The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925), 180 pgs. 

A mysterious party host; a decadent mansion with crowds of lavish guests overflowing into the lawn; champagne and rumors spilling; distant views of the working class below. Welcome to the Roaring Twenties in New York City.
When Nick Carraway moves into the much smaller home next-door to Jay Gatsby's mansion, he gets an up-close view of extravagant wealth. Mr. Gatsby throws a fancy party every weekend, each one more over the top than the last. Nick is only an observer of these events until one day he receives an invitation, and suddenly he is a part of Gatsby's world--a world of affairs and adventures which is sure to end in disaster. 

This was my first time reading this classic, and I had a good time! The prose was a bit difficult for me to understand at times--I definitely had to re-read a few parts to get what was going on--but it is a very interesting story to imagine. The themes of class and gender roles during the 1920s are quite interesting to unpack, but this is definitely a story written from a well-off white male perspective.

Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea

 Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomey, 596 pages.

This book, originally published in 1908, has been a favorite of mine for a long time; and although I'm not quite as fond of the sequels, I do still quite enjoy them. For anyone who hasn't read these books in the 120 years they've been popular, they follow Anne Shirley, an orphan who is adopted into a small Canadian town and has a talent for getting into scrapes, imagining things, and seeing the beauty of the world. This time I'm listening to the books as read by Mary Kate Wiles and a full cast of her friends, mostly other actors from her Shipwrecked Comedy group. They do a great job bringing the characters to life, and I highly recommend this if you're looking for an audio version of this classic! (It's also technically a podcast, meaning that these are free on Spotify)

The Odyssey

 The Odyssey by Homer (trans. Emily Wilson), 582 pages.

I realized when perusing this blog that although many UCPL staff members read this book as part of our annual Big Book Challenge, nobody had actually written about it here, so I decided to fill the gap! I imagine most people know the broad shape of the story, as it is nearly 3000 years old. That being said, I was surprised to find how little of this vast, sprawling epic has made it's way into pop culture. It is definitely worth reading the whole thing for yourself, and I don't believe there's a better translation than Wilson's. She does an excellent job capturing the tone and rhythm of the original poem, while also rendering it not only easy to understand, but exciting! 

We are flush with copies of this excellent translation of a classic, and I highly recommend picking it up if anyone missed the discussions this summer.

Cymbeline

 Cymbeline by William Shakespeare, 166 pages.

Princess Imogen has secretly married a man that her father, King of Britain, does not approve of (despite the fact he is almost universally regarded as the best of men). He is angry because he intended for her to marry his stepson, and in his fury at his daughter's disobedience, he banishes her new husband. This triggers a series of events that will lead to betrayal, scandal, disguises, and old secrets revealed, all as she attempts to get back to her husband. 

After reading Judi Dench's book on Shakespeare, I realized that I haven't actually read a Shakespeare play in a number of years. This one struck my fancy from that same book, so I decided to give it a try. I really liked this play! Although Imogen's stepmother makes for a somewhat weak villain, I did overall really like the characters in this play. I also really liked the mythic, almost fairy tale like, quality that this play maintained. While not my absolute favorite of Shakespeare's plays, I do think that this one is definitely underrated, and it deserves more appreciation.  

The Importance of Being Earnest

 The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, 160 pages.

Jack Worthing finds the pressures of being a wealthy gentleman and good example to his ward completely unbearable at times. So when it all gets to be too much, he goes off to London to deal with his rascally brother Earnest, a role which he gets to embody in town. This secret comes out in London to his friend Algernon, who has his own similar scheme. He is about to give up the came in preparation to propose to Algernon's cousin Gwendolyn, when who should show up at his country estate but his non-existent brother Earnest? 

I last read this play in high school and remembered very little except that I really liked it. Rereading it now I remember how uproariously funny it is. The title itself is a pretty remarkable pun, and overall I was delighted at how well the humor holds up 125 years later. This is an extremely silly play, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a laugh. 

Matilda

 

Matilda by Roald Dahl, 240 pgs.

