Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

It's been a while since I last read a book that was so undone simply by its own popularity.

Stoker relies so strongly on the air of mystery to carry Dracula's experience, and the very fact that this book has become such a pop culture phenomenon completely undoes that aspect of its strength. Everyone reading this book already knows the answers to the most tantalizing questions Stoker poses: they know Dracula is a vampire, they know his castle is supernatural, they know Lucy's odd ailment is due to having her blood sucked. Surely Stoker knew that such mysteries would create fear and unsettlement in his contemporary audiences, but modern readers—long inundated with the Twilights and the Blades and the Interview with the Vampires and the Castlevanias—are already well-informed about (and enamored with) vampirism in action and horror films of various sorts and will be able to pick up on this stuff nearly immediately. This isn't the first time I've considered such a disarmament of a novel's strengths in plotting by pop culture, and such a thing continues to fascinate me.

The book's titular Count Dracula

Regardless of the fact that this novel has been innately spoiled, I was able to appreciate Stoker's careful crafting of the mystery from a more objective point-of-view, and I respect how he pushed his contemporary readers forward through the plot by asking them what, exactly, was going on here. It's skillfully rendered and impeccably paced; drip-feeding new reveals to the reader. But I couldn't help being robbed of this enjoyment by being easily able to guess what was happening, and so the book subjectively loses this core aspect of its quality and renders much of its investigation as much more dry and rote than it should be. These reveals are robbed of their impact and thus the new discoveries of Van Helsing and co. feel more like busywork than like the new and surprising bits of information they ought to be.

Many readers say that Dracula was their introduction to classic literature in general, and to Victorian literature more specifically, and I think it makes a superb bridge into both for the newer reader. Stoker's prose is surprisingly clean and easily readable, yet still aesthetically pleasing. This kind of novel perhaps represents the bridge from the earlier, stuffier, more labyrinthine prose of high Victorian literature into the more easily consumable, yet still pleasing modernist literature I tend to love so much. I like Dickens as much as the next guy, but he does get a bit long in the tongue at times, which often threatens to undo his propensity for sheer prosaic beauty.

Stoker's prose doesn't quite hit Dickensian highs, but it more than gets the job done for me:

There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive. And as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal till I could see in the moonlight the moisture. Then lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited. 

 

Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night. 

 

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing that could pass away. 

I've always been a fan of the epistolary structure, though I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps having everything strictly segregated by chapter appeals to the overly orderly, anal being inside of me. While I enjoy this 'found footage' style of novel, I do have to say that Stoker's use of voice between his viewpoint characters left a lot to be desired for me.

Bram Stoker

The novel begins very enjoyably as we're thrust into Jonathan Harker's view. His voice seems appropriately proper and Victorian, and the mystery we're confronted with is relatively fresh, atmospheric, and intriguing. Harker is somewhat relatable as being a stranger-in-a-strange place. Later in the novel, the reader moves on to the other male characters, such as Sewell, Arthur, and Quincy Morris who seem to share an identically proper, buttoned-up, curiously professional characterization to Harker, despite the new characters being from drastically different places in life; Sewell being a physician, Arthur being Lord Goldalming, and Quincey Morris being from Texas. Surely the last of them, at least, would feel remarkably different? The two female characters of Mina and Lucy suffer similar lack of differentiation—the lines and actions of one would suit the other perfectly. And so the characters felt, in general, unremarkable to me and I did not feel myself empathizing with them, since they did not feel unique to me.

The one character safe from this criticism is, of course, Dr. Van Helsing, our resident kooky mad scientist-type. I found myself picturing him as sort of a Christopher Lloyd type from Back to the Future. An eccentric, friendly quack doctor on whose breadth of knowledge regarding the supernatural you can count. His optimistic, hopeful manner was apparent to me and was a nice change of mouthfeel from the deliberately dark and Gothic touches residing throughout the rest of the story. 

I found his dialogue to be particularly brilliant; I enjoy that you can hear just a touch of Van Helsing's Dutch accent in his dialogue:

It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.

This sort of dialogue crafting is brilliantly subtle—only slight errors here and there—but just deliberate enough to affect the voice of the character. I really enjoyed the dialogue throughout Dracula and found it to be one of Stoker's strengths. He handles others, such as the cockney London working class accent, with similar skill. This is not something common to writers of even the greatest horror literature, so I appreciated it here.

Outside of Van Helsing, of course, I found little to differentiate these characters and thus was forced instead to rely instead on the atmosphere and the norms of Victorian London to carry me along, which, most of the time, was more than enough. Stoker is adept at painting a scene, especially those drenched in Gothic horror tropes, and I enjoyed the novel mostly just for that.

So, while I found some of Dracula to be wanting, I did like a lot of it, and I believe its structure and the ease at which its prose can be read makes it a fantastic introduction both to Victorian literature and to classic literature in general. I'll likely recommend it to new readers of the classics quite regularly from here on out, but its flaws keep it from sitting the pantheon next to my very favorite novels.

It's just a shame that so much of Dracula happens to be undone by its own popularity. But it's hard to hold that against it.

⭐⭐⭐

Animal Farm (1944) by George Orwell

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly.

As a traditional liberal I'm not above admitting that my enjoyment of this book is carried by a healthy amount of confirmation bias. That admittance aside, I found Orwell's blatantly allegorical and satirical effort impossible to put down.

Animal Farm doesn't overstay its welcome, which is good; its 'gimmick' would have worn itself out before too long had the pagecount been heftier. More than anything, it's thoroughly amusing. The setting and characters are immediately silly and thus disarming, allowing for the later events of the story to be that much more affecting. This is not a book which has any pretension towards profundity; it's not all that deep and doesn't spend much time ruminating on the ideas its lambasting. Rather, it reads angrily; with a thoroughly frustrated air to me. Orwell's distaste for the Soviet Union at a time when his government had been somewhat unperturbed by Stalin's actions is palpable, and reading between Animal Farm's lines in this fashion was an added layer of entertainment for me. Orwell succeeds in transferring his bitter opposition to the grinding, cancerous, malformed wheel of Stalinism and puts together an affecting, cautionary tale on revolution—despite its glossy layer of silly satire. I had myself fully prepared for Orwell's satire and was thus caught off-guard by just how affecting the impact of the story's climax was.

Orwell's ever a master satirist, but, even more deeply, he also regularly succeeds at making the emotional impact of his storytelling resonate with his readers. Animal Farm's tight, pacey narrative and initially disarming silliness which gives way to emotional, affecting storytelling make it worth a read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Romeo and Juliet (1595) by William Shakespeare

Romeo climbs Juliet's balcony in the play's iconic scene

I do have some recollection of reading the famous play Romeo and Juliet in high school, as most Americans do. We even took a field trip to see it performed live. However, like most students of teen age, I paid the great work little respect and thus recall almost none of my previous read, nor the experience of seeing the play itself, and thus was able to experience it again with fresher eyes.

