novels, comets, movies
In my blog posts I've compared similar passages across different novels, and I've got several passages from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I want to link to other novels: "Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "The Lord of the Rings," "Matilda," and one nonfiction book, Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot." Compare this declaration by King … Continue reading Esmeralda, cosmologist
I picked up “Pilgrim’s Progress” only because I was reading “Little Women,” which I found made constant reference to Bunyan’s earlier novel. So I put down Alcott and started “Pilgrim,” and it was a mixed experience – riveting in many places, but often hard-going. As often happens when I pick up a new author, the … Continue reading Pilgrim’s Progress
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
This one for me will always be The One With the Grasshoppers.* Said grasshoppers destroy the Ingalls’ wheat crop and smother their farm like a Biblical visitation. Worse, they stay. And lay millions of eggs. Then one day they start marching on the ground, robotically, toward the west, finally taking their bows without so much … Continue reading On the Banks of Plum Creek
August 26, 2020 Nearing the end of a two-week vacation, I’ve managed now to reach the midway point of "War and Peace", having started over from the beginning. I reached the end of the novel but there were many chapters I had skipped, and I'm sweeping through now, from the beginning, to read those. Wonderful … Continue reading Reading left to right