Category: Review

“[L]ooking around me at American society in 1959,” John Updike once said in an interview, he could observe “a number of scared and dodgy men….This kind of man who won’t hold still, who won’t make a commitment, who won’t quite pull his load in society, became ‘Harry Angstrom.’ I imagined him as a former basketball… Continue reading John Updike’s “Rabbit Run”

No less an author than T.S. Eliot, writing his introduction to an edition of Huckleberry Finn in 1950, said The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the only one of Mark Twain’s various books which can be called a masterpiece. I do not suggest that it is his only book of permanent interest; but it is the only one… Continue reading Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

Anthony Trollope never met an 800-page novel he didn’t like. Like Dickens and other Victorian novelists, Trollope wrote many of his novels for periodical publication, and so they were first published one section at a time—and the more serial installments, the more the writer was paid. When those novels were published in book form, they… Continue reading Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”

Everybody knows the story—one might say the “legend”—of John Kennedy Toole and his magnum opus, A Confederacy of Dunces: How the young writer, despondent over the manuscript’s rejection by many publishers, took his own life by asphyxiation in his car in 1969 at the age of 31; how his mother Thelma found a carbon copy of… Continue reading John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”

Tolkien, whose day job was as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, dabbled in world-creation in his spare time from as early as 1917—beginning with his creation of two different elvish languages, Quenta and Sindarin, and the alphabets that go with them. He invented Middle Earth and made up the stories first in order… Continue reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”

“ 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”