I've always viewed Shakespeare's work as being rather stuffy and impenetrable. Probably this is due to the early modern English language in which his plays are written. Thankfully, I thoroughly destroyed this barrier in the past with a complete reading of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. No work of early modern English will ever intimidate me after completing such a slog as that, and I was able to experience Romeo and Juliet in a far more natural manner than I was probably ever able to while studying it in school.

Shakespeare's actually quite different from my previous view of him. The early pages of Romeo and Juliet left me staggered not from his poetic, creative, beautiful dialogue (although it does feature plenty of that), but with the experience of reading Romeo and Mercutio's sharp, barb-like dialogue between one another and pausing, dumbstruck, with the thought of: "Hold on a second... Was that a dick joke? In Shakespeare!?"

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Yes, yes it was. It was a dick joke. There are plenty of vagina jokes, too!

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry 

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Surprisingly (at least to me—a Shakespearean neophyte), various clever, bawdy references are peppered throughout.

Reading such dialogue is amusing, mostly due to my previous notion that Shakespeare's work was utterly proper and academic, but also due to the everlasting notion that the generations before ours were always somehow better than us; more polite, more proper, more civilized. And it's nice to be reminded so often while reading literature that that's certainly not the case. That it never was. That even highly educated nobility, decked out in their expensive, colorful livery, were still shamelessly making dick jokes with their pals as they drank at a party.

And so I learned that Romeo and Juliet often reads as a modern romantic comedy. The first half of the play is strikingly casual, entertaining, and humorous. I swept through its pages with relative ease compared to how challenging I used to find his work—I attempted to read Macbeth several years ago and failed inside the first dozen pages. I can only imagine that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have greatly enjoyed such levity.

This kind of light, comic romance would be fully disarming to one who was not already aware of the play's conclusion. My reading of the play undoubtedly suffered at the spoiling of this reveal, as I expect most readers' must be. With hindsight, I came to admire the deftness with which Shakespeare sets up the tragic ending. The play's paciness also helps this along, as it moves quickly from scene to scene and wastes little time with unnecessary diversion.



As I read, I grew to respect Shakespeare not as some high-minded artist, but rather as an exceptional entertainer. Of course, some of this is lost on us modern day readers, as there's a bit of a time barrier. But I still enjoyed Romeo and Juliet far more than I expected to. If I had to level a criticism at the play, it would probably fall more on the medium with which I experienced it rather than any of the text itself. Reading a play in written form is always going to fall short of the full experience of seeing it live, and I found myself craving some exposition to help illustrate the scene for me; something which I would not have felt had I been witnessing the stage production rather than reading it.

Regardless; a worthwhile experience. And I look forward to reading more Shakespeare soon.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Pillars of the Earth (1989) by Ken Follett

Pillars succeeds mostly on its strong re-creation of the time period. British history is so populated by sheer event that it's almost impossible to pick a single time period in the past thousand years and have it not offer a compelling setting.

Follett is a strong writer of historical fiction. His setting rings true and offers an ample amount of historical education in addition to the page-turning quality of his narrative. Historical fiction has always been partly of an educational nature to me; something akin to a textbook repurposed into a more easily consumable morsel, and Pillars succeeds in this.

The story starts strongly and offers an ample bevy of narrative hooks; Tom Builder's struggle to provide for his family during a time of civil strife is something nearly every adult is able to identify with, and Prior Phillip representing the enlightened clergyman is a nice change from the somewhat more common cliche of the manipulative, greedy character (almost always a Bishop or Pope) we tend to see in depictions of dark age priests in contemporary historical fiction. And intelligent characters are always enjoyable to read, in which we have Jack Jackson to float our leaky, dirty twelfth-century boat.

However not all of the characters succeed. Despite Jack's admirable intelligence and his victimhood to bullying at the hands of his step-brother, I actually found him somewhat more empty than I had wished for. He's easy to root for, but I had trouble identifying with his character. Follett's knowledge of architecture is obvious, but the use of so much jargon was above my understanding at times, and I think Jack's character relies strongly on his infatuation for mathematics, art, and architecture, which was something I was unable to grasp at times.

Stronger offenders, though, were the villains of the story. William Hamleigh was such an obvious target for the reader's hatred, but I found most of his sadism utterly unrelatable, and found his narration rather flimsy and insincere as a result. There's nothing William really wants or is driven by; he seems to exist just to cause suffering for others. I believe there was room for more characterization in his mother, too, who seems the most compelling of the bunch of villains we have, but so little time is spent with her and she remains not much more than an interesting but thin force to the narrative. Ditto to Bishop Waleran, who, with just a bit of foundation in the form of past motivation peppered through the narrative, could have accomplished more than just being the nakedly ambitious clergyman.

Pillars is an enjoyable book, and it offered a nice break to some of the denser, more difficult literature I've been attempting to tackle lately. And it's a really solid example of historical fiction. But it's not one of my favorites as it feels rather thin in certain areas, despite its paciness and its strong narrative hooks.

⭐⭐⭐

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce

Penguin's beautiful Deluxe Edition of Portrait. Perhaps my favorite paperback on my shelves.

Joyce's prose is unbelievably, otherworldly gorgeous.

It's the primary reason I love his work so much. There's the stuff you've got to carve through if you're as basic a reader as myself—the late 19th century Irish politics, the nearly untranslatable contemporary slang that requires reference for a modern reader to understand, transitions into changes in voice and mode that often make it a bit difficult to follow the narrative. But then Joyce hits you with a paragraph of some of the most beautiful prose you've ever read, and it's instantly your favorite thing again:

As he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment. 

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement.

Joyce as a young man

I read recently that a reviewer whom I respect refuses to consider any prose 'purple'. Perhaps I'm learning why this is, firsthand, as I read through Portrait. A lot of Joyce's work here could be considered purple. It's incredibly ornate, and it's lavishness is possibly overdone. The more I read, the more I considered that this was deliberate. Perhaps Joyce was attempting to depict a young, talented thinker's tendency to try too hard, and maybe the protagonist and titular Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, lacks reservation in the earlier chapters and Joyce's prose strives to depict this overzealousness. If so, then more the fool I, because I greatly enjoyed it nonetheless and did not find it to be too fatty or too flashy for my tastes, which are actually typically more reserved.

