Right — pull up a chair, or a turnip, or whatever passes for furniture these days — because I’ve just finished The Three Strangers and by Jupiter’s whiskers, what an experience it was. Like trying to shave a goat on a merry-go-round. It's a night so wet it would make Noah look skywards and say, “You what, again?” … Continue reading Wessex Tales: Why You Should Never Invite Strangers to Your Baptism: A Hardy Story: The Three Strangers
Tag: book-reviews
Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson: A Masterpiece Buried Beneath a Mound of Linguistic Muck
Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet is rather like stumbling across a hidden bottle of whisky in a dusty old kirk - an unexpected pleasure, provided you can stomach the cobwebs and the dead rats floating inside. The story itself, once you prise it out from beneath the dreadful mound of vernacular rubble, is a … Continue reading Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson: A Masterpiece Buried Beneath a Mound of Linguistic Muck
Through Hell and High Water: A Wanderer’s Musings on Dante’s Inferno
I have long been of the opinion that if one is to take a trip, one ought to choose the destination with care. A sojourn in Tuscany, perhaps; a jaunt through the Alps; or, at the very least, an unhurried ramble through the English countryside, where the only fiery pits one encounters are the embers … Continue reading Through Hell and High Water: A Wanderer’s Musings on Dante’s Inferno
T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding & The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding is the grand finale of Four Quartets, a poem of spiritual reckoning and renewal that reads like a soul’s dark night before the dawn. It is a tapestry woven with threads of history, theology, and poetry, each stitch pulling the reader deeper into Eliot’s meditative vision of time, suffering, and redemption. The poem … Continue reading T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding & The Waste Land
Shards of a Broken Mind: A Critique of The Life of a Stupid Man
The Life of a Stupid Man was published posthumously in 1927, the same year Ryūnosuke Akutagawa took his own life. That makes this work seem like a literary suicide note - one final, unfiltered outpouring of his disillusionment and despair. It wasn’t crafted for an audience so much as exhaled, a last gasp of a man … Continue reading Shards of a Broken Mind: A Critique of The Life of a Stupid Man
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