Tarzan, like Superman, has always existed. At least, that’s how it feels to me… there was never a time in my life when Tarzan didn’t already exist. But once upon a time, someone imagined him, and gave him life on paper. More than a hundred years later, he lives on, though his creator is long gone. It was a strange experience to read the original Tarzan story.
Tag: public domain ebooks
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He apparently jotted down some philosophical thoughts in a diary as he was marching around on various military campaigns, and these fragmentary thoughts form part of the corpus of texts associated with stoicism, an ancient school of thought that encourages people to take life as it comes, good or bad.
The book is not coherent, and there’s a lot of repetition. It wasn’t written as a thoughtfully organized presentation designed to be consumed by others. And my understanding is that it’s not even complete. Bits of text are lost because the source is old and “corrupt”.
If you want to understand stoicism, I think it’s probably better to read some modern synthesis before or after reading old source texts. Still, I think it’s worth reading source texts like this one, because whoever writes the synthesis is going to put their own spin on whatever was “meant” by the original authors; but the same thing can be said for any English translation! I think it must be impossible to translate philosophy without making some biased assumptions about the author’s intended meaning. Maybe all we can really wrap our heads around is what people today construe stoicism to be. We just have to guess at what it used to be originally; and there may never have been a consensus among thinkers even then.
So anyway, what are some of the ideas to be found in the text?
Continue reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Selected works of Henry James
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 Ambassadors1904 – 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.
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
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.)
The Maid of Sker by R. D. Blackmore
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.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
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
Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore
This historical novel, published in 1869 and set in the late 1600s, is satisfyingly long, entertaining and suspenseful, and thoroughly wholesome.
I love the narrator, John. He feels really honest and solid. But he’s not dumb, even though he says people say he’s slow. As a narrator, he’s full of observations about people and circumstances, and a bit of poetry, too. Interestingly, he still counts as an unreliable narrator! I usually don’t like those. But he’s not unreliable very often. I noticed it only in some scenes where the author indirectly suggests that a woman loves him but that he hasn’t noticed.
It’s a challenging book from the standpoint of the dialect passages, which you kinda have to squint at, and because there are some old words, or words relating to the country setting, that are unfamiliar even to me, and I read a lot. But these vocabulary-related challenges are welcome, in my view.
I kinda wished I knew more about the historical setting, but actually you don’t need to, because the focus is on the main characters. You don’t really have to care about the other stuff that’s happening.
When John goes off to find a friend of the family in the middle of a small war, I kept thinking it would be great to see a Steven Spielberg movie of the book, like the one he made of War Horse, which has some of the same themes. The movie War Horse was absolutely gorgeous. There have been several TV and film adaptations of Lorna Doone, but I haven’t seen any of them. It probably makes more sense as a TV series, given the length of the story. A movie would have to cut a lot.
See below for some passages that stood out.
Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
This is one of those books where you know what’s going on, but you have to wait a long time for the characters in the story to catch up. Sigh.
The title is the nickname given to a lawyer who settles in a small town but fails to achieve success because the locals think he’s weird. Partly, he is; as a hobby, he takes people’s fingerprints and compares them. The townspeople aren’t as clever as they think they are, so it’s ironic that they give the young lawyer a nickname that disparages his intelligence (see below). But the book isn’t about the lawyer.
The book is about two boys, one “white” and one “black”, who change places, kind of like the boys in The Prince and the Pauper. This time, however, the change is deliberate on the part of the mother of the “black” boy, who swaps him for her employer’s son to give her own son a better life. That doesn’t really turn out well for anyone, except maybe the lawyer; everyone has to admit that his fingerprinting hobby is actually quite useful for identification purposes.
The “I see where this is going” plot made me impatient, and the dishonest mother and her spoiled son are somewhat and very irritating, respectively. However, the setting is interesting; the themes are interesting; the lawyer is interesting; and the dialect dialog is interesting. Moreover, the wry observations in the narration are interesting (see below).
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
I’m gradually learning that Mark Twain is not exactly my cup of tea, but I have to say, this was a fun book.
Most time-travelers try to pretend they fit in and generally avoid introducing anachronisms. Either they’re just there as spectators to soak it all in on the reader’s behalf, or they’re caught up helplessly in large-scale historical events and are simply trying survive while attempting to return to the time and place where they belong—or, likely, both. But not the guy in this book! He remakes the whole world in his own image. And you know what? More power to him. The past is a terrible place.
Soon, I’ll read Ivanhoe and see how Walter Scott depicts Medieval England. Some Googling indicates that it’s not wholly accurate (though it has many accurate details), and that it romanticizes the past, but that not everything is shown in a positive light.
See below for some quotes I pulled out of Connecticut Yankee that I found amusing or insightful (or both).
Continue reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
While I admire the intent of the novel, and enjoyed the story as historical fiction to some extent, the theme of injustice came across as overly didactic—and of course the whole plot relies on the absurd coincidence that there exists a literate pauper who looks like the twin brother of the heir to the throne of Henry VIII.
Still, the story is a powerful reminder that, as they say, The clothes make the man. See below for more thoughts on this theme, and a bit more information on the premise, including a sample of the Shakespearean-esque dialog of the novel.
