Through some rabbit hole on the internet, I stumbled across the name Anya Seton and a fancy cover for her book, The Turqouise. Intrigued, I waited patiently for the inter-library loan snail to bring it to me, and boy was I surprised when the book delivered was a battered hardcover bound with actual thread and smelling of an octogenarian’s basement. While slightly put-off, I accepted it anyway and went home to discover the strange and satisfying pleasure of reading an old book. I ripped my fare share […]
No man here lives a charmed life.
Okay, I’m probably operating on far too little sleep to write a coherent review, but here goes. The prose here is a luminous dream, casting it’s shadows upon the mind and lulling the reader into a warm and tranquil languidity. Coming so fast on the heels of the tenaciously awkward writing of Stephanie Meyer, the fluidity exhibited by Conrad is both refreshing in its rarity and a disheartening reminder that I can never be the writer I often dream that I am. This story has […]
My, what big teeth you have.
The inimitable H.G. Wells, from 1895-98, wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. That’s an unbelievable concentration of brilliance that I can’t find in another writer. Someone like Stephen King has written numerous works that will (or have already) become classics of their genre, but they’re spread out over a career (for instance, 1978’s The Stand followed hot on the heels of 1977’s The Shining, but Misery came out in 1987 and The Green Mile […]
Gothic crime and Victorian intrigue
A Victorian novel in the form of an epistolary, this is the supposed journal of 17-year-old Richard Shenstone, who has just been sent home, or “rusticated,” from Cambridge because of misdeeds that are only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. Richard has recently learned that his father, once a respected deacon of the church, has died of a heart attack while under suspicion of embezzlement of church funds–and worse–and that his mother and older sister are living in dire circumstances in a delapidated […]