Category: Classic Book Club Posts
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Book Review: The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My father lived in a cursed house as a child. Every night an old hag with a red kerchief wrapped around her head climbed the shingles of the house up to his window and knocked with her boney fingers until he woke with a start. My uncle was hit by a truck in that house.…
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Book Review: Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag
Are you looking for a light and cheerful winter read? Well, this isn’t the one! It’s brilliant — like snow-blind brilliant. It’s human, but in the most tragic sense. It’s spellbinding like a breathtaking winter sunset when it’s far below freezing. Most Americans are familiar with THE LONG WINTER by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Pa’s optimism…
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Are Artists Selfish?
“How good life is when one does something right and just!” The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky I read somewhere that Dostoevsky originally intended for The Brothers Karamazov to be three times as long as it actually turned out to be. If it had been, I definitely would have followed his characters along. Despite being a…
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Top 5 Favorite Romantic Partners in Classic Literature
Hi everyone! After spending quite some time pondering the suffering of soldiers wounded at Gettysburg I thought I needed a quick pick-me-up. 🙂 Maybe you do too. I feel we need some love right now so I’m calling all readers to share the ladies and gentlemen they adore. I mean, who doesn’t like romance done…
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Classics Club: Gone With the Wind
Gone With the Wind As much as I enjoyed Gone With the Wind for its insight into Southern society before and after the war, I had so little love for Scarlett by the end that the last hundred pages felt a bit of a chore. Despite this there are scenes in the book so full…
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Classics Club Review: The Count of Monte Cristo
Vengeance is sweet. Is it really? Personal admission: I’m too lazy to be vengeful. I get angry, feel slighted, plot revenge and then forget about the whole thing. Well, not quite forget … Granted I’ve never been wrongly accused of plotting against the government. I’ve never been sent to prison for years. And I’ve never…
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Scarlet and Black: Classics Club Review
“Every one of our hero’s first steps, for all he thought himself so cautious, were, like his choice of a confessor, careless blunders. Led astray by all the overweening confidence natural to a man with imagination, he took the will for the deed, and thought himself past master in hypocrisy.” And so it is…
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Classics Club Review: Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
I had many suitors. In the 1980’s we called admirers something else, but I forget what. Many a suitor wrote me letters. An Irish poet from Limerick with liquid, sensitive blue eyes I met one night on my travels sent letters across the Atlantic for months. I liked his poetry, but he wanted love and…
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9 Signs You May Have Mistakenly Joined a Dystopian/Utopian Community
“I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear; it had enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, [and] afforded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity.”
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Classics Club Review: War and Peace
The day after taking doxicyclene for Lyme disease and anaplasmosis this is the text conversation between my daughter and me: Me: I was feverish with a bizarre and pounding headache. Not normal. Felt really weird. Sweating profusely. And UNABLE TO STOP GOING OVER SCENES FROM WAR AND PEACE in my head. Daughter: Okay. That’s terrible…
Author Adrienne Morris 