One of my favorite early episodes had to do with the timidity with which Stephen approached his infatuation with his muse. As I was reading along I suddenly realized Stephen's internal monologue was now focused on an object of affection. I didn't recall said object being introduced, so I backtracked to see if I had somehow missed something. But I hadn't—Dedalus first approaches the thought of romantic love via his admiration of Dumas' famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo, and the titular count's undying love for Mercedes. This soon morphs into Stephen's infatuation with an unnamed character—something he touches on regularly in the following pages throughout the first half, but rarely ever outright, or in a concrete way. I found it a novel way of displaying the protagonist's fear of confronting his own emotions in any way other than a roundabout one. He looms on the periphery of his feelings and touches them briefly, but rarely indulges in them directly. It's a bit of tantalization by Joyce, the impact of which is helped strongly along by Joyce's sheer, beautiful prose, which imparts his character's strong feelings in a way with which we are able to viscerally empathize.

Such instances of Joyce's artful, beautiful prose carry the book. It's probably, page by page, the single most beautiful book I've ever read. I've got dozens of highlights proving that statement. But as always with Joyce, you've got to take the good with the bad. I understand Catholic guilt occupies a huge chunk of Joyce's character, but do I really need dozens of detailed pages describing, in depth, the tortures of hell?

The ebb and flow between Irish politics, drop-dead gorgeous inner monologue, and Catholic dogma seems paced fairly well, though. The things that didn't appeal to me didn't drag down my overall experience of the book, and I expect as time passes I'll think more and more highly of it—something similar as to what happened with my memory of Dubliners. The drier, more specific portions of the text seem smaller and smaller in the rearview, and the examples of memorable, songlike prose grow all the larger with each recollection.

I didn't find Portrait to be a difficult read, per se, but it is a substantially different read than many other books—even those of the same era by Joyce contemporaries such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Joyce switches gears quite frequently and often without warning, but the quick cuts often feel more smooth than abrupt. I'm not sure why this is... Probably it has something to do with how surreal, introspective, and dreamlike the narrative tends to turn towards while Joyce narrates for us Dedalus' inner thoughts and feels. Thus reading Portrait feels more like experiencing various vignettes into the life of Dedalus, which jump forwards through time without any prefacing or preparation, and change smoothly into different styles. Joyce takes us from a cloudy, ambiguous outpouring of pure emotion and religious epiphany on the part of Dedalus' inner narrative, into an actual concrete, religious sermon delivered by a priest, and then the narrative changes to follow him in a more direct, traditional manner as he seeks to confess his sins. Normally this is not something I'd find interesting, but the way in which Joyce proceeds through different modes keeps it altogether fresh. And, as always, it's all beautifully written in his enveloping, affecting prose.

There were parts of the novel that seemed to drone on about an intensely philosophical topic—something common to earlier, 19th century literature, which undoubtedly inspired Joyce—and I found certain portions of this more difficult to trudge through. The aforementioned treatise on hell is guilty of this, and later on as Joyce dives headfirst into describing in specific terms the result of Stephen's gorgeously written aesthetic epiphany on the shore. Stephen goes into painstaking detail, depicted in dialogue with his friend Cranly, as to exactly what he considers to be beauty and art, and how he'd like to pursue it. It was all a bit deep and detailed for my common noggin, but this thorough examination gives way to a later discussion in which Stephen comes as close as he does in the entire book to renouncing his religion altogether. He states to Cranly that he has lost his religion, but is not sure that religion itself is not worthwhile—something I have struggled with myself as I've read more and more Christian scripture and literature and dedicated more and more time to understanding the religion and why it moves its followers so. And the ending few pages in which Joyce completely changes his style to first person, stream-of-consciousness, imparted to me that his character, Stephen Dedalus, had finally found his own voice and succeeded in developing into the artist he decided he wished to be.

Perhaps what this book is best at is moving its reader in a subconscious fashion. Joyce's prose somehow instills into you exactly what he's trying to say, without having to say it outright. I've been to some of the most amazing Catholic churches in the world—the colossal St. Peter's, the gracefully aged Santa Maria del Fiore, the famous Notre Dame (before she burned last year), Cordoba's stunning Mosque-Cathedral—but the religion has never resonated particularly strongly with me despite these memorable encounters with its architectural wonders. And though I'm American, I have been to Dublin—it's a fine city. I'd probably go back. But I have no strong love for the place, nor any substantial attachment. And clearly I'm not old enough to have been in school in the late 19th century.

Point being: I have no real understanding of what it is to be an Irish Catholic young man coming of age at the turn of the 20th century, I've never been particularly artistic or concerned with aesthetic beauty. So I have no reason for any of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to resonate with me as strongly as it does. Somehow, regardless of any of that, Joyce has imparted not only the depth of what that entails, but what it feels like on an emotional, spiritual level, through the sheer power of such viscerally affecting prose. I wasn't just told what it was like for Stephen to have a crisis of faith, but was made to feel it through every fiber of my being. Me—a postmodern American atheist. And I grew to love every bit of it, despite never really caring about the subject matter. It was a pretty memorable experience sliding through this novel, swooning at nearly every page, just bathing in the sheer beauty Joyce's prose provides. What a wonderful book.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Oliver Twist (1837) by Charles Dickens

It's difficult rating books like Oliver Twist where I seem to bounce rapidly from really loving it to grinding through, seemingly by the page.

Dickens' writing is gorgeous which makes the majority of the book an enjoyable read. His ability to set a scene is unmatched and his dialogue seems genuine, and the very setting of Victorian London is hard to beat. The credibility rising from Dickens depicting his contemporary setting only makes Oliver Twist stronger.

But the story itself, beyond these aspects, didn't engage me. Dickens' characters are pretty thin and he relies more on his wittiness and his sense of humor to carry them than their caricature-like construction. I felt little attachment to any of them and I didn't feel that any of them really grew as we continued, nor would I really have cared if they had. The only two in the whole thing I ended up rooting for were Nancy and Sikes' poor dog.

It seems like Dickens' own upbringing as a working child gave rise to much of this story. Some of the scene-by-scene events are extremely compelling — such as the Artful Dodger's courtroom shenanigans, which I later read was actually inspired by a real event witnessed by Dickens. But I never felt that the overarching story set enough framework for these moments to really shine. I suspect Dickens had a number of these scenes in mind when writing Oliver Twist, but was not as inspired when laying the foundation in which to place them.

It's worth reading, if only for the caliber of Dickens' prose:

The stars seemed, to the boy’s eyes, farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground, looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still.

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever. The worm does not work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame.

The child was pale and thin; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large and bright. The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs had wasted away, like those of an old man.

Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.

But I've already read better Dickens and I look forward to getting into some of his other, more critically celebrated work now that I've finished Oliver Twist.

