About Me

I'm a theatre person who believes that balance in life is achieved by knowing everything about something and a little about everything.

Home on web at http://vandegraaff.tumblr.com

My BookLists

• To-Read (Top 10 of 11)
  • Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
    by Tolstoy, Leo
  • The Pilgrim's Progress
    by Bunyan, John
  • King Solomon's Mines
    by Haggard, Rider
  • The Secret Garden
    by Burnett, Frances Hodgson
  • Paradise Lost
    by Milton, John
  • Walden
    by Thoreau, Henry David
  • Anne of Green Gables
    by Montgomery, L. M.
  • Father Goriot
    by Balzac, Honoré de
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    by Twain, Mark
  • Kim
    by Kipling, Rudyard
  • View the entire BookList: To-Read

Browse BookLists

• The Hound of the Baskervilles finished
• The Prince finished
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz finished
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater finished
• Utopia finished
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde finished
• De Profundis finished
• Madame Bovary finished
• The Confidence-Man finished
• Tales of the Jazz Age finished
• My Antonia finished
• Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories finished
• The Picture of Dorian Gray finished
• The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman finished
• The Communist Manifesto finished
• The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories finished
• The Good Soldier finished
• One Man's Initiation finished
• There are Crimes and Crimes finished
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man finished
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner finished
• The Metamorphosis finished
• Therese Raquin finished
• Three Lives finished
• The Sorrows of Young Werther finished
• Bartleby the Scrivener finished
• Rappaccini's Daughter finished
• Little Brother finished
• The Dance of Death finished
• The Jungle finished
• The Intellectual Devotional finished

  Good, basic, biased This piece was interesting but I found myself wanting more then what was given in almost every instance. It sent me to wikipedia to do more research which I suppose works out just fine. There was also an interesting voice that strayed sometimes from the pure reporting of various interesting things into the dangerous land of opinion which is fine so long as you are aware that it is there and should watch for it. I posted this on 24 April 2012
  0 Comments My book
  review »

• The Beautiful and Damned finished

  Pretty and sad just the way I like it Fitzgerald's work is deliciously over-written and had several moments of supreme poetry. There was this pathetic inevitability to it that you couldn't look away from, you just had to watch as these two people fell apart. The end disappointed me but that's a personal preference. I posted this on 24 April 2012
  0 Comments My book
  review »

• The Alchemist finished
• King Henry IV, Part 2 finished
• The House of Atreus finished
• King Henry IV, Part 1 finished
• Life is a Dream finished
• Antony and Cleopatra finished
• Oresteia: Agamemnon finished
• The School for Scandal finished
• The Master Builder finished
• Miss Julie finished
• A Midsummer Night's Dream finished
• Antigone finished
• Macbeth finished
• Hamlet finished
• Phaedra finished
• The Importance of Being Earnest finished
• Pariah and The Stronger finished
• The Countess Cathleen finished
• The Outlaw finished
• The Father finished
• Heartbreak House finished
• Tartuffe finished
• The Imaginary Invalid finished
• Major Barbara finished
• The Bacchae finished
• Poem-a-Day Collection II finished
• Ghosts finished
• The Scarlet Letter finished

  Overwritten if not overwrought I understand that the overly-heavy and purple prose was the way things were written back then but it kind of loses kick for a modern audience. I liked how the story built towards the climax and the character of Pearl. I think in general The Scarlet Letter was filled with some beautiful passages but the the long-windedness really took away from the emotional kick of the story. I posted this on 16 May 2011
  0 Comments My book
  review »

• Berlitz Essential French Phrases finished
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding finished
• Creditors finished
• Wikipedia Tour: Masterpieces of Western Art finished
• Wikipedia Tour: The Roaring 20s finished
• Renascence and Other Poems finished
• The Playboy of the Western World finished
• Highway 152 by Sam Shepard finished
• Poems finished

  Hard work, some pay off I like TS Elliot. This volume was just a little less meaningful for me as it lost some of the grandeur of previous works. Maybe I got the wrong impression starting out with The Hollow Men and Gift of the Magi but most of these were about drizzly streets in Paris. Which is lovely, it's just hard to push through sometimes, convoluted. Some wonderful works though, marked with a sadness and nostalgia. I posted this on 11 December 2010
  0 Comments My book
  review »

• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus finished

  An epic of Faustian preportions A good read, Faust is a wonderful character in that he shows the desire for freedom and control in all of us. He shows us as we wave our dicks at god and hope for the best. I would have liked to see him redeem himself by the end or at least use his powers for awesome in the mean time. Overall a wonderful piece of Marlow with magic and sluts and everything. I posted this on 11 December 2010
  0 Comments My book
  review »

• Byron's Poetical Works finished
• Beyond Good and Evil suspended
• Three Soldiers suspended
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems suspended
• Just So Stories suspended
• The Voyage Out suspended
• The Intellectual Devotional II suspended
• Le Cid suspended

The Beautiful and Damned - Pretty and sad just the way I like it

Fitzgerald's work is deliciously over-written and had several moments of supreme poetry. There was this pathetic inevitability to it that you couldn't look away from, you just had to watch as these two people fell apart. The end disappointed me but that's a personal preference.

I posted this topic last year. Replies (0)

The Intellectual Devotional - Good, basic, biased

This piece was interesting but I found myself wanting more then what was given in almost every instance. It sent me to wikipedia to do more research which I suppose works out just fine. There was also an interesting voice that strayed sometimes from the pure reporting of various interesting things into the dangerous land of opinion which is fine so long as you are aware that it is there and should watch for it.

I posted this topic last year. Replies (0)

The Scarlet Letter - Overwritten if not overwrought

I understand that the overly-heavy and purple prose was the way things were written back then but it kind of loses kick for a modern audience. I liked how the story built towards the climax and the character of Pearl. I think in general The Scarlet Letter was filled with some beautiful passages but the the long-windedness really took away from the emotional kick of the story.

I posted this topic 2 years ago. Replies (0)

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus - An epic of Faustian preportions

A good read, Faust is a wonderful character in that he shows the desire for freedom and control in all of us. He shows us as we wave our dicks at god and hope for the best. I would have liked to see him redeem himself by the end or at least use his powers for awesome in the mean time. Overall a wonderful piece of Marlow with magic and sluts and everything.

I posted this topic 2 years ago. Replies (0)

Poems - Hard work, some pay off

I like TS Elliot. This volume was just a little less meaningful for me as it lost some of the grandeur of previous works. Maybe I got the wrong impression starting out with The Hollow Men and Gift of the Magi but most of these were about drizzly streets in Paris. Which is lovely, it's just hard to push through sometimes, convoluted. Some wonderful works though, marked with a sadness and nostalgia.

I posted this topic 2 years ago. Replies (0)