raderwoman is currently reading Anna Karenina.
I’m 60 years old, female, from the United States. I’ve been a DailyLit member since October 21, 2008. My reading interests include classics, murder mysteries, theology, and current events.
Books
- Anna Karenina 94% complete
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin finished
- The Artist of the Beautiful finished
- Arms and the Man finished
- Antigone finished
- The Ambassadors finished
- Androcles and the Lion finished
- The Adventures of Sally finished
- The Alchemist finished
- Alcestis finished
- The Aeneid finished
- Adam Bede finished
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Abbe Mouret's Transgression finished
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Ajax finished
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The Golden Bowl finished
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The Age of Innocence finished
- Crime and Punishment suspended
Posts
Abbe Mouret's Transgression - Abbe Mouret's Transgression
This was a perversely enjoyable read. While I spent much of the book wanting to slap the Abbe silly, I recognized the tale as Zola's fable pitting love of intellect/religion against love f all that is natural, passionate of feeling, delight in the sensual. Considered quite shocking in his own time, Zola doesn't hold a candle to current-day explicitness, but his sensual language and imagery are, to me, very evocative.
Ajax - Ajax
I've always felt a lack of familiarity with so much Greek literature. Reading something by Sophocles that I hadn't any knowledge of was interesting, if not absorbing.
The Golden Bowl - The Golden Bowl
I have to say this book is not the best choice to read on line because it is based on such exquisite subtleties that it requires some rereading on occasion. It is SO subtle that I think most modern readers would toss it over their shoulders after the first 100 pages if not before. The writing is ornate, even for James, and the sentence structures sometimes a real challenge to parse. Maggie's method of dealing with a truly horrible situation and finding, most of the way through, that her father is aware of everything, provides a perversity that I am not sure a reader of today could even begin to understand. Interestingly for me, I found the father-daughter relationship utterly treacly and even distasteful at the beginning of the book. By the end I admired their complete sympathy for one another.
The Age of Innocence - creation of a lost time and place
Reading Wharton is transport to a time so far fro current reality as to feel like fantasy. Even though the characters in this book are struggling with a set of mores that seem utterly laughable to me, I was completely involved in them, even the minor characters shown with exactness, easy to visualize and to understand. Her perceptions of motivation and behavior is still brilliant.