Thank You, Jeeves book review So here's the thing: you either love Jeeves and Wooster or you don't. Or, poor thing, you've never read them (by "them" I refer to the 15, by my count, novels and short story collections about Bertie Wooster and the world's most perfect manservant). If that's the case, all [...]
The Forsyte Saga: The Man of Property If you're old enough to remember it airing on PBS in 1969, the Masterpiece Theatre series is probably what comes to your mind when you think of The Forsyte Saga. That is, if you think of it at all, which is unlikely. John Galsworthy's multi-generational chronicle of [...]
The Tropic of Cancer book review Reading Henry Miller is like being cornered by a loud, overbearing drunk at a party who leans over you breathing whisky in your face while he insists on telling you every detail of his love life. You smile and squirm and desperately try to get away, knowing that [...]
Ethan Frome book review "I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story". The story, as we will learn, is the strange, sad case of the reclusive Ethan Frome, a New England farmer who, decades earlier, suffered a terrible [...]
Tess of the D'Urbervilles book review There's something about the start of a new year that makes me want to look back - in this case, quite a ways back, to England during what was known as the Long Depression of the 1870s. A financial crisis linked to a dramatic fall in grain [...]
The Landlady short story I feel the need to explain myself. I’m not a bad person but if you were to judge me by the attacks I’ve endured on social media for the past few months you’d be inclined to think me a monster. Or at the very least a heartless, money-grubbing landlady. I’m not. [...]
The Reader book review "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana, The Life of Reason The Germans have a word for the struggle of those born after the Second World War to overcome the negatives of the past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung can be defined as the public debate that continues to this day [...]
The Color Purple book review "He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn't. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties." This is what Alice Walker calls "folk speech", the [...]
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas book review "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and [...]
The Secret History book review If every new writer's career had as auspicious a start as that of Donna Tartt, we would all be writers. And we would all, I think, be rich. In the early 1980s, while a student at Bennington College, Tartt began working on a novel. As she wrote she shared [...]
