I just finished reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain while on my daily lunchtime walk and had to restrain myself from immediately jumping into another one of Mark Twain’s novels. After all, there are only so many, and I want to save them to read after I finish books that might not be as enjoyable. I think that more than anything else should be the real mark of a great writer, being so good that your work is held in a kind of strategic reserve to wash away the ills of other, less enjoyable books.
Tom Sawyer is about the mischievous adventures of a boy and his friends get up to while growing up in a small Missouri river town. But along with pulling pranks and playing pirates Tom manages to do the right thing on occasion. The book does a good job of showing Tom’s character and craftiness all through out.
I’m pretty sure that my little reviews do a disservice to the books I read, and I think this one is the most disserviced out of the books I’ve read so far because I’m not an English major or a real book critic. I can’t wax poetically about the merits of a piece of literature the way someone who’s studied these sorts of things can. All I can really provide here is my stamp of approval, and approval I shall grant.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a great read and I cannot recommend it enough.
I got done reading The Odyssey yesterday and I’m much more impressed with this than I was with the Iliad. The flow of the story was a lot smoother. There weren’t whole pages that were just lists of people who died and their entire life’s story, so it wins almost on that fact alone, but the story is actually interesting. Around the middle of the book Ulysses tells his tale of woe on the high sea, and then quickly makes it back to Ithaca, where the story grinds a little, but had a satisfying ending.
Overall I give The Odyssey my seal of recommendation.
I just finished The Prince a few hours ago and I wanted to give some time to soak in. I’m not sure that any review I give would do any justice to the work, mostly because I’m sure that some of the topics covered may have gone a bit over my head. In general terms it is about aquiring and keeping hold of power.
I’m generally positive about, because as I was reading through it there were several moments where things from the book triggered my “that makes perfect sense” response. I’m not a ruler of men or the king of a country, but I don’t think you have to be to get something out of this one. If there was one point above all that I took away from the book it was the necessity of self reliance and to avoid being hated, so two points there I guess.
The there are two translations of The Prince on Project Gutenberg, I would recommend going with the one I linked to and skipping the one that includes Machiavelli’s “The Art of War” as that translation uses an archaic english style of spelling that makes it the reading equivalent of pulling your own teeth.
I’m definitely going to go back and reread it again someday. I’m giving The Prince my seal of recommendation.
I just finished reading The Iliad by Homer and I want to get this down while it’s fresh in my mind. More than anything this book was a major let down. From the epic story of the seige of Troy I was expecting something, well, more epic.
The story is a long, detailed, account of the beginning of the war. How detailed, you may ask, and what’s this about the beginning of the war? Well, a lot of people die in this story (as befitting a story about a war) but most of these people are not important to the story as a whole. They’re what we who play RPGs call NPCs. Most of the time these characters wouldn’t even get a name if they didn’t have an impact on a story. Homer, however, gives everyone a backstory, usually giving it after the poor fellow has already suffered a gilling blow, making it almost completely unnecessary. Also, the book doesn’t cover the actual fall of troy.
That’s right, no horse, no heel, nothing!
In the end I’m going to have to recommend that people skip this entry in the “best books ever written.”
This is the second in a series of small reviews for the “classics of literature” that I’m going to be reading on my new nook. Remember, I am not an English major, nor am I a trained critic, so these might not be the best reviews that you’ll ever read but I will at least endeavor to make them entertaining.
Again I read one of the books that came preloaded on my nook, Pride and Prejudice, and was expecting it to be another drudge to wade through. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to actually be enjoyable.
The book is about a young woman dealing with the stuffiness of nineteenth century England. Normally, after reading a sentence like on the back of a novel, I would put it back down and wander over to Sci-Fi section of the book store to find something with a dragon or a spaceship on the cover. It was only my desire to read some of the books that are held up as “classic works” that got me to even open the file on my nook. I have to say that I’m glad I did. I enjoyed the book mostly for the dry humor of the main character, but I will admit that about halfway through I started to enjoy the story itself.
Jane Austen’s writing style seemed to capture all the formality of the era, and if I only had one complaint it would be that the conversations were a little hard to follow at times. (Would it have really killed her if she had used the occasional “he said” or “Elizabeth replied” in some of the longer dialoges?) I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of dry humor.
