novels, comets, movies
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
My blog is new, so I've never picked out favorite books for a year, but here we go. My ten faves for 2021, fiction and nonfiction, out of the 66 books I read: 1. New Testament -- the recent translation by David Bentley Hart 2. Notre Dame de Paris Translated by Alban Krailsheimer 3. Lonesome … Continue reading Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)
January 14, 2021 I’ve just finished “Madame Bovary.” Some of it was slow going, specifically the passages of excessive detail about physical objects and surroundings. But after finishing the novel, I read in Soledad Fox’s “Flaubert and Don Quijote” that Flaubert used all this detail to satirize the “realist” genre: that’s why he describes the … Continue reading Madame Bovary
December 31, 2020 I’ve read Charlotte Lennox's “The Female Quixote” (Kwicksoht), and I struggled through much of the first half, but the effort was well worth it. I flew through the last 100 pages. Lennox’s novel was inspired by Cervantes and later inspired Austen, two authors I’ve recently discovered, so I really wanted to read … Continue reading The Female Quixote
November 17, 2020 It’s often said that “Northanger Abbey” is similar to “Don Quixote.” I would think that Austen read Cervantes, but I’m just finding out about a 1752 novel called “The Female Quixote; or, the Adventures of Arabella,” by Charlotte Lennox, that Austen read and even praised in an 1807 letter. https://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/the-influence-of-the-female-quixote-on-northanger-abbey/ This is … Continue reading Arabella