This is another guest post by my wife, Adele. Rating: 5/5 Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Secret Daughter (New York: William Morrow, 2010). After I finished this book, when I had let the whole story sink in, I felt I had finished reading a work of art. The author uses the style of jumping from one person’s perspective to...
This is our first guest post. My wife, Adele, has been doing some reading and wanted to share her thoughts with all of you. Here we go! Rating: 5/5 Lisa Genova, Still Alice (New York: Pocket Books, 2009). A wonderful and educational read! This is a story of how one Alice discovers she has Alzheimer’s and how that...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990). Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] was published in 1774 and is a quintessential example of early Romanticism and the Sturm und Drang movement. It’s what is called an “epistolary novel”: a novel...
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: From This World to That Which Is to Come, ed. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). This is another of those books you encounter tangentially in any study of the arts or humanities but rarely actually sit down and read. This is another book I have...
Rating: 5/5 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (New York: Routledge, 2002). Dr. Faustus was an actual historical figure. He was apparently an itinerant scholar and fortune teller, and there is some documentation on his life during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. (See the Wikipedia article...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin, 2nd edition (NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). Goethe’s Faust has been on my reading list for a long time. I finally got through it, and it was nothing like I expected. My exposure to Faust has been through music and music...
Rating: 1/5 David & Leigh Eddings, The Redemption of Althalus (Del Rey, 2001). In short, don’t bother. I finally put the book down about a third of the way through. I found it on a list of fantasy must-reads. Well it sure doesn’t make mine. It’s not that it is written for a young adult audience, it’s just that’s all it...
Rating: 5/5 S. Joshi (ed.), The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics, 1999). I just finished The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories containing stories of H. P. Lovecraft edited by S. T. Joshi. It does not contain the entirety of Lovecraft’s stories, but it apparently includes the major ones...
Rating: 2/5 William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984). I’ve always been a fan of the “cyberpunk” mythos, but I have just never gotten around to reading the archetypal book that really started it all, Neuromancer. I finally did. It’s a pretty quick read (250ish pages in the Ace special edition). It’s written in a gritty,...
Rating: 5/5 Tad Williams, Otherland (4 vols: City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, and Sea of Silver Light) (DAW, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001). An oldie but goodie. Published between 1994 and 2001, Otherland is a massive novel (3000ish pages across 4 volumes). It’s not a series. It really is...