Digital Sextant

by Charles Dickens; narrated by Mark Smith for Librivox.org I only read one Dickens book before I started on the “1000 books to read before you die” project.  And while A Tale of Two Cities is pretty great, in High School it was just a book to read.  But now I’ve read both Great Expectations [… Read More]

by Agatha Christie The only Christie novel to make the 1000 books you must read before you die list, Ackroyd serves as a metonym for every Christie novel, or at least every Poirot novel. It’s skillfully written, with a wide net of characters, an intriguing puzzle mystery with plenty of side distractions (affairs, debts, scoundrels, [… Read More]

Antigone is the rebellious sister who wants to bury her brother. Ismene wants to toe the line and follow the rules. I admire Antigone: Make straight your own path to destiny But find myself reflected better in Ismene: Extravagant action is not sensible.

by Nathaniel West There seems to be a distinct slice of fancy-pants literature in which mopey people mope about, do mopey stuff, and generally bemoan the lack of motivation that leads them to mopery.  I’m thinking here of The Magus and The End of the Affair.  In this case, West’s novel focuses on the eponymous [… Read More]

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens; narrated by Debra Lynn for Librivox I haven’t read a ton of Dickens in my day, but the humorous title and description of this book made it a good one to dive into. It was a long one, though. The audiobook was divided into 75 [… Read More]

by Nathaniel Hawthorne; narrated by Dick Hill This post resides firmly in spoiler city. Somehow, this is the first time I’ve read this book. I didn’t see the movie, either. In my high school, there were multiple “tracks” of literature that meant one group of students read one set of texts (I read 1984, A [… Read More]