I do love Miss Marple. She’s plucky and clever, and the nosiest old lady ever. In this one, a friend of Miss Marple’s thinks she has seen a man strangling a woman on a train. Not her train, but on a train going in the opposite direction. The cops can’t find a body, and no one believes the friend. So of course Miss Marple figures it out. She starts poking around with train timetables, maps, all kinds of stuff like that, and she determines where […]
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
As I read Great Expectations a lot of questions popped up for me. Do people struggle through some of this old language like I am doing? Is this book still relevant, or is it a quaint morality tale belonging to 19th century England? What was Dicken’s own stance on class? And, was Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of Miss Haversham over the top? (I haven’t seen the film adaptation, a friend described her performance as contained). I actually had a heavily annotated edition of the book, […]
Moby-Dick, ten years later
Fun story: I read Moby-Dick for the very first time after I had jaw surgery in the summer of 2004. I was taking an American Literature survey that fall, and I wanted to prepare, especially because I would be pretty much confined to no strenuous physical activity with lots of free time (and sure enough, the most workout I could muster was carrying a stack of books from the library. I read 40-some books that summer alone, and watched countless movies in between my mom […]
Oh, Jane, would it have hurt you to be just a bit more interesting?
Jane lives a pampered and privileged life, the only child of a wealthy and influential woman. She’s lonely, insecure and immature. She has no real friends, just people who mainly seem to take pleasure in bullying her. One day, she encounters a robot minstrel, one in a new line of highly realistic, artificially intelligent androids and her life is never the same. Though she is initially frightened by the robot, she’s also fascinated by him and can’t put him out of her mind. She runs […]