhaps that's only because it's the first book I've read on a longer list of potential choices.

]]> <![CDATA[Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings]]> 86894 544 George Eliot 0140431489 adam 3 3.90 1991 Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2007/05/29
shelves:
review:
I only read Eliot's early essay, "The Natural History of German Life," but plan on reading more of this volume this summer. This essay is extremely interesting and important for understanding Eliot's realism, as it basically provides an outline for understanding what she is trying to do with her fiction, especially her early works (Scenes of Clerical Life & Adam Bede).
]]> <![CDATA[The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation]]> 445408
Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who knew no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"—a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned.

The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Rancière an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Rancière sees as perpetuating inequality.

]]> 176 Jacques Rancière 0804719691 adam 4
Rancière's argument in support of Jacotot’s conclusions is easy to follow and quite convincing; the book also does well is recasting the basic premises of Jacotot’s system in the basic terminology of twentieth-century theory. Language, for example, plays an important role in the entire argument because Jacotot concluded that intelligence was prior to, and corrupted by, language: we are not intelligent because of language; rather, language is merely a tool by which we communicate with and understand each other. “Man does not think because he speaks � this would precisely submit thought to the existing material order. Man thinks because he exists� (62). Truth, therefore, cannot be expressed in language but must rather be grasped or felt in spite of its inadequacies.

On the whole, the conclusions of the book are at once hopeful and discouraging. Progress, especially in terms of the refinement of social institutions to reflect rationality, becomes a negative term because it constitutively perpetuates the very inequalities that it supposes itself to be overcoming. Equality, therefore, can never be realized on a social level because we need social institutions and they necessarily produce inequality. At the same time, however, the book is hopeful and potentially revolutionary insofar as emancipation is always possible � at least intellectually � because every human being has the capacity to realize his or her capacity for intelligence by submitting his will to rationality. As Rancière says, “There cannot be a class of the emancipated, an assembly or a society of the emancipated. But any individual can always, at any moment, be emancipated and emancipate someone else, announce to others the practice and add to the number of people who know themselves as such and who no longer play the comedy of the inferior superiors. A society, a people, a state, will always be irrational. But one can multiply within these bodies the number of people who, as individuals, will make use of reason, and who, as citizens, will know how to seek the art of raving as reasonably as possible� (98).

I also found this book extremely interesting in terms of Enlightenment thought. Having spent the last few months reading a lot of Kant (among others), the conclusions reached by Rancière (via Jacotot) provide an interesting counterpoint to Kant’s understanding of the relationship between politics and freedom: “One must choose between making an unequal society out of equal men and making an equal society out of unequal men. Whoever has some taste for equality shouldn’t hesitate: individuals are real beings, and society a fiction. It’s for real beings that equality has value, not for a fiction� (132).

This book - short and easy to follow - is a must-read for those who teach or who are interested in issues of justice, as it forces us to think about just what i]]> 4.10 1987 The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
author: Jacques Rancière
name: adam
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/29
shelves:
review:
The basic premise of Rancière’s work is to provide a history of the early nineteenth century French schoolmaster, Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot found himself in a position where he was asked to teach French to a group of Flemish students. The problem, however, was that the students knew no French and he knew no Flemish. In devising a method of teaching these students French by having them read and recite a book in French until they could understand and discuss it, Jacotot developed a “pedagogy� (in scare quotes because it is precisely an anti-pedagogy) based not on explication but on emancipation. The conclusion he reached by “teaching what he didn’t know� was that all students were of equal intelligence because they all had the same capacity for reason; the purpose of education, therefore, was not to explicate an established body of knowledge (which posits the schoolmaster as a “master� and the children as ignorant) but rather to have children realize their own capacity for reason and intelligence by recognizing the necessity of its use.

Rancière's argument in support of Jacotot’s conclusions is easy to follow and quite convincing; the book also does well is recasting the basic premises of Jacotot’s system in the basic terminology of twentieth-century theory. Language, for example, plays an important role in the entire argument because Jacotot concluded that intelligence was prior to, and corrupted by, language: we are not intelligent because of language; rather, language is merely a tool by which we communicate with and understand each other. “Man does not think because he speaks � this would precisely submit thought to the existing material order. Man thinks because he exists� (62). Truth, therefore, cannot be expressed in language but must rather be grasped or felt in spite of its inadequacies.

On the whole, the conclusions of the book are at once hopeful and discouraging. Progress, especially in terms of the refinement of social institutions to reflect rationality, becomes a negative term because it constitutively perpetuates the very inequalities that it supposes itself to be overcoming. Equality, therefore, can never be realized on a social level because we need social institutions and they necessarily produce inequality. At the same time, however, the book is hopeful and potentially revolutionary insofar as emancipation is always possible � at least intellectually � because every human being has the capacity to realize his or her capacity for intelligence by submitting his will to rationality. As Rancière says, “There cannot be a class of the emancipated, an assembly or a society of the emancipated. But any individual can always, at any moment, be emancipated and emancipate someone else, announce to others the practice and add to the number of people who know themselves as such and who no longer play the comedy of the inferior superiors. A society, a people, a state, will always be irrational. But one can multiply within these bodies the number of people who, as individuals, will make use of reason, and who, as citizens, will know how to seek the art of raving as reasonably as possible� (98).

I also found this book extremely interesting in terms of Enlightenment thought. Having spent the last few months reading a lot of Kant (among others), the conclusions reached by Rancière (via Jacotot) provide an interesting counterpoint to Kant’s understanding of the relationship between politics and freedom: “One must choose between making an unequal society out of equal men and making an equal society out of unequal men. Whoever has some taste for equality shouldn’t hesitate: individuals are real beings, and society a fiction. It’s for real beings that equality has value, not for a fiction� (132).

This book - short and easy to follow - is a must-read for those who teach or who are interested in issues of justice, as it forces us to think about just what i
]]> The Mill on the Floss 20564 'If life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?'

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother, a close friend who is also the son of her family's worst enemy, and a charismatic but dangerous suitor. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot's most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving.

In this edition writer and critic A.S. Byatt provides full explanatory notes and an introduction relating Mill on the Floss to George Eliot's own life and times.

Edited with an introduction and notes by A.S. BYATT]]> 579 George Eliot 0141439629 adam 3 3.82 1860 The Mill on the Floss
author: George Eliot
name: adam
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1860
rating: 3
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Practical Philosophy (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)]]> 31860 706 Immanuel Kant 0521654084 adam 0 germanidealism 4.09 1996 Practical Philosophy (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)
author: Immanuel Kant
name: adam
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/17
shelves: germanidealism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Religion and Rational Theology]]> 312758 548 Immanuel Kant 0521799988 adam 0 germanidealism 4.24 1996 Religion and Rational Theology
author: Immanuel Kant
name: adam
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/17
shelves: germanidealism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)]]> 432 City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye... It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense.

Ghosts and The Locked Room are the next two brilliant installments in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.

]]> 203 Paul Auster 0140097317 adam 3 3.79 1985 City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)
author: Paul Auster
name: adam
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2007/04/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Modern Classics Passage To India]]> 45196 362 E.M. Forster 0141183101 adam 4 3.59 1924 Modern Classics Passage To India
author: E.M. Forster
name: adam
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1924
rating: 4
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2007/04/28
shelves:
review:

]]>