Tag: Review

  • A Simple Heart

    I am a little bit conflicted about stories like A Simple Heart. It tells the rather bleak life of a servant girl. And while I like that the main character is not a hero of some sort or very special, it does not make for the most engaging type of story. The writing was nice… →

  • Crime and Punishment

    (Please be aware that this is an old review) A very famous classic in Russian Literature. I read Anna Karenina last year (and I know it’s Tolstoy, so completely different, but I don’t have a lot to compare it with as I’m not really experienced in Russian Literature). Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, or Rodya, is a… →

  • The Meek One

    I am in the minority here who didn’t like The Meek One. I just really didn’t enjoy the story about a man who is so detached from his young wife that he drives her to suicide. The writing is good but I really can not stand to read about all this psychological abuse. As in… →

  • The Survival of Molly Southbourne

    So I read The Murders of Molly Southbourne earlier this year without knowing what I was getting myself into, but it was a very original surprise. I admit however that I didn’t exactly remembered how it ended, so I found myself a little bit confused at the beginning (it went better very quickly though). The… →

  • Remember, Body…

    Some Greek poetry in the Little Black Classics collection, and it is relatively modern (as in the author has not been dead for the past two millennia). These are sensual poems. There is a lot of love and maybe more so longing for love. This feeling was portrayed rather well, but the poems became sort… →

  • Dead Bad

    Another old case plays an important role in the eight book of the Calladine & Bayliss series, which is something that has been used a couple of times now in the series. I hope this will not be in every book now, or you would start wondering whether the detectives might not have been doing… →

  • Little Black Classics – All in one review and a review for all

    Recently I finished the last of the 127 books from the Little Black Classics collection, which were all published by Penguin in 2015-2016. Small bites of Classics, to try them out and discover new authors. Or that was what I thought. In a couple of posts I will be looking back at the multi-year reading… →

  • The Yellow Wall-Paper

    This was one of my favorite books in the collection, again from a writer – Charlotte Perkins Gilman – whom I had never heard of before. It is a chilling tale of a woman who, by her doctor husband who believes she is hysteric, is prescribed rest. As the time goes on, she is denied… →

  • Herding Cats

    Herding Cats is Sarah Andersen’s third volume of Sarah’s Scribbles, a collection of webcomics. I enjoyed reading the first two a lot so I was looking forward to this one a lot. The comics are still nice, but I felt that maybe they were getting a little bit repetitive at this point. While relatable, a… →

  • The Steel Flea

    The Steel Flea is a piece of Russian comedy for a change. I am more familiar with Russian tragedy, but since this in essence is still a satire or social commentary it is not unlike the other Russian authors that I read. It is a short tale of Russian worker who aims to outdo the… →

  • The Plastic Magician

    Polymaking, the magic that deals with plastic, is still a relatively new field in The Plastic Magician. Alvie arrives for her apprenticeship and with the help of some convenient meetings, she soon has impressed her teacher and is working on a spectacular groundbreaking technology. It has been a while since I read the original trilogy,… →

  • The Old Nurse’s Story

    I bought the whole collection of Little Black Classics not only because they look so pretty on my shelves, but also because I was hoping to read some authors which I had never heard of but were pretty great. Elizabeth Gaskell was of those. This collection contains two short stories which portray her nice writing… →

  • The Absolutist

    The latest novel by John Boyne! I couldn’t wait to read it, but unfortunately I was supposed to get this book as a Christmas present (First World Problems), so I had to wait a little time. It was a real touching story in my humble opinion. I personally don’t really know a lot about the… →

  • The Maldive Shark

    Melville, best know for Moby Dick, has some of his work collected in this edition that was inspired by his years on sea. I think the best part of it was that I immediately got that he actually spent his time there. Descriptions of the life at sea seemed – as far as I could… →

  • Just One Damned Thing After Another

    #TimeTravelTuesday I’ve been thinking about how to best convey the fun I had when reading Just One Damned Thing After Another. I’d heard so many good things beforehand that I wasn’t sure it would live up to my expectations. But luckily for me, it did. (And there are seven of them! – at the time… →

  • The Great Winglebury Duel

    I am way behind on my classics and I am willing to admit it. This means so far, I had not read much of Charles Dickens besides A Christmas Carol. This edition contains two short stories, and they were quite nice but lacked something. Maybe, because the typical social criticism was largely absent, it felt… →

  • Strange Skies over East Berlin

    East Berlin, the 1970s. A place so crowded with spies of all sorts that people wonder when was the last time they told the truth. It is the setting of this new supernatural thriller, which aims to make us pause and ponder on some important moral questions. The main character is an American spy in… →

  • Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings

    There’s not more to it than the title suggests. So, I can also be short in my review. I didn’t like it at all. Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings (Little Black Classics #36) – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe →

  • Night Call

    Set in an alternative 1930s New York, a former police officer Roche and his new automatic (robot) partner Allen, need to keep a perilous peace in order to keep war from its streets. This was a gritty novel. The alternative setting worked quite well, but ultimately it also left me with a lot of questions.… →

  • Well, they are gone, and here must I remain

    Well, they are gone, and here must I remain – a long title for a short collection of poetry. Maybe a bit of a weird choice, since it is quite the mouthful. On the other hand though, it sort of resembles perfectly the kind of romantic poetry that is collected here. Coleridge was one of… →

  • Dead Jealous

    Dead Jealous is the seventh book already about Calladine and Bayliss, detectives is Leesdon, a small English town with surprisingly high crime rates. A lot is going on once more