What a fun book. My daughter started reading this one night, finished it in a day, and declared it as her favorite book of all time. I've seen most of the early movie versions of of Dahl's books but I'm just starting to read them now and really wished I'd experienced them as a kid. Matilda is one of those kids who is born to neglectful, awful parents and who don't encourage her natural abilities so she develops them herself. I love that this is basically a kid experience some massive trauma and ends up developing a superpower as a result to counteract all the bad people in her life. Books that feature kids who develop a power over grown-ups is always a good read, it's nice to see mean adults get their comeuppance at the hands of someone so small. Kids and adults. 

Things Fall Apart

 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 209 pages.

Okonkwo is a man's man, wildly successful by the metrics of his Igbo village in late 19th century Nigeria. After a tragic accident Okonkwo is forced to flee his home, and when he returns seven years later the forces of colonization are in full force, and his place in the world becomes deeply uncertain.

As an ethnography I found this book extremely successful. I also felt that it was very effective at meeting Achebe's goal of changing Western views of Africa, and especially precolonial Africa. As a novel, I'm afraid I found it less successful. It was slow and meandering, and aside from Okonkwo himself I found few of the characters very compelling. That being said, I would still consider this a valuable book, and at only 200 pages I would definitely consider it worth the time put in.  

The Lottery & The Haunting of Hill House

The Lottery and Other Stories (292 pages) and The Haunting of Hill House (182 pages), both by Shirley Jackson

Not long ago, I realized that "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's best-known tales, were gaping holes in my reading history. So I set out to rectify the situation. In both, Jackson's distinctive style — atmospheric, haunting, something's not quite right, but hey, there's something almost humorous going on here — shines through, especially in the short story collection, which allowed her a wide range of subjects upon which to muse. I particularly enjoyed the titular story and "Charles," a humorous bit about a troublemaking child that was both very realistic and made me realize I'd read one of Jackson's other humorous short stories when I was a kid ("Life Among the Savages"). With Hill House, the classic haunted house book felt almost cliché to a reader in 2023 — until you realize that all of these "cliche" things originated in the 1959 book. Jackson's skill with creating unsettling atmospheres and unreliable narrators is unparalleled, and I'm so glad that I finally read these books.

*This is the collection out of which I read these two books. Also highly recommend We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I read a few years back.

Manga Classics: Anne of Green Gables

 Manga Classics: Anne of Green Gables by Crystal S. Chan (adapted from the original by L.M. Montgomery), 319 pages.

This manga is a very faithful adaptation of beloved children's book Anne of Green Gables, the 1908 classic about an orphan who (after a miscommunication) goes to live with elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert on Prince Edward Island. Anne proceeds to get into all sorts of fairly hilarious trouble as she grows up in the wonderful little town. 

Anne of Green Gables has always been a book that is very rich with visual descriptors, and I feel like illustrations really help this story to breath. I feel that the manga style in particular really helps emphasize Anne's love for beauty and tendency towards the romantic. As I mentioned before, this is an extremely faithful adaptation. Much of the text is taken directly from the book, and I noticed to major changes to the story. My only criticism is that the middle of the book felt like it was rushing, touching on a whole lot of incidents very briefly in quick succession for time. While I understand that not everything can fit in the comic, I find myself wishing she had cut some incidences entirely rather than the perfunctory treatment they got. I would still call this a really stellar new treatment of a stellar book, and I'm really glad I happened upon it on the shelf. I would recommend it for young readers and fans of the original alike.

Invisible Cities

 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 165 pages.

This book is difficult to describe. The frame device is famous explorer Marco Polo describing the cities he has seen to Kublai Khan. The actual book is mostly dozens of vignettes no more than a few pages long about the fantastical cities that he has seen. But really it is a meditation on the possible ways that cities could be, and what that means on a human scale. The book is extremely philosophically compelling, and once I managed to stop taking it so literally I thoroughly enjoyed it. My ebook copy is very full of bookmarks. The short chapters (and short overall page count) make it very easy to casually pick up this book. A great book to read at a leisurely pace, I thoroughly recommend it.

A Study in Scarlet

 A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, 123 pages.

In this, the first Sherlock Holmes novel, John Watson is introduced to a weird man looking for a roommate while he is doing the same. Watson is fascinated and impressed by Holmes' deductive detective techniques, and is soon tagging along on a very strange murder where the clues don't seem to be adding up.