⭐⭐⭐

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1896) by Oscar Wilde

Smart, melancholy, and morbidly beautiful. Poetry seems to suit Oscar Wilde so much better than the medium of the novel, where he has to worry about things like voice and characterization. With poetry he can feature his strengths almost exclusively; namely, his ability to put drop-dead gorgeous words in an order that renders them suitably meaningful in absence of a lengthy plot.

Then again, as a poetry neophyte, I'd expect pretty much any competent poetry to look beautiful to my eye. And this certainly is that. I found The Ballad of Reading Gaol beautiful and heartbreaking and even more devastating considering Wilde's own person history. A must-read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad

Less a novella than an essay ruminating upon the man-made hell that was Africa during the colonial era, Heart of Darkness suffers from a lack of readability due to both its framing device and Conrad's seeming dislike of paragraph breaks. Look, I've read some difficult stuff. I'm halfway through the King James Bible, I've read Shakespeare, some Joyce, etc. So although I'm not nearly as well-read as a lot of the more prominent reviewers on this website, I can still stick it out and complete (and enjoy my experience reading) a lot of more difficult literature. Rarely have I ever zoned out and skim, mind wandering, as much as I did in this book.

Conrad can certainly write, as portions of this book are quotable in their beauty, and his foreword in my Penguin Deluxe edition was stunningly well-worded, but it seems to fall apart in most of Heart of Darkness as Marlow, the narrator, drones on endlessly and tends to add details that stall the story more than add depth to the themes he's exploring. I couldn't shake the feeling that this should have been a short story rather than the novella it is. It manages to feel bloated despite its short length.

There are some important ideas discussed here: The evils of colonialism, for sure. And Conrad probably was one of the first to depict it as such. And, perhaps even more compelling since it's as timeless as anything worth writing about: The cruelty men exhibit to their fellow man when allowed to act maliciously without consequence, and the faux justification of such acts provided by faith in racism and misogyny that gave way to the Western pseudosciences of the 19th and 20th century such as eugenics and phrenology. But the process in which Conrad says what he wants to say made it a chore to access his thoughts on such themes and I had to constantly refocus my efforts to the extent that made this 89-page novella feel three times its length. In the end, I abandoned my read at around 50 pages and consulted a summary instead. For shame, I know.

It's extremely rare for me not to put in the effort to finish a piece of classic literature. So rare in fact that I've only ever done it once before, during my read of Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, which I despised. But I just can't do it. I'm sorry, I tried, and Conrad deserves it, but I've failed. I tried in audio form while I work, I tried sitting by the fire with music early in the morning when my brain was fresh, I tried in bed late at night when winding down. But I can't focus my brain enough to trudge through Conrad's bloated, uninteresting prose to get to the good stuff.

I hate calling media "important", but this is probably an important book. It's just too bad it's not more accessible than it is for the mouth-breathers like me. I'm receptive to what it has to teach but I've lost patience for the method in which it does it.

Sorry, Joseph.

⭐

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read Wuthering Heights yet!

Emily Brontë's mise-en-scene and character writing are absolutely brilliant. Reading this book feels like late Winter. It feels like chilled, frosted glass and quiet wind. Like looking at bare tree branches against an overcast sky. And I don't just think that's because I read the book in late winter. The settings of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are cold and bleak. Snow regularly falls and otherwise healthy people get sick and die seemingly at random. There's a blight—perhaps a spiritual one—hanging over this patch of land, it seems, which remains as starkly beautiful year-round as it does cold and bereft of much joy.

Goodreads user Alex put this stunningly well in his own stellar review:

Wuthering Heights takes place in a dark, tiny, parallel place, like one of those rolled-up dimensions string theorists like to talk about. Whether the supernatural exists there is uncertain. The law doesn't, except abstractly. It's a more violent world than ours, more intense.

The characters of the story seem affected by the miasma of this place, both physically and spiritually. They get sick very easily. Most of the time, they recover. Sometimes they don't. Many of the characters die young of illness; something the Brontë family must have experienced even before the entire brood of siblings died themselves before ever reaching age 40.

The dreadful character of the place seems personified by Heathcliff. Having perused the reviews here prior to reading the book, I didn't expect a Romantic story, but I was fully aware of Heathcliff's popular reputation as a dark heartthrob. The frontpage of reviews contains multiple instances of the reviewer swooning over the love of Catherine and Heathcliff, and there are a bevy of Tumblr-esque stylized images featuring Heathcliff's strapping silhouette looking dreamily into the distance on a hill somewhere among the moors of Yorkshire, perhaps dreaming of his lost love Catherine. Behold his manly figure, furrowed brow and all! How pensive and still dedicated to his one true love! It's so totally romantic, especially that time he dug up her partially decomposed corpse and definitely did not have sex with it!

And I simply cannot understand this reputation or this celebration of him as a dark, tortured hunk. Heathcliff is not just an unlikable character. He is most definitely not an anti-hero and I would probably even disagree that he's a Byronic one. He quite noticeably has no redemptive arc because he's so obviously the villain of this story, and the most detestable character I've read since the first time I rekindled my interest in reading by picking up A Song of Ice and Fire after completing university ten years ago. I cannot fathom how anybody reading this book can see him as anything other than an evil, malevolent sociopath, hellbent on making life miserable for everyone around him solely because the goal of which seems to be all that's keeping him going. Heathcliff's so-called romantic feelings for Catherine are not a sign of his humanity or a small window to his inner tenderness; they are a malformed, grotesque malignancy spewed forth from within an abused little boy who so allowed his hatred and rage to fester they've polluted whatever empathetic humanity must have once been left of his soul. Heathcliff's love for Catherine consistently resembles more an unhinged obsession than well-wishing affection. Catherine chooses to reciprocate his affection (though never to the extent of Heathcliff's), famously quipping:

"I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same".

And I fail to find the romance within this quote, seeing instead the glaring narcissism of a woman who can only find it in herself to love this man because he so resembles her own qualities. Consider the course of action Heathcliff might have taken had Catherine not happened to reciprocate this attachment. My expectation would be something along the lines of Persephone and Hades, or perhaps Jeffrey Dahmer. "Stalker" would not even begin to describe a Heathcliff scorned.

