The Turn of the Screw: A Book Review 

I’ve heard of this book but I’ve never read it. I have however watched “The Others” with Nicole Kidman. The premise of this book reminds me so much of that movie.

This is one of my all-time favourites and repeated readings repay the effort. I've seen reviews on Amazon complaining that its too difficult, boring tedious and too complicated. For me, this is a symptom of being unable to concentrate and wanting instant gratification. Tales like this require work on the part of the reader and this is part of its pleasure.

Awesome video! You sent this book to my overpopulated goodreads TBR :) Well done!

I liked it a lot !

Thank you for sharing your love of literature and for encouraging us to explore this spooky gem. 📖👻👏

Michael Flanagan made it a masterpiece chefs 💋

Great video! Thanks again!

Great video as always and now I need to check this one out. With the themes you talked about, it reminded me quite a bit about The Yellow Wallpaper which is another gothic horror story. Highly recommend it even though it’s short. I’m already looking forward to see what you think about Dracula. It’s my favorite gothic horror book for sure and it has inspired my own writing quite a bit as well :)

This is one of my favorite books! As for the whether ghosts were real, i tend to take a "Schrödinger's 'Ghost'" view, they are simultaneously real and not real. Also I think the style of james' prose was a product of his time AND the fact that he was an American living in Britain. And one either likes that or not.

I agree completely about the convoluted writing, after a certain point I just started skimming. I always thought the ghosts were real, only after reading reviews afterwards (trying to see if I was the only one that found it boring) did I think that the governess might be crazy.

In the perfect world you would talk about all the books in the world (I would never get tired)

Thanks

Fantastic video as per usual. Read the book in anticipation and to be honest I think you enjoyed this more than I did. In fact I’m sure you liked it more than I did because I kinda hated it. Now I’m going to qualify that by saying that I read Jane Eyre not long ago and I may have a touch of governess in a creepy house fatigue. I think there’s a fine line between ambiguity and just bad plotting. I think James is so preoccupied with atmosphere and description that he flat out doesn’t bother to properly describe the events that take place in the plot. He was perfectly happy to be definitive with the ghosts motivations despite no evidence in the text beyond “I just know” I think the character motivations are completely unbelievable and Miles wasn’t creepy. He was just a little sh*t. The one blessing of this book. It was short. I was ready to quit but then realised it was two thirds finished so I may as well carry on. Glad you enjoyed though. You’re more ‘glass half full’ than I am. In answer to the big question, yes I do think that the ghosts were real, purely based on the governess describing the face of Quint to Mrs Grose even though she wasn’t aware of him or the fact that he died. If James meant it to be ambiguous he did that badly as well. I’m looking forward to your Dracula review. I’ve read that book so many times over the years and I love it, but it is very, very flawed. It’ll be interesting to see how a first time reader reacts to it, will you just see the flaws or enjoy it for being more than the sum of its parts? On to your next book framed in diary entries.

One of my favourite classics!

I was really hoping for a spoiler review of this novella. I would have very much liked to hear your opinion on that ending. As to whether the ghost were real, I'm leaning more to the ghost not being real.

The haunting of Bly Manor! I'm watching that show with my wife right now. I'm only a few episodes in, NO SPOILERS! 😂

Thanks again for another great review. I find I agree with you again. The Turn of the Screw - okay, it's considered a bona fide classic, just as Henry James is considered a bona fide master, but as I mentioned in an earlier review, I just cannot tolerate his prose. Like you, it always strikes me a s a little self-indulgent, a little insecure, but worse, by the time I've slogged through to the end of just one (!) of James' endless, marathon sentences, I find it almost impossible to determine what the heck he was getting at in the first place. After a few such convoluted whoppers, you feel as though you're a dummy and this novel isn't for you. After a few PAGES of such fare, you feel more like hurling your copy at the wall w/ great force. And if you're a writer who forces a reader to decide whether THEY'RE stupid or YOUR BOOK is stupid … well, maybe not the best direction to take, as an author. It's as though James hid a superbly creepy story behind a wall of willfully impenetrable prose. IMO a writer's first task is to communicate something - even if what's being communicated is ambiguous, such as whether the ghosts are in the house or in the governess's mind. Yet to me, the writing seems designed more to obscure its own meaning rather than to convey it, which makes the question itself almost moot. I have no sense that the author knows or even cares about the answer, so why would I? Think about this same story had it been written by James' contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, for example. Still, it is a haunting, uncomfortable, wonderfully creepy story once you struggle through the wall of thorns the author built around it, and 10/10 on the title! LOL. GREAT title.

First time I read the book, it bothered me. Second time I read the book, it unnerved me

a