After about 150 years of near constant popularity I feel confident that everyone reading this knows who Sherlock Holmes is and his general deal. That being said, reading this novel still felt like a sort of original experience. And the Mormons were a surprise. 

I could definitely see myself reading more of these, and it's definitely a worthy book for fans of the classic mystery novel.

Murder on the Orient Express

 Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, 275 pages.

In this (tenth) case of detective Hercule Poirot he is pulled into the investigation of an impossible murder that took place in the train cabin right next to his on the Orient Express. Ratchett, the murdered man, is an American millionaire who had asked Poirot for his protection, believing that someone was planning on killing him. Poirot refused what had sound like a boring case from a man he didn't trust, but now the case is anything but boring. The one who killed him must be one of the thirteen people in the snowbound train, but the evidence keeps getting more puzzling.

I've never actually read an Agatha Christie novel before, and I thought it was finally time to remedy that. I was intrigued by the premise of this one (although I had had the ending spoiled for me), and so decided to jump right into the middle. It was a cool mystery, and I can definitely see why people still read Christie's books. I love how all of the evidence was laid out at various points, and how the book rewards the reader for being observant and putting together some things a little before they are revealed. I may very well read another of her mysteries. 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, 488 pages

After joining an expedition to hunt down the mysterious "monster" that is destroying ships around the world, Professor Arronax is shocked to discover that the creature is instead a submarine piloted by the unpredictable Captain Nemo, a man who has made the sea his home. When Nemo sinks the ship they're traveling on, Arronax, his servant Conseil, and Canadian whaler Ned Land are taken aboard Nemo's Nautilus, with no hope of escape. But Nemo does give them a grand tour of the world's oceans, exploring and interacting with thousands of sea creatures and geological formations.

Let's face it: everyone is familiar with this book, and anyone who knows anything about it knows there's a giant squid attack (heck, it's depicted on the cover!). But the squid attack happens REALLY late in the book, after way too much scientific description of every type of fish, mollusk, sea mammal, and coral in the ocean. I appreciate the role this book (originally published in 1870) played in introducing people to the oceanic realms, and the role it played in helping establish the science fiction genre. However, I really could have done without the lists of scientific names, as well as the gleeful slaughter of various sea creatures and the depiction of any non-white people as "savages." So this one gets a "meh" from me.

Dracula

 Dracula by Bram Stoker, 399 pages.

I would say that nobody needs me to summarize the plot of a hundred year old novel, but I was surprised to realize when I started it that Dracula himself is pretty much the only part of this book to have bled into the public imagination, and almost all of the plot was a surprise to me. 

I should also probably address before my review that I read this book in a very weird way. Although I did read the whole text, I did so by having it emailed to me chronologically on the dates that correspond to the dates on the letters and journal entries in the novel (which takes about six months).

I really enjoyed this novel! I thought it was genuinely spooky, and it did some really interesting things thematically. I really liked the characters, and definitely got invested in some of the relationships. I also now feel informed enough to properly appreciate how weird many adaptation choices are (Van Helsing was EXTREMELY different from what I was expecting).

Note: If you are also interested in reading this classic novel in easily digestible chunks (and in a way that several times really manages no hammer home the dread of waiting) I highly recommend Dracula Daily, which was the service I used. It just ended for this go round, but it will start up again next May, and you can always subscribe to their emails now.

The Odyssey

 The Odyssey by Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, 582 pages.

I don't feel any great need to give a long summary of a story that is several thousands of years old. Odysseus has a hard time getting home after the Trojan War, and once he does he has more trouble there. What I will say is that this is a very good translation. Wilson does an excellent job interrogating the conventions of translating the Odyssey and examining whether or not they actually contribute to a better translation of the original story. This results, most notably, in a text written in much more accessible language, as well as grappling more directly with all of the slavery in this book. I absolutely recommend reading her essays in the introduction, which I read mostly after I finished the main text of the book, but which could also be valuable if you read them before. I believe Emily Wilson is working on a translation of the Iliad right now, and I definitely plan to pick that one up when it's done.

