I nearly always struggle reviewing classics, or if not yet “classic,” the darlings of mid-century American literature. They’re beloved and enduring for a reason, and yet, a lot of them, being “of their time,” may not hold up well or for whatever reason fail to command the attention of the modern reader. A lot of people will take that as an excuse to belittle the modern reader. I will not. I will also struggle with reading someone like Vonnegut, whose work implies layers upon layers […]
Book Club Reads Classics with Movie Adaptations – Voting!
Voting is now closed for this book club. Please visit our Book Club page for more information! We are heading into the tail end of 2016, and into our last Cannonball Book Club read of the year. When I originally spoke to MsWas about setting up our book club for this year, she had but one request: that we include Classics. Perhaps you’ve heard before, but the original book club was hosted on Pajiba and led by Yossarian in the pre-Disqus days. They read […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Emma
This is the fifth in my series of posts wherein I write reviews for classic books in the form of letters to the characters so as to avoid actually writing a review for a book that has been written about by everyone’s mother’s second cousin’s uncle twice removed from a monkey. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it has so far been a fun experience. July was Emma month, and I was very much looking forward to it, since I’ve liked it more and more every time […]
If you could see me now…
I’ve been impressed with the writing of H.G. Wells thus far. War of the Worlds was as good as I’d hoped: as exciting as the Spielberg movie, but without the insufferable children and tedious family dynamics. The Time Machine, while a tad dry, was still well-written and enjoyable. The Island of Dr. Moreau was fairly straight forward, but was masterfully executed, prescient, and surprisingly humane relative to other books of its era (think Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, or some of Rudyard Kipling’s work). The Invisible Man completes […]
This book was an absolute punch in the gut.
My God, this book. It’s so hard to review classics, which admittedly is not often an issue for me. My reading history contains almost no classics. I didn’t go to school after the fifth grade, so I was never assigned any for school, and although I’ve always been an avid reader, I’ve never picked up classics on my own. I took a lit class last semester, and every single assigned reading, I thought “Well, I’m going to hate this.” Every single time, it totally blew […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Mansfield Park
This is the fourth in my series of posts wherein I get weird and write reviews for classic books in the form of letters to the characters. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it has so far been lovely, even with this one. May was Mansfield Park month, and I was looking forward to it, as it has been my least favorite Austen since I first read it, and thought that might make for an interesting reading experience. In fact, until now, it’s the only one of her books I […]
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