Category: Review

“ In his own day, William Makepeace Thackery was considered the one great Victorian novelist who could be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens. Both had a string of highly admired novels and were well-known public figures on the lecture circuit, and each grudgingly admired the other’s work in print. So admired was Thackery… Continue reading William Makepeace Thackery’s “Vanity Fair”

I remember as a young child seeing the 1939 American animated film of Gulliver’s Travels at a local movie theater, I suppose as a 20th anniversary “re-release.” Though dealing only—and not very faithfully—with Gulliver’s first voyage, to Lilliput, it made a tolerably entertaining children’s story. Indeed, the book is often put forward as a children’s novel, presenting… Continue reading Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”

I had deliberately avoided this book for forty years. Sure, it was  a huge bestseller in 1979 and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1980, and yes, it was honored with a spot on Modern Library’s famous “100 Greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century” (not to mention ranking 57th on Radcliffe’s “100 Best… Continue reading William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice”

I hadn’t read John Steinbeck’s magnum opus since high school until rereading it while compiling my current list. What I found is that The Grapes of Wrath still packs a punch: a realist novel intended as a kind of exposé of the trials and hardships of the hundreds of thousands of “Okies”—poor farmers from the Great Plains… Continue reading John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”

Treasure Island is a novel almost everyone knows something about: a sea yarn about pirates and a hunt for buried treasure on a tropical island, with a heroic young lad as narrator and protagonist. Published in 1883, it was Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s first big success and his most popular and best-selling novel. Yet it may be… Continue reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”

Reading Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy (more properly The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) is an experience like no other. You open it up expecting it to be what it purports to be: a Bildungsroman along the lines of, say, David Copperfield, or its close contemporary, Fielding’s History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. What you get instead is something completely unprecedented, which appears… Continue reading Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”

The selfless and tireless new teacher who comes into a new school with unorthodox methods that challenge the old, ineffective ways of other educators and succeeds in inspiring underachieving students to find the potential within themselves to rise above their unpromising condition and grow into successful adulthood is, basically, the clichéd “teacher as hero” story.… Continue reading Muriel Spark’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”

Mary Shelley was only eighteen years old when, having eloped with the already-married Romantic poet who ultimately did make an “honest woman” of her, she took seriously the challenge of Shelley’s friend Lord Byron to write a “ghost story” and produce what was ultimately to become the most successful Gothic horror story ever published. Some… Continue reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

Sir Walter Scott’s most popular novel is one that does not appear on many of the most common lists of “Greatest Novels.” The book does have some acknowledged flaws: though a historical novel, there are places where an alert reader might discover an anachronism or two. Further, the prose style is somewhat turgid for contemporary… Continue reading Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe”

Paul Scott, the British author of thirteen novels, only began writing seriously in his forties, when he quit his job as a literary agent (he had represented such stars as Arthur C. Clark and Muriel Spark) and received a stipend to return to India (where he had served in the British army during the Second… Continue reading Paul Scott’s “The Jewel in the Crown”