Tag: anthony trollope
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Five classics that ought to capture you from page one
I feel great, like extremely good. It’s unaccountable, since I’ve felt pretty not-great for most of the past two months. Can’t explain it. Anyway, early in the history of this blog I used to do lists! My most popular one was eight writing manuals that aren’t a total waste of time. And last night as…
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WRAP UP SEASON 2016: The ten books I liked best this year
This year’s been a good one for reading. I started it out as part of the jury for an award, which consumed my reading for the first few months. Then I got kind of depressed and couldn’t really read anything: I just had no taste for books anymore. But somehow Proust was the only thing…
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Been really enjoying Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels
I spend a lot of time with nerds and geeks and hipsters–the kinds of people who get really passionate about pop-culture. And…that’s not me. At one point I attributed it to getting older, but I don’t think that’s it. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as passionately consumed with my media choices as many people…
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I’ve just been so goddamn depressed about President Trump
Sorry my posting has been sporadic. I’ve just been so depressed about Trump. It’s really odd, I started off feeling relatively okay, and then I got more and more unhappy. My fiancé is out of town this weekend, and I was like I can’t be alone, so I made a spur of the moment trip…
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Do you think that authors really dislike their villainous protagonists as much as they claim to?
I started reading Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, which is about the machinations of a very wealthy and dishonest and villainous widow. And I love her. She’s pretty much the best. But Trollope does not love her. He’s constantly talking about how evil she is and shit. In fact, lots of Victorian novels are about very…
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The Small House at Allington (by Anthony Trollope) and Election (by Tom Perrotta)
I really don’t know why I continue to read Anthony Trollope’s novels. There can’t be anything more infuriating than his plotting. All of his novels are love stories, and all the love stories are terrrrrrrrrrible and awkward and horrifying in their implications. In this one, Lily Dale is wooed by and then affianced to the…
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Three Books, Six Paragraphs: Drop City, Framley Parsonage, and The American
Drop City by T.C. Boyle – A novel about a fictionalized 1960’s utopian community that starts off somewhere in Sonoma county and ends up in backcountry Alaska. Ever since I read Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, I’ve been meaning to read another commune novel. I’m still fascinated by communes and am on occasion somewhat disappointed that…
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The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Okay guys, so, I don’t know if I told you, but the theme of this year’s reading is 19th Century English Literature (the theme of last year was Proust and the theme of the year before that was The Russians, okay). And in keeping with said theme, I recently read Anthony Trollope’s The Way We…