The Eyre Affair

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, 374 pages

Thursday Next is a literary detective for SpecOps, the special branch of the police that handles those things that can't quite be handled by the regular police force. For the most part, she spends her time authenticating Milton and dealing with overzealous Baconites (the preferred term for those people who staunchly believe that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays, and go door-to-door evangelizing this). But when an original Dickens manuscript is stolen, Thursday suspects that a certain ultimate-evil criminal is behind the theft and is put on the case.

I can't even count the number of times I've read this ridiculously clever and funny book. Filled with wordplay, pointed commentary about both classic literature and pop culture, and tons of creative oddness (A secret society dedicated to catching asteroids! Re-engineered extinct species as pets! Streetfighting gangs of surrealists and post-modernists! A new religion that worships the GSD, the Global Standard Deity!), I find something new to enjoy every time I read it. If you've spent more than 10 minutes discussing books with me any time in the last 15 years, I've probably recommended this book and its series at least twice. So I'll do it again: read this book. It's awesome.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll  116 pp.

This is one of my favorite books from childhood and I had the fun of portraying the Duchess in a somewhat modernized production of the play back in the dark ages when I was in high school. It's one I drag out every few years just for the enjoyment of the absurd characters and goings on. This time I listened to an audiobook version read by Scarlett Johansson. I quite wish this version had included Alice Through the Looking Glass as that contains the parts I like best in the Alice adventures. However, Johansson does a good job of narration.

Red Queen

Red Queen by Christina Henry (2016). 291 pages.

Red Queen continues where Alice left off. Alice and Hatcher leave the clutches of the Old City to find Hatcher's long lost daughter. They look forward to the idyll of the verdant fields beyond the city, but find only ash and desert...a land destroyed not by wildfire, but some dangerous power. As they head deeper into this ravaged land, they learn of the hold the White Queen has over it and that they've unwittingly become the pawns in her cruel game against the Black King. The only way out may be to ally with the Red Queen, whose magic runs deep and dark.

I must admit that I did not like this sequel nearly as much as its predecessor...I think, in part, because it focused too much on a romance between Alice and Hatcher that felt a bit too teen angsty and forced. It took me out of the action and terror that I so enjoyed from the first novel. Additionally, it's been a long time since I've read Through the Looking-Glass, and I've read that fewer times than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, so it was more difficult to make the connections between the stories (that's on me). I also think that Alice was such a twist on the original that perhaps the shock value wasn't there for me. That said, I did enjoy watching Alice come a bit more into her own in this book, and I'm looking forward the upcoming collection of novellas set in this universe as well as Henry's other twisted reimaginings of classic children's tales.

Alice

Alice by Christina Henry (2015). 291 pages.

This is not the wonderland you remember. Alice has resided in a mental hospital for the past ten years, abandoned by her family after returning from a mysterious absence from which she can only remember a man with long ears and a knife. When a fire takes hold of the building, Alice escapes with the madman Hatcher into the sour, cruel, and illegal magic of the Old City. They are thrown into a harrowing spiral of events to discover the truth behind what they've tried to forget and what that means for who they are now.

Wow! Alice was unforgettable. I've been so curious to read this, but I put it off for years because of my particular allegiance to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and knowing that it was a dark fantasy/horror twist on the classic scared me a bit (that genre is usually not my cup of tea). However, I could not tear myself away and devoured the book in a day. It is grim and violent (filled with too many trigger warnings to count), but also compelling--to grow with Alice and Hatcher throughout the course of events, to watch Alice become a real badass, and, as a reader, to fit this interpretation into its inspiration like a strange puzzle piece. Many retellings of classics/fairy tales fall flat for me when they stick too close to the original, but I found that Alice was wildly creative and it worked. It made me want to reread the originial and then dive into this once more.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Herman Melville's Moby Dick / Chaboute, 256 pgs.

This graphic novel of Moby Dick is fabulous.  The story is faithful to the original book although somewhat abridged.  The illustrations of the characters look exactly how I imagined them.  I have to give props Queequeg especially.  The whale and the hunt are particularly exciting to read.  Not as good as Melville's original but a wonderful supplement.