I like to go into books blind. That being said, in the edition I had the ending was spoiled in the introduction. I just happened to glance at it and it ruined the whole experience.
The Blue Castle is my favorite book ever!!! And L. M. Montgomery is my favorite author!!! I read The Blue Castle at least once a year. I also read it aloud to my husband, and he agrees that it is excellent.
Yes. I agree with your friend’s assessment of Hemingway. His callous treatment of the women in his life makes me think he was addicted to the first rush of attraction more than an actual relationship. (Nothing wrong with that if you are aware and honest.)
Yes, I think that would certainly cause problems. Maybe that’s why one of the two in the relationships in his books usually die before the newness of the relationship has worn off. 🙃
I'm always on the hunt for a great short story and a number of people spoke extremely highly of EH's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place". Totally insignificant miss for me. Great if one thinks it is profound to be told life is meaningless.
Les Miserables inspired "War and Peace". But the key difference is that the characters in the latter feel like real people whereas Hugo's characters feel like archetypes never quite like real people. It all seems to be at a remove. Still worth reading. Hope you get to Don Quixote some day. It may crack an updated version of this list.
I have read Don Quixote. It’s a fun and informative read in the light of all the literature it has influenced but nowhere on the level of Les Miserables as far as story.
@@RelishBooks see for me, the Don and Sancho Panza endure in the memory with a vivid fullness that none of the archetypes in LM come close to. DQ has grown for me as Les Miserables has receded.
That’s some great variety! The Lord of the Rings would be at the top of my list too if I had counted it as a single volume. And I really like Crime and Punishment, it was in my top eight. 😊
@@Tolstoy111 I know. But often authors intentions aren't carried out, and we can't always view their work the way they wanted because that's not what happened. Sometimes I do classify LOTR as a whole, but since it was published as three books and works very well that way, that's more often how I view it.
If you’re looking for forthright or direct, you came to the wrong author. But It’s usually the first Henry James people read because it’s a ghost story and not super long but it’s very much Late period James - at this point he was dictating his fiction to a secretary and you can really tell. One loses the feeling of a sentence or a phrase. Ever read Heart of Darkness? Be curious what you’d think.
Interesting video to listen to. For me it was like a ride in an automobile that went surprisingly well for quite a while until one by one the wheels fell off at the end! LOL Enjoyed it anyway. :)
Her ranking (of the ten she's read): 1) Bleak House 2) Tale of Two Cities 3) Our Mutual Friend 4) David Copperfield 5) Great Expectations 6) Pickwick Papers 7) Nicholas Nickleby 8) The Old Curiosity Shop 9) Oliver Twist 10) Hard Times
Spoilers for the book! It's been a long time since I read the book but doesn't Segundus establishes the magic school and help figure out what was wrong with that enchanted lady. Also I highly recommend reading the laddies of grace adieu and other stories. Also lud in the mist.
He tries to establish a school, but Mr. Norrell doesn’t allow it. I wish that plot line had come back around and got more development, but it never does. He becomes lady Pole’s caretaker instead.
I'm totally shocked that you even read this book, I didn't see that coming at all....lol...and then to say you liked it and spoke highly of it too..omg...ok ok...just threw me off..haha...
Kate’s final final speech can be dramatized in ways that shed a different light on it. There was one production where she was seen rehearsing the speech earlier from a written draft. So who wrote it? Is she sincere? Etc
I am reading the first one in the Elliot family trilogy, A Bird in the Tree. It’s good. I have most of her books but maybe a few. I have also read The Little White Horse. I liked it.
I'm so glad you read this, as it's one of my four or five favorite books! She's been working on a sequel for many years; it will be set a few years after the events of the first book and center more on characters like Childermass and Vinculus. The Raven King was invented for the book but she drew a lot of her worldbuilding inspiration from a really magical book by folklorist Katharine Briggs, The Encyclopaedia of Faeries, a chunky tome that compiles some of the eeriest and weirdest stories of the Fair Folk in the British Isles.
She did a remarkable job creating such a huge and comprehensive history, she really had me thinking The Raven King might have been a pre-existing character. What are the other books on your top five list?
I suspect more people have read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities (and this is purely anecdotal), not because they chose to, but because those books were chosen FOR them, in the form of school reading assignments--at least, at the schools I went to.
Giving him a quick look on Wikipedia can answer that more fully, but in short, he cheated on his wife repeatedly and took advantage of many young boys.
By all means read Gone With the Wind, but realize that the view of slavery and the Civil War is that if a Southern apologist trying to create the exact sympathy for the South you reference. She was not a historian. Her research involved talking to her white relatives and reading southern apologist historians. Her view on Reconstruction reflects the resentment and racism of the South. Not to mention that the book seeks to justify racist and KKK violence. Reading GWTW as history is a mistake. Reading it as a novel can be enjoyable.
I don’t think the book is actually trying to justify any of the racism and violence, since you as the reader clearly see what flawed thinking the main characters have. I do think she was trying to show as accurately as she knew how the thoughts of certain classes of people at that time. But any way you look at it, it is both an interesting and difficult story.
@BookishTexan No need to apologize, I completely understand where you’re coming from. The book deals with very dark themes and it’s difficult to process everything that’s in it.
@@RelishBooks If you want to continue our discussion of GWTW I have a review video of the book in which o go over my points in detail with examples from the book. You can leave a comment there, but no hard feelings if you don’t want to.
Well, that is quite the "shotgun" approach ... don't know what to write here. I know a couple of these ... Henry is difficult for me, not a "Ghost Story" lover. Also, you dive deeper ... I'm a surface feeder.
Loved this review! I haven't picked up this book in a couple of years, but from what I remember it was great! Have you read East of Eden? I believe that is also a good Steinbeck novel!
Agree. Also, a story when read at age 15 or 16 because I was told to ... confused me. Now in my old age (75) it is the discussion you have provided. Steinbeck pulled it off .. discussions for the ages.
This play is literally the start of modern drama. To find a play before this one that is still performed, you'd have to go back at least a century. btw the literal translation of the title is "A dollhouse" which suggests that all of the characters are fooling themselves and not just having only to do with Nora.
@@robertgallagher5285 I don’t really have a problem taking Shakespeare seriously. That’s like saying Shakespeare made it hard to take the Greek tragedians seriously.
always bugged me that it won the Pulitzer Prize the year that “Absalom, Absalom” came out. A much greater novel about the South PS Scarlett O’Hara is a direct literary descendant of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Hope you read that some day. It’s a masterpiece.
@@RelishBooks ha! That’s a fairly straightforward one. May I ask why? You seem to be big on likable characters and AILD doesn’t really have any. But it’s extremely well executed.
@@Tolstoy111 I love good 'literary' writing, but Faulkner is ridiculously heavy handed. The story would have been a lot more meaningful if he hadn't over-emphasized and drawn out every detail with such drama.
@@RelishBooks If it's done as well as high literary art then it IS high literary art. :) A lot of what you saw there in Faulkner is intended to be comic. Hope you get to AA or The Sound and the Fury. They are amaaaazing.
@RelishBooks yes I own a special DVD set amd now own a digital version. I had seen the movie first. The funny thing is I was a teenager and gwtw and my now mother in law was trying to get to watch it and I had no interest in an "old" movie. Once I finally watched it it became a favorite. I read the book foe the first time a few years ago. The story is the same but there are actually quite a few differences. Let me knownif you end up watching the movie!
