This is a modern retelling of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, but I’ve never read that book, so this review will have nothing do with it. For your purposes (if you, like me, have also never read Silas Marner), this is a book for people who love books. (So, everyone on this website.) Of course, some of your tastes will bounce right off it, but you’re definitely all the intended audience. Being people. Who read. A.J. Fikry is a widower who owns a bookshop on a […]
Silas Marner Gets the Lifetime Movie Treatment
This novel was, apparently, a New York Times bestseller. I don’t recall reading any reviews of it, but I’m guessing it was a big hit with folks looking for something easy to take to the beach or on long plane rides. The funny thing is, it’s exactly the type of book the main character hates. AJ Fikry is an over-educated 40-ish widower who owns a bookstore on Alice Island, which is near Nantucket. He is grumpy and has very exacting tastes in literature, preferring short […]
Squash Your Inner Cynic
In order to enjoy this book, you have to squash your inner cynic but if you do, you will find this tale of a cranky book store owner in a small resort town/island off the coast of Massuchusetts a charming good time. A.J. Fikry is an old man at forty-five, grieving for his dead wife and annoyed at many of his customers’ tastes in fiction. In a matter of days, several events happen that begin to pull him out of his funk—he has a disasterous […]
Catching up on the classics: Silas Marner
I always find it hard to rate and review classics. Usually they’re classics for a reason, I usually enjoy them just fine, and at the very least I appreciate them. Earlier in the year I read Middlemarch, which was wonderful and long, and I thought I should expand my Eliot horizons. Silas Marner is much shorter than Middlemarch, and a much easier read. You probably know the basics: old, miserly bachelor happens to become the caretaker of an orphan, who teaches him the True Meaning […]