I read this after having lived in Chile, fully immersing myself into their rich and welcoming culture. Years later I read, and loved, this first book by Allende.
At twenty, Emma Woodhouse—“handsome, clever, and rich”—knows that she’s the most fantastic woman in Highbury, and nothing amuses her more than meddling in other people’s affairs. But although she has good intentions, her matchmaking goes seriously awry, wrecking a perfectly good engagement for her f...show more
Although not usually a favorite for Austin fans, I loved this book. Maybe because I “read it“ via audio book and it’s narrator really brought the book to life for me. I just fell in love with the Fannie’s character.
Destitute young woman leaves rotten boarding school for job as governess in sprawling mansion, falls in love with broodingly handsome employer with dark secret. In the twenty-first century, the plot of Jane Eyre might sound clichéd, yet Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, about a plain orphan girl exceed...show more
Published in 1931, while Modernism was turning fiction artfully on its ear, Buck’s simple, plot-driven tale of the shifting fortunes of Chinese peasants Wang Lung and O-Lan was innovative in its own way, marking the introduction of Asian characters into mainstream Western literature. In its pages, r...show more
Is life unfair? Is circumstance fate? Can we ever take the law into our own hands to change it? Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first major novel poses these questions in the tale of a man who enacts brutal crimes in order to break the strictures of his social destiny. For Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the han...show more
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” That’s the famous opening sentence of Rebecca, a suspenseful romantic tale that has cast its irresistible spell over millions of readers since it was published in 1938. The “I” is the novel’s unnamed narrator. She is a timid and inexperienced young wo...show more
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
Shallow, impetuous, dishonest, and shortsighted, Emma Bovary is not exactly a likeable heroine. She lies constantly, spends other people’s money without reservation, and has little to no affection even for her own child. Yet by the novel’s end she has become so real that we can almost feel her prese...show more
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