My ten most memorable reads of 2022, fiction and nonfiction, out of my 42 first-time reads: 1. The Book of Job -- Robert Alter's translation “Oh, let that night be barren, let it have no song of joy.Let the day-cursers hex it, those ready to rouse Leviathan.Let its twilight stars go dark.Let it hope for … Continue reading Favorite reads of 2022
Huck Finn's dilemma: send his friend Jim back to slavery as he has been taught he must do, or go against his church's teaching by helping Jim to escape, and then go to eternal hell as punishment I've started reading David Bentley Hart's "That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation." It is … Continue reading That All Shall Be Saved
Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey is unsentimental. Her language is poetic but straightforward, and never prettified. It's unsparing about the violence and moral ambiguities in Homer's poem, and not surprisingly, reading it is an emotional experience. This happens often in the space of one line, or just in single word of double meaning, as … Continue reading The Odyssey, books 11-24
I cannot say anything about Homer's "Odyssey" that hasn't been said before, so I'm going to take a personal angle on this one. I'm going to try to describe why I loved "The Iliad" even in high school but have never gotten around to its sequel until now. To sum up, I think I loved … Continue reading The Old Beggar and the Sea
When I was 8 or 9, I remember finding an old movie playing on television one afternoon, about an old man and what looked to me like a swordfish. I came in only near the end and my goodness it left an impression, though I retained no clear memory of how the story ended. I … Continue reading The Old Man and the Sea
My 10-year-old daughter and I recently read Carlo Collodi's 1883 story, "The Adventures of Pinocchio." Now, it turns out that the story is fairly dark, much more than the famous Disney movie of 1940. Parents may wish to be careful with this one, and a full plot description of Collodi's story can be found on … Continue reading Pinocchio and Moby Dickens
Lionel Trilling famously stated, ''All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of 'Don Quixote'." Therefore I try, in the most literal way possible, to find our famous knight and squire in the pages of every novel I read. Well, I recently finished all 1,304 pages of "Les Misérables," and I couldn't find them. … Continue reading Don Quixote – Les Misérables edition
A few days ago I was making a list of the best sequences in the novel of "Les Misérables." My list, which I'll put below, was heavy on actions taken by Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, and one item stood out: Eponine barring her father and his thugs from entering the house where Cosette and … Continue reading Eponine and Sonya Alone
Roman Catholic nuns play a critical role in the novel of Les Misérables. Victor Hugo takes up several chapters in an interlude about their order. It is one of the famous "digressions" of his novel. Like the other digressions, it requires patience, but the effort is rewarded, and I find myself thinking about it long … Continue reading Sisters of The Wretched
I've been watching a lot of "Les Misérables" adaptations since finishing the novel. I've watched the usual suspects, and I'll list them below (slight spoilers), but I have to start with one of the very best, only 10 minutes long, that I found entirely by chance. Click on the photo for Inspector's Javert's vlog, or … Continue reading Other Les Misérables films
