Classics > C Classics

Advantages: one of the gems of English literature, short
Disadvantages: none

This novella has one of the highest ratio of meaning per page, the text is only 106 pages long, yet you can get interpretations which are many times longer than the original! Let's look closely at the text without referring to loads of background information and see if we can find out what it is about. Like many novellas (a piece of literature longer than a short-story but shorter than a novel) 'Heart of Darkness' has a frame, in fact it has two ...
...on a pleasure ship lying at anchor in the mouth of the Thames who listens, together with some other men, to Marlow whose business on board isn't quite clear talking about his time as the captain of a steamer on a river in Africa. The function of a frame is twofold: on the one hand the story seems more credible if there's a source that vouches for its being true, on the other hand the frame creates a distance between the reader and what is told, the ... Read review

Advantages: The first and greatest of English detective novels
Disadvantages: nothing

...unusual, but appropriate, manner, reflecting the episodic nature of the story. Three actors present the story in parts, taking on separate first-person accounts of events. All the voices are convincing, cultured British intonations describing the events surrounding the apparent theft of the Moonstone diamond from a country mansion. Each voice shades the various characters featured within the particular parts, just as the narrative offers characterizations ... Read review

Advantages: Compelling and easy to read
Disadvantages: Often abridged or without original illustrations these days.

Alice in Wonderland Here we meet Alice by a river with her older sister in the summer, bored she notices a rabit walking on it's hind legs wearing a waistcoat and looking at a pocket watch muttering he is late. he drops a glove and anxious to help Alice chases him with it and falls down a rabbit hole, where she is transported into a starnge new world. She meets all sorts of strange characters, the most memorable probably being the Mad Hatter, The ...
...and The Queen of Hearts, who ironically seems to have none. She takes part in tea parties, tries to sooth a screaming pig, shrinks then becomes a giant then shrinks back again, and has to play croguet with a flamingo and hedgehogs amongst other bizarre activities. I can read this book over and over again, there are many layers to it and you can appreciate it all over again as an adult on another more psychadelic level, it's deffinately one of my ... Read review

Advantages: Easy to read…
Disadvantages: …nonsense.

...A WOMAN OF PLEASURE (or) FANNY HILL (1748) By John Cleland (1710-1789) The aim of writing this novel was, according to John Cleland, to present pornography without a single “taboo” word. The modern reader will “search in vain for four-letter words,” as I read in one of the introductions to the book. This is the story of a young orphan girl, called Francis (or Fanny) Hill, who works in prostitution and although she meets the love of her life, she ...
...she actually has sex with Fanny and makes her orgasm. Later on towards the end of the novel, Francis peeps at two men out of curiosity and she realizes that they are having sex. She feels disgusted by this “criminal scene” as she puts it and tries to “raise the house upon them” but she falls and faints. Hypocrisy? No, in fact her relationship with Phoebe, it seems, was not considered “unnatural” –whatever what that may mean– to her in any way. This ... Read review

Advantages: The landscape descriptions; insight into the time and place
Disadvantages: Slow and dull in terms of character and story; got nothing from reading it

****************************************************************** TITLE: Death Comes For the Archbishop RATING: ** AUTHOR: Willa Cather PUBLISHER: Virago Press Ltd. (2006) LENGTH: 320 pp. AVAILABILITY: 6 GBP from Amazon BOOK ISBN: #1844083725 ****************************************************************** INTRODUCTION ****************************************************************** As many of you have been reading my previous reviews ...
...to get my Bachelor’s Degree, which I should be getting in December. I’m taking six online courses this summer, one of them being “The Novel in America Since 1914” which is an upper level English class at the University of Maryland. I’ll be honest with you all in that I very much prefer British literature than American, and thus some of my favorite books are “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “A Room of One’s Own.” This will be my ... Read review