The many revolting actions taken by Heathcliff can't really be cataloged simply because there are so many of them that regularly occur. There are the minor things, such as hanging a dog from a fencepost, and there are the major things, such as leaving his own son isolated in the cold garret until he literally dies. But nothing so repulsed me as his treatment of Hareton. His clear (and I believe this is stated outright by the character, though I failed to make a note of it during my read and cannot locate it now) goal is to create in Hareton another version of himself; a young man so abused his wrath consumes him and rends his potential to nothing but more wrath and violence. Heathcliff does this in order to feed his grudge and spite Hareton's father Hindley, who, being physically and mentally abusive, was the cause of so much of Heathcliff's own misery as a child; what essentially has made Heathcliff into the monster he has become. Heathcliff clearly states that he is able to see Hareton's vast potential as a kind, (initially) intelligent, and physically strong young boy and resolves to snuff it out, refusing to allow the boy to grow intellectually. He doesn't permit him to learn to read, become educated, or even learn a trade, instead reducing him to an illiterate farmhand who can barely speak and can do only unskilled manual labor. Cathy the Younger later comments that Hareton is not much more than a dog, as when he is not at work he merely stares into the fire seemingly without a thought in his head.

Heathcliff's treatment of Hareton was viscerally repulsive to me before I even consciously considered why it should be. After all, Heathcliff is no stranger to mistreating the other characters of this book. He constantly abuses them verbally, he physically assaults them and nearly murders both Hindley (by stabbing him and kicking his unconscious body) and Isabella (by throwing the knife at her and nearly cutting her throat as she flees Wuthering Heights). He abuses and kills animals. He is the indirect cause of the death of two characters (Hindley, by studiously exacerbating his drinking and gambling problems, and the aforementioned Linton, by isolating him to his room and refusing to send for a doctor when he becomes ill). So we've already been well acquainted and even somewhat desensitized to Heathcliff's heinous acts by the time his abuse of Hareton occurs. But this deliberate neglect of Hareton snuck into the backdoor and punished my spirit and made it quantifiably more difficult for me to read this book: I don't usually take 2 full weeks to read a ~300 page novel, but I needed regular breaks from it's bleakness.

I think what bothers me so much about Heathcliff's treatment of Hareton isn't just a spiteful act against his deceased father, it's the complete and deliberate snuffing out of a human being's potential. Hareton is a living abortion, a stunted, grotesque, shambling thing nobody wants and everybody hates. Heathcliff aborts his potential to affect the world as a human being, preferring to render the endless potential of our race into a living death. He destroys the best of us for nearly no practical reason; only to dishonor the memory of a long dead man who Heathcliff has already taken everything from. Heathcliff gains no real significant satisfaction from this that I can see. He executes such a heinous crime because—hey, why not? Another way to put a black mark on Hindley. It's not even the icing on the cake, it's a sprinkle. And that makes such a crime even worse.

Hareton knows he is being intellectually and spiritually stunted; made into a brute who lacks even basic humanity. But perhaps he lacks the intellectual wherewithall to fully grasp the crime being committed against him. It's the complete removal of all that he could possibly be, the crushing of his spirit and the denial of the means with which he could attain a fruitful life. He exists from day-to-day as a specter, an empty husk with no purpose, a sad bastardization of what life represents. His life is meaningless and the tools with which he could find a meaning for it are ripped away from him by force. It would be better just to kill him outright, for in this way he is a trophy in Heathcliff's house, a rotting signpost of Heathcliff's victory over his father and a living, breathing insult to him.

The wrath and revenge of wronged individuals spread throughout the characters of this story like a plague. Heathcliff, the blast radius of the bomb set off by Hindley's abuse, destroys the lives of everyone around him in the most despicable ways possible. And his victims, in their misery, project their vitriol outwardly to others in a cycle of pain, misery, and violence. It's particularly poetic, then, that the character of Hareton turns out to be everything that Heathcliff is not. He is perhaps the most undeservedly abused character in the entire novel (his abuse begins as an infant, when, neglected by his drunken father, he is dropped from a staircase and barely saved from death or crippling injury by Nelly), and he is also the one who shows the most restraint. He proves to the reader and to Heathcliff himself that it is not, in fact, inevitable that any human being as mistreated as Heathcliff would turn out so malevolent. And after 300 pages of misery, of directed violence, hatred, and wrath, Emily Brontë gives us our ray of hope in Pandora's box of horrors. In Hareton she tells us that we have it in us to be more than the sum of our experiences, that we can choose to be good, or at least to strive to be better.

Cathy the Younger is the catalyst to Hareton's salvation. She creates in him the motivation to be better. He picks up books for the first time and painstakingly attempts to teach himself to read, a single letter at a time. Cathy, in her bitterness at Heathcliff's victory and during her miserable isolation at Wuthering Heights, scoffs at Hareton's attempts to read, thereby grievously insulting him where he is most sensitive, and still he refuses to strike out at her verbally or physically when such a reaction has for decades been the norm for every character in this story. Each time this occurs, Nelly comments on Hareton's posture, implying that he's coiled like a viper prepared to strike. His clenched fist, tensed posture, grimace, or raised hand. His initial reaction is the same as Heathcliff's or Hindley's would have been: to physically or emotionally harm his attacker. And yet he restrains himself with great effort and never once does so in the entire story. These are the times in the story when he stands at the threshold to violence and savagery Heathcliff has long since crossed, where the opportunity is there for Hareton to give in to hatred and anger and take his vengeance. As a physically imposing individual he has the power to do so. And he refuses them each time. He is tested, but instead of abusing others, his emotions vent themselves harmlessly in a verbal curse, or an aggressive act against an inanimate object (such as throwing the books into the fire in an expression of his frustration). He's not necessarily kind, but in refusing to take part in the violence, he inadvertently halts the cycle of abuse and revenge at the core of this book.

In doing so, he saves Cathy as well as himself from this cycle: She is already descending into spitefulness and bitterness herself, and she is moved by Hareton's efforts and together they begin to weather the stream of hatred and abuse heaped on them by Heathcliff. It's telling, then, that once this cycle is broken, its progenitor, Heathcliff, is confronted with their lack of malice, and is sapped of his energy seemingly by an apparition, hurries to his demise as he quits eating, wanders the wilderness in the wet and cold, and basically lays down and dies after several days of lacking further will to live. The vengeance propelling him forward for all these years has disappeared, its flame snuffed out by Catherine and Hareton's actions, leaving him without the fuel to continue on his path of destruction. Replacing this is newly budded love between Hareton and Cathy—a love that feels warm, genuine, and organic—which one can assume will now procreate and begin to permeate this setting in the same way Heathcliff's hatred has.

So after nearly an entire story filled to the brim with abuse, hatred, anger, and an unfiltered bleakness streaming off the page and into your brain, Emily Brontë sets us up for this cathartic, hopeful ending that makes the entire journey worthwhile. It's superbly effective, brilliantly executed, and extremely satisfying.

