Category: books

As part of my ongoing informal free public-domain classic literature self-education program, I decided to tackle the work of Henry James. I chose 2 novellas and 7 novels and read them in chronological order.

• 1878 – Daisy Miller (novella)
• 1880 – Washington Square
• 1881 – The Portrait of a Lady
• 1886 – The Bostonians
• 1897 – What Maisie Knew
• 1898 – The Turn of the Screw (novella)
• 1902 – The Wings of the Dove
• 1903 – The Ambassadors
• 1904 – The Golden Bowl

I decided to drop the last two; you’ll see why. Below are my thoughts on the others, starting from the most recently read novel, The Wings of the Dove.

Continue reading Selected works of Henry James

This work, published in 1722 and attributed to Daniel Defoe but set in 1600s England with interludes in Virginia, is a fictional first-person account of the life of the narrator, “Moll Flanders” (not her real name), the daughter of a Newgate prisoner. Although she is penniless as a child, she manages to give herself the appearance of a gentlewoman. Her fortunes and her identity pass through a number of transformations during the course of her life, which is marred by a series of deceptions and misdeeds, which she eventually comes to repent of.

Wikipedia says this novel, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (which I enjoyed very much), is an example of “spiritual autobiography.”

See below for what I thought. (I am not a fan.)

Continue reading Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

When and Why I Read Moll Flanders

Another famous book by the author of Robinson Crusoe, which I enjoyed.

Genre: English literature
Date started / date finished: 09-Jun-25 to 15-Jun-25
Length: 307 pages
Originally published in: 1722/1995/2023
Source link: Moll Flanders

Wikipedia says, “Blackmore considered The Maid of Sker to be his best novel.” That’s why I read it. But I liked Lorna Doone much better.

(I guess readers can’t be expected to agree with authors about their work; Mark Twain liked Joan of Arc best of his novels, whereas I preferred Connecticut Yankee; E.M. Forster liked The Longest Journey best of all his novels, whereas I preferred A Room with a View.)

This 213,414-word novel is supposedly about a two-year-old high-born girl who mysteriously washes up alone in a boat on the coast of a farm called Sker. However, in actual fact, the book is about the narrator, an old Welsh fisherman and sailor, and could more accurately have been titled David Llewellyn of Newton-Nottage. Old Davy finds the child, who calls herself Bardie, in the summer of 1782, but the tale spans eighteen years, and Davy has spent most of them far away from Bardie. Large swaths of the book are devoted to Davy’s adventures in Devon, which eventually shed some light on Bardie’s origins—but large swaths of the book are also devoted to his adventures in the navy, which do not.

As a narrator, Old Davy suffers greatly in comparison to John Ridd, the narrator of Lorna Doone. Both men profess a commitment to honesty, but Old Davy not only exaggerates (particularly about himself, while pretending to be modest), he lies, and calls his rationalizations honesty! Early on in the novel, he describes to the reader how he tricks people into buying fish he caught that aren’t fresh anymore. That’s disgusting to me for three reasons: I don’t eat fish at all because I don’t like the taste; rotting fish don’t taste good even to people who normally like fish; habitually lying to and running from your customers is the opposite of admirable. He also poaches, smuggles, and simultaneously collects both a pension and a salary from the government. The louder he says he’s not doing something, the more certain you can be that he is (like the duck in the comic at this link). Davy is intended to be funny, and to an extent, he is. But to have this weasely, money-grubbing, boastful man conveying the story is intermittently quite irksome, especially when he says nothing whatsoever related to the maid of Sker for many pages at a time—and all the more when I already read a book by the same author that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Still, the book is a kind of unusually cheerful mystery; everything works out all right in the end, and it was entertaining enough to keep me interested along the way. The story’s origin as a serial publication probably explains the plot tangents.

See below for passages that illustrate the humor of Old Davy.

Continue reading The Maid of Sker by R. D. Blackmore

When and Why I Read The Maid of Sker

I'm reading this because I enjoyed Lorna Doone, by the same author.

Genre: English literature
Date started / date finished: 03-May-25 to 29-May-25
Length: 474 pages
Originally published in: 1872/2014/2024
Source link: The Maid of Sker

Wikipedia says: “Twain was aware of his reputation as a comic writer and he asked that each installment appear anonymously so that readers would treat it seriously.”

This is, indeed, a serious book. It claims to be a translation, but it is historical fiction. My understanding is that the trial of Joan of Arc was so well documented that it gives a surprisingly good picture of life in 1400s France, and this extensive documentation served as the basis for Twain’s novel.

Twain’s narrator (speaking for Twain) says:

“I give you my honor now that I am not going to distort or discolor the facts of this miserable trial. No, I will give them to you honestly, detail by detail, just as Manchon and I set them down daily in the official record of the court, and just as one may read them in the printed histories. There will be only this difference: that in talking familiarly with you, I shall use my right to comment upon the proceedings and explain them as I go along, so that you can understand them better; also, I shall throw in trifles which came under our eyes and have a certain interest for you and me, but were not important enough to go into the official record.”

I misunderstood the title. I thought the title was THE Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which would have made it a memoir told from her point of view. But it’s not, as I learned upon beginning to read the book. It’s someone else’s personal recollections. My bad. It makes much more sense for the story to be told by someone close to her who survived her martyrdom, rather than for the story to be told by Joan herself, even given that it’s a novel.

I don’t think it works as a novel, though, to be frank. Certainly it’s not my favorite Twain novel, though he said it’s his favorite. I liked A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court better than this one. Quite possibly I liked all the books of his that I’ve read better than this one. Why is that?

Continue reading Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

When and Why I Read Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

This is... a historical/biographical novel that pretends to be a translation of a memoir, written by a comedian.

Genre: American literature
Date started / date finished: 17-Apr-25 to 02-May-25
Length: 337 pages
Originally published in: 1896/2004/2021
Source link: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc