Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
I hope everyone has had a good start to the week. I have had a very lazy day due to having such a tiring day yesterday. This has meant quite a bit of reading which has been lovely.
My chosen book this week is another off my Classics Club list.
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden sex worker, can offer the chance of redemption.
(All purchases made using one of the above affiliate links gives a small percentage of money to myself with no extra cost to yourself. All proceeds go towards the upkeep of this blog. Thank you ever so much, your support is gratefully received.)
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
Happy Monday! I hope everyone has a had a good start to the week so far. This week I am featuring another book off my Classics Club List for Goodreads Monday.
With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë’s most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. The first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life’s journey – a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman’s consciousness in English literature.
(All purchases made using one of the above affiliate links gives a small percentage of money to myself with no extra cost to yourself. All proceeds go towards the upkeep of this blog. Thank you ever so much, your support is gratefully received.)
I remember attempting to read this a few years ago but for one reason or another I did not finish it so fingers crossed I do when I read it this time around.
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Last week I decided to take part in the Classics Club Spin Event to decide my next read off my Classics Club List. The post can be found here.
Well the results are in and the chosen number was 11. This means my next read will be The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins and I have to finish it by 30th April 2022.
I have only read one book by Wilkie Collins but I did love it so fingers crossed I will enjoy The New Magdalen just as much.
I am thoroughly enjoying my classics reading after so long without reading any.
Please drop me a comment if you are doing the Classics Club challenge or if you have taken part in the Spin Challenge.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
I have decided to take part in my first Spin event for The Classics Club. To join in you simply list 20 books left off your Classics Club list before Sunday 20th March 2022 and then the club will randomly select a number. The selected book then has to be read before Saturday 30th April 2022. I have a lot of titles left to read as I have only recently started the challenge so it has been a difficult selection but here is my list:
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Silas Marner by George Eliot
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
The Runaway by Elizabeth Anna Hart
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Evelina by Frances Burney
Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot
Love in Excess by Eliza Haywood
I’m really looking forward to what the random selection will be and I hope I will be able to read the book within the time frame.
Wish me luck!
Please drop me a comment if you are taking part in the Spin event or if you have read any of the books on my list.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
Happy Monday! I hope everyone has had a good start to the week so far.
It is time for another book off my Classics Club list, which is my main TBR at the moment and any books I read not off the list are just my usual mood reading choices.
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire.
Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, “Clarissa” is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Its rich ambiguities – our sense of Clarissa’s scrupulous virtue tinged with intimations of her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex; the wicked and amusing faces of Lovelace, who must be easily the most charming villain in English literature – give the story extraordinary psychological momentum. .
I’m really looking forward to reading this book as it will be something for different for me as I haven’t read many books where the story is told through letters.
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
This weeks book off my Classics Club List is another new author to me and one that I have been meaning to read for many years and own a lot of her books already.
When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man, John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction.
In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell skillfully fuses individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale creates one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.
(All purchases made using one of the above affiliate links gives a small percentage of money to myself with no extra cost to yourself. All proceeds go towards the upkeep of this blog. Thank you ever so much, your support is gratefully received.)
Hopefully I will get around to reading this book this year and it will be another classic off my ever growing TBR pile.
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
I am continuing with featuring books off my Classics Club list and I am also linking my Goodreads Monday posts on the main list as well so I don’t forget which books I have featured.
Love in Excess is a well-crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion. Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum.
This is a new author for me. I made sure that when I built my list of Classics books I had some new authors as well as old favourites. I always like discovering new authors especially if they have written lots of good books that I can add to my TBR.
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
I hope everyone has had a good start to the week. I have been trying to catch up on chores today but I did manage some quiet time with my book as well.
I am continuing with featuring books off my Classics Club list and I am also linking my Goodreads Monday posts on the main list as well so I don’t forget which books I have featured.
Wilkie Collins is rightly regarded as one of the nineteenth century’s most eminent writers. Although many Persephone readers will know The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he in fact published twenty-one other novels. The New Magdalen (1873), Persephone Book No.138, is about a ‘fallen woman’, Mercy Merrick, attempting to rehabilitate her character and her reputation; and the (often reprehensible and unkind) attitude of some of those around her.
I absolutely loved reading The Woman in White so I am looking forward to reading The New Magdalen. I always find it such a shame that books get lost and forgotten so I think it is great of Persephone books to get this book back on the shelves and people reading it again.
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.
Hello!
I hope everyone has had a good start to the week. The third book I have chosen to feature from my Classics Club list is…
The story of a woman born and bred in the murky world of seventeenth-century London. Daniel Defoe created a female character-narrator who recounts, from a woman’s point of view, her life and adventures, portraying critically the society in which she lived.
I’ve never read any books by Daniel Defoe so I am looking forward to reading this book.
Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.
Happy Reading
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
This collection brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen’s manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship [sic], and The History of England.
This edition includes:
– Frederic and Elfrida
– Jack and Alice
– Edgar and Emma
– Henry and Eliza
– Love and Freindship
– A History of England
– The Three Sisters
– Lesley Castle
– Evelyn
– Catharine, or the Bower
– Lady Susan
– The Watsons
– Sanditon
Review
This was the only work by Austen I had left to read and as I usually like to start the New Year with an Austen book I decided it was high time to read this collection of works and complete the set.
I was really excited to read Austen’s juvenilia work and I was not disappointed. I was also really frustrated that so much was left unfinished. I knew it would be unfinished but I so desperately wanted to know how the stories ended.
Austen’s juvenilia stories were hilarious and you could really tell they were written by a girl who had not seen a lot of the world yet but was starting to get a good understanding of people. At times you could really see the true magic of Austen’s wit starting to develop and make itself known. There are a great deal of fainting ladies in Austen’s juvenilia works, they are either fainting on the sofa, on the floor, basically all over the place and for very little reason. One thing we do learn though is that it is better to run around like a lunatic than faint in bad weather because running around keeps the cold away and fainting will make you catch a chill with mortal consequences.
One of my favourites in this book was A History of England. I loved Austen’s clear love of Mary Queen of Scots and hatred of Elizabeth I, she is forever putting down Elizabeth I and praising Mary Queen of Scots at every opportunity. The history is not accurate and it is clear that Austen has made up quite a bit of her facts with hilarious results. There are also no dates but the monarchs are in chronological order. The added illustrations by Cassandra Austen were an added bonus.
Lady Susan I struggled to get into to begin with due to the story being written in the form of letters but once I got used to it I loved it. Lady Susan is quite a character and one I imagine people with any sense would steer clear of. She has a quite a reputation but men pay no heed to this reputation because of her way with words and her beauty. Thankfully, most women can see through this scheming character.
I could go on and on about how much I loved this book and there really wasn’t any story that I did not enjoy. It was so interesting to see Austen develop as an author and I loved her little dedications for each story. I give this book a massive 5 out of 5 Dragons and will definitely be reading it again.
(All purchases made using one of the above affiliate links gives a small percentage of money to myself with no extra cost to yourself. All proceeds go towards the upkeep of this blog. Thank you ever so much, your support is gratefully received.)
About the author
Jane Austen born 16th December 1775 died 18th July 1817 was an English novelist known for her six major novels. Austen’s novels are known for social comedy and accurate depiction of human relationships.
This review is part of my Classics Club challenge. Please click the link to see my list of 50 books.
If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you
Lady Book Dragon 