When taking the time to consider the story and write this review what really stands out to me is that despite my hatred of Heathcliff, I never once felt like I couldn't understand why he felt the way he did. While I couldn't relate with his unrepentant cruelty in seeking unending, unsatisfied vengeance, I never felt that I couldn't see why he was pushed that far to begin with. He's warped from very early on in his childhood, experiencing terrible abuse at the hands of Hindley. Such an upbringing couldn't leave someone undamaged, and we're unaware of what horrors could have befallen him before his adoption, when he was wandering the streets as an orphaned child. And therein lies the talent of Emily Brontë in writing these characters. The core arc of Heathcliff's abusive upbringing giving way to his continuation of the cycle in abusing others, and culminating in the breaking of that cycle by the refusal of perhaps the most abused individual in the entire story to damage others in turn is an example of an unbreakable display of empathy and an infallible kindness in the face of focused malevolence. It's brilliant and perfectly executed, and it's accomplished without any of these characters feeling contrived to push the plot.

Ironically given the reputation of the "romance" between Catherine and Heathcliff, one thing that isn't given proper motivation—or even basic detail—is the justification for Heathcliff's love for Catherine. We get Catherine's description of her love for Heathcliff as basically being love for herself ("how can I live without my own soul?" she says, in reference to Heathcliff), which, although narcissistic, is at least a proper motivation that allows us to better know her character. Heathcliff's desire for Catherine gets nothing of the sort, rendering it more a base obsession to us than anything else. What, in all their time spent together as youths, drew him to her? We're never told by him, and considering his negative aura I'm as apt to believe it originated not from pure, altruistic love, but from more nefarious origins. Perhaps Catherine's specter has grown in his head and morphed into something different than what it was when she was alive. Perhaps he once saw her as his means of entering properly into the family that adopted him, and, robbed of that course of action, sought to destroy the family instead.

It's possible the absence of a concrete root for Heathcliff's love for Catherine is intentional, and Brontë wants us to question whether he's simply obsessed with her and using his loss of her as a justification for all his horrid acts rather than honestly in love with her. Either way, the ambiguity worked greatly for me and added depth to the story rather than detracted from its genuineness, though such a lack of substance leaves me unable to understand the great admiration for Heathcliff by fans of this work. Is it really so attractive to be mindlessly, harmfully obsessed with a person? Is it even admirable? Because that's all Heathcliff is: bare obsession without any logical guidance or reason. Anything else is a projection made by the reader. It's like asking your significant other why they love you, and them not being able to come up with a valid a reason for it, yet you're sure they'd run through a fire for you. Something is missing there, and I'm not willing to give such a malicious character as Healthcliff the benefit of the doubt. I wonder why others do.

This is such a phenomenal book that I can't really criticize it beyond nitpicking Joseph's nearly unreadable dialect (it reads as if it were an American trying to imitate a Yorkshire accent aloud) or the book's framing devices and character naming conventions making the story difficult to follow. Otherwise I loved the bleak, cold atmosphere that oozes from Wuthering Heights. Its characters are so well-written they seem like real human beings interacting with one another. Whenever I couldn't immediately empathize with a character, I found that I could soon learn to by recalling their personal history.

It's amusing that Emily Brontë, a delicate woman with a contemporary reputation for being extremely soft-spoken and gentle, and a lover of animals and nature, was able to find it in herself to write about such a relentlessly dark, life-destroying place populated by such horrible people. I suppose we all have our dark side, it's just unfortunate that all of us aren't capable of channeling it into a masterpiece of character-driven literary drama that takes place in one of the most memorable settings I've ever read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

“I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same;”

“Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever: your veins are full of ice-water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”

Next morning—bright and cheerful out of doors—stole softened in through the blinds of the silent room, and suffused the couch and its occupant with a mellow, tender glow. Edgar Linton had his head laid on the pillow, and his eyes shut. His young and fair features were almost as deathlike as those of the form beside him, and almost as fixed: but his was the hush of exhausted anguish, and hers of perfect peace.

The little wretch had done her utmost to hurt her cousin’s sensitive though uncultivated feelings, and a physical argument was the only mode he had of balancing the account, and repaying its effects on the inflictor. He afterwards gathered the books and hurled them on the fire. I read in his countenance what anguish it was to offer that sacrifice to spleen. I fancied that as they consumed, he recalled the pleasure they had already imparted, and the triumph and ever-increasing pleasure he had anticipated from them; and I fancied I guessed the incitement to his secret studies also. He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one and winning him to the other, his endeavours to raise himself had produced just the contrary result.

The two new friends established themselves in the house during his absence; where I heard Hareton sternly check his cousin, on her offering a revelation of her father-in-law’s conduct to his father. He said he wouldn’t suffer a word to be uttered in his disparagement: if he were the devil, it didn’t signify; he would stand by him; and he’d rather she would abuse himself, as she used to, than begin on Mr. Heathcliff.

“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, #1) by Arthur Conan Doyle

I'm very much a fan of Holmes in the short story format and I can see why it's classically been the most popular format for the stories.

Doyle does masterly work in minimal pages in introducing the character of Irene Adler, whom I find to be equal to Holmes and Watson and hope to see much more of in future stories. Further, I enjoyed the King quite a bit despite his small screen time. Doyle has a knack for writing entertaining characters.

Doyle captures the details of Victorian London as well as ever, adding just enough detail to intrigue readers nearly 150 years after it was produced. The loafers scuffling about one another to try and earn a copper for opening a rich woman's cab door, the description of the more quiet streets of London after the sun has set, etc. Surely his goal was not to transport us backwards to his time so skillfully, since he was writing for a contemporary London audience, so it's strange how well A Scandal in Bohemia accomplishes this.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Sign of Four (1890) (Sherlock Holmes, #2) by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Holmes stories are surprisingly timeless; one might be shocked at how modern many of the characters and stories are. Holmes, as a character, will never go out of style. He's the quintessential mad scientist type; drug-addicted, uneven in social circumstances, and deeply brilliant on the topics which affect his chosen vocation while remaining ignorant on those that do not. Watson is not the "sidekick" he's so often depicted as, but more an interested bystander with his own goals and desires who becomes friends with his roommate, Holmes, and tags along. He's a protege only in that he's interested in Holmes' activities, not in that he has any real wish to train under Holmes or follow in his footsteps. You get the sense that, despite his age, he's already had his story and is settling into a sort of retirement, or second life. And that allows him to be a fully formed character in his own right, with the charming flaws that make characters so likable: On the surface he's a typical soldier; he's known women across the world, he loves gambling, etc. But we get to see him below the surface, as the observant, intelligent man he is. And having that surface coat of soldierly paint makes us like him all the more, privileged as we are to know his inner thoughts.

Probably most surprising to me when reading The Sign of Four is how much the characters and tone match Guy Ritchie's 2009 film. I've got a far different picture of Holmes in my head than Robert Downey, Jr., but the overall tone of that film—it's light-hearted strangeness, and the camaraderie of its two leads—very closely matches Doyle's original work.

The more time Holmes and Watson spend together, the more fun they are for us to spend time with. Like real-life best friends, they begin to speak more familiarly with one another, leading to fun dialogue between the two, with which we chuckle along like somebody at a party laughing at a joke from outside the discussion circle.

The mystery narratives are spiritual successors to Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poe may have blazed the trail, but Doyle's stories are far more polished in terms of characterization, pace, and setting. From Poe Doyle also picks up the strangeness that makes the Holmes tales more colorful: Perhaps inspired by Poe's inclusion of the murderous ape run amok, Doyle throws at us peg-legged criminals and malformed midgets from across the globe in The Sign of The Four, or the spontaneous, mid-narrative break into the story of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Mormonism in the Americas in Doyle's previous episode, A Study In Scarlet. These stories are apt mysteries without these quirks, but they serve to break up the pacing and seriousness of a crime story that might have become too dry or bleak without them.

The only criticism I feel comfortable leveling at the story is the way the conclusion is presented via an expository dump. Perhaps there might have been a way of more organically fitting it into greater story. I suppose this is going to become a norm among Holmes stories moving forward.

Doyle's Holmes stories are peak entertainment; well-written and eminently readable for all generations. The Sign of Four, like its predecessor, provides us with a fun windowpane via which to gaze on late-Victorian London.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene

A lot is said about the prescience of this novel regarding its analysis of 20th century Vietnam, Western colonialism, and the spread of Communism, but I found it most enticing just as a piece of character-driven fiction. This is my first exposure to Greene (at least, in the written form—I have seen the film The Third Man, which was penned by him), and it left me quite moved. He's a talented writer and shows his chops constantly through The Quiet American, able to make even the most mundane details shine brilliantly and the more noteworthy ones singularly affecting.

The story was at its best, in my opinion, when allowing the two main characters play off one another. Pyle and Fowler are magnificent foils for each other and I enjoyed watching them spar, though I didn't particularly like either one. Fowler is at least honest with his cynical moral laziness, while Pyle—the stereotypical American, even today—revels in his misguided, naive heroism, as if he were the star of his own Hollywood film. Frequently I detested both of them.

No matter how prettily Greene was able to present Fowler's (and perhaps his own) inner thoughts to us with his prose, I couldn't shake the discomfort one feels when at a small gathering with a group of people you dislike, but are forced together with by social responsibility; like a family party with distant relatives you'd rather not (and normally would never) associate with. Greene's lovely writing and interesting characters kept me reading, but I can't say I was enjoying myself all too often as it's far from a happy story.

Though Pyle and Fowler are interesting, fully-formed characters, I was dismayed that Phuong wasn't given more screen time. Almost all we know of her comes from Fowler's thoughts, since she is overly reserved for the vast majority of the story. I found her way of life fascinating on the surface, and her quiet strength intriguing, and would have liked to have seen more of her.

With American, Greene has managed to produce something that is simultaneously a quick and easy read, while also dense with solid characterization and the exploration of contemporary sociopolitical ideas. It's made me a fan of Greene, and I look forward to exploring more of his work soon, but first I've got to shower off with Siddhartha, Anne of Green Gables, or something similarly toned to heighten my mood.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens

I've read most classic writers, whether in school or since, despite my lack of reviews on this website. However I'm ashamed to admit that this is my first exposure—ever—to Charles Dickens. I'm not sure how I managed to avoid all of his novels, novellas, short stories, and the like up to this point, but here we are. And after experiencing his work for the first time I can confidently consider it a failing not only of my own reading choices, but of our education system.

Perhaps most affecting in the story is how much of myself I saw in Scrooge. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that might have been Dickens' intent. We're all curmudgeonly, miserly, and stingy with our affections at times, and Scrooge's initial character represents that quite well. While this novel did a lot to reform the Christmas holiday and popularize it, it's also a general reminder for us to be more kind, generous, and empathetic towards one-another, which, from what I understand, is a common theme in Dickens' work.

The changes Scrooge goes through in subsequent pages, though unsubtle, is touching and doesn't seem cloying, though it very well could have in the hands of a lesser writer. The dialogue and Dickens' imagination in designing the spirits are particular highlights for me.

Though it's equal parts comical and beautifully written, what's most striking is that Dickens prose remains so readable now, nearly 200 years after he began writing. I breezed through A Christmas Carol pretty easily, and I sometimes have troubled getting into Victorian literature.

I went in somewhat cynical, but Dickens changed my mind. This is every bit the influential modern fable it's reputed to be, and I'm looking forward to making up for lost time and reading more Dickens next year. Perhaps The Pickwick Papers next, followed by Oliver Twist?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Greek Myths (1955) by Robert Graves

I'm not sure whether to give this a negative review because Graves' delivery is so dry it seems almost intentionally unengaging, or to give it a great review because it's an all-encompassing study of the sources available for us today. Indeed, this belongs on everyone's bookshelf for quick reference. Or at least, it would have before the internet was invented.

Probably my lack of enjoyment of this volume stems from the fact that I thought it was something it was not until I opened it and began reading it. I was expecting a collection of short fiction in which Graves skillfully imparts Greek myths, and I instead got terse blurbs describing them with each followed by a lengthy discussion on the sources and historiography from Graves himself. While this is an invaluable tool to anybody studying or teaching mythology in an academic sense, it makes for very dry pleasure reading, and I ended up putting it down about halfway through and picking up Homer's Iliad instead.

HI am familiar with this type of tome, having studied history as an undergrad. But I can't say I missed the instances of several passages discussing names, births, and progeny, droning on and on ad nauseam. But again, this is counterbalanced by the fact that this is a fantastic collection, including sources, of these myths.

Perhaps I'm just not a fan of Graves' style. I didn't love I, Claudius despite having a keen interest in Roman Civ, and I certainly didn't love this. But I still feel it holds some value due to the quality of its study and its value as a quick reference tome for anybody interested in Greek Mythology.

⭐⭐

The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) (The Lord of the Rings, #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien

Rereading Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire—something written specifically as a counterpoint to Tolkien's work, and the various works in fantasy Tolkien inspired with it—has led me to realize just how off-the-rails HBO's famous (infamous?) television adaptation has gone. While earlier seasons stick closely to Martin's work (to great effect), latter seasons begin to depart, first in minor fashion, then in necessarily major strides as they surpass Martin's books and the weight of wrapping up the series falls on their heads alone. This has had the expected disastrous effect on the show's writing quality; a series once praised for its gray characters, complex machinations, and authentic fantasy world has devolved almost completely into a Marvel-inspired fantasy epic that consistently breaks its own rules and resorts to cheap faked-death cliffhangers where once it was renowned for playing seriously with its characters lives. The show is completely unrecognizable from its source material. Its appeal remains as genre pulp; fan-pleasing mental junk food that's pretty to look at but no longer espouses the qualities that made it so revered.

Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that Peter Jackson's now world-famous Lord of the Rings film adaptations are actually quite adherent to their source material. I was in high school when the film series released and had not yet read Tolkien's legendary masterwork, yet I adored the films for the ethereal, otherworldly sets, make-up, and special effects they provided, bolstered further by the iconic score constructed by Howard Shore; one now so iconic to fantasy films that it rivals comparisons of Ennio Morricone's famous spaghetti western themes.

In stark contrast to the HBO adaptation of Ice and Fire falling far short of Martin's work, I honestly believe that Fellowship works far better as a film than it ever did as a novel, and that Jackson's rendition of Tolkien's work is about as perfect as you can hope for. I'll even go as far as saying I'm shocked that this isn't a more common opinion.

In novel form, perhaps the strongest aspect is Tolkien's grasp of language. Not the English language in specific, but of the history of language: its etymology. Tolkien's background as a linguist allows him to construct the foundation of this world not with long paragraphs of exposition (although he does frequently fall victim to this), but with words; the languages present, names of structures and lands, and even the songs the characters sing. A lot of Middle-Earth feels fantastical because it's built around these languages. It does a lot to impart a feeling of foreignness that so much modern fantasy lacks.

Most disappointing to me was the constant parroted opinion that the characters of the films are much simpler versions of their book counterparts. I can confidently say, at least in this first episode, that this isn't entirely true. Are the characters altered? Sure: Gimli is used a bit too much as comic relief in the films and his people and character lack development, but honestly, he doesn't get much development in this novel, either.

And that's my main problem with Fellowship. Where the film has its fantastic visuals to fall back on, the book has only descriptions. Which is fine, but I wanted something more. I yearned for something like Martin's brilliant, colorful cast of dozens of characters, or Abercrombie's biting sardonic wit to fill these pages. The bulk of Fellowship is filled with our characters moving from place to place, experiencing this wonderful world that Tolkien has created, but we learn very little of them and not enough depth of these locales we're witnessing is provided. Tolkien breezes past description of ruins, rivers, old settlements, etc, with very little time devoted to creating any depth or substance. Sure, those ruins sound great. I like ruins! But then we're onward once again.
Instead it felt too often that Tolkien caved to his indulgence, filling his pages with something like song, which is fine as a display of this world's culture, but I wanted something more substantial to dig into.

I am admittedly not a huge fan of fantasy. I've read quite a bit of it, but very little I've liked, and maybe it's just the fantasy formula in general that turns me off of Fellowship rather than Tolkien himself. After all, this is a beloved novel. But it just wasn't for me. Too much of it was pretty window-dressing; meandering through lovely lands without meaningful history. Contrary to what Tolkien fans espouse, the characters were paper-thin and failed to grow, and the world, though pretty to imagine, never inspired me with its history like Martin's does, even when he's at his most indulgent and taking us on seemingly pointless tours through Essos in A Dance With Dragons.

After finishing, I began to view Martin not so much as the aforementioned "counterpoint" to Tolkien, but rather an evolution of him, as I believe Martin features a lot of what makes Tolkien attractive—an old, interesting world and a compelling narrative with strong themes—but Martin constructs his world and his characters with more care and roots said construction more within reality than fantasy, and provides each with exponentially more depth, thus making them far more intriguing than Tolkien does his.

Yes, yes, I know: Burn the witch. Who doesn't adore LOTR? But I can't help it: This is my second time reading Fellowship, and charming though he can be, Tolkien just doesn't work for me.

⭐⭐

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde

Wilde probably had written so many plays and so much poetry despite having only a single novel and a relatively small amount of short stories because prose doesn't seem to feature his particular talents—describing beautiful things in a witty fashion using beautiful words, and coming up with scandalous scenarios—as much as the other media of writing do. Certainly this novel seems to expose some of his flaws as a writer.

I found I couldn't connect with any of the characters, who felt more like talking heads existing to pass on Wilde's philosophical diatribe than human beings to which interesting things happen. Most glaringly, I couldn't understand the other characters' attachments to Dorian Gray, who, by my estimation, was nothing more than a pretty face. There certainly wasn't anything substantial within his character that drew me or, indeed, would draw anybody else. He's an empty vessel; we're told he's beautiful and he is wealthy, but he displays nothing at all of his own character in the entire first half of the book, never mind anything interesting.

I often felt that the three main characters blended together. They seem to lack many differentiating beliefs and they all speak with an almost identical voice. There was very little separating them whatsoever; especially Lord Henry and Dorian. The three seemed all to be facets of Wilde himself, indeed upon my research of the book I learned that he thought of them as such, too. None have their own unique character, save small differentiating factors: Basil has a sentimentalist streak, Lord Henry is just Dorian, but a bit older and more experienced.

Wilde's prose is littered with the witticisms he's known for and it's beautifully constructed, but I still can't help but think he makes a better poet and playwright than novelist. Dorian Gray reads more like a collection of nicely packaged Oscar Wilde quotes than it does a stand-alone novel. The pacing felt uneven as well; it's front-loaded with a slog of philosophical soliloquy as we're immediately piled on with Wilde's new Hedonism as provided gleefully by Lord Henry. Dorian is immediately taken with it, but from there the story takes a bit too long to get going as Wilde indulges himself in depictions of London's high society at the turn of the century, opera and plays and dinner parties and the like. Subsequent to this is Dorian's years-long slide into debauchery, which, disappointingly, is summarized within one chapter, punctuated by a peculiar set of forgettable paragraphs that drone on while listing all of passions which he indulges over the years. This was disappointing to me since the development of Dorian Gray as a character was what I was most looking forward to in the story. However Wilde recovers himself towards the end and remembers he's writing a damned novel, and eventually does add some characterization and move the plot along through the last 60 pages or so.


If you like Wilde's work, you'll probably like this. He chooses a spectacular premise to build the book around but my dissatisfaction stems from my feeling that he failed in constructing the pillars the story needed to rest upon. His philosophy is interesting as well, but I feel it failed in its application.

There's enough here to recommend a read, as Wilde is particularly well-suited to the description of beautiful things. I certainly came away with a bevy of new highlights. But I found it all ultimately superficial, Wilde's attempt at throwing a gloss over raw philosophical ramblings, something highly ironic considering the subject matter of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

⭐⭐⭐