For my “This Old Thing” square I finally bit the bullet and took this binding of two plays with me to jury duty to ensure I wouldn’t be tempted by more modern works, and shut my phone off. I needn’t have worried; it’s not like this would get mistaken for a written transcript of This Week Tonight or anything, but Moliere is not just remarkably readable, his views aren’t as antiquated as you might expect for someone writing in the mid 1600s. I picked these […]
“I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.” (BINGO 5!)
For many, Jane Eyre is part of the reading undertaken during their education. For some it is read in high school, for others college, but for me it never joined the reading lists of my various courses. In fact, until several years ago when I read Agnes Grey I had read nothing at all by any of the Brontes. It is however fully in the milieu of a reader’s culture; I understood it enough to get the jokes in Texts from Jane Eyre and Hark! […]
Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!
First Bingo!!!! I’m going to be teaching “Dubliners” to my Advanced Fiction students this semester, so what luck that we had a square for old books :) Written in 1914, James Joyce hoped to capture the tenor of his city in a series of short stories that act like windows into the lives of Dublin’s inhabitants in the early 20th Century. Did I like this book? It grew on me. It’s not thematic or cyclic, nor does it have any reoccurring characters. At its core, […]
I don’t think it’s aged all that well (Plus, half Cannonball!)
I’ve heard James’ The Turn of the Screw as being a classic Gothic novel, the one that basically begat a genre and inspired authors like Shirley Jackson (whose books I’ve loved so far in my readings). I chose this one for the ‘This Old Thing’ bingo square (it was published in 1898), and I was really excited to finally sit down and read it Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The plot is about a young governess who takes a posting that’s too good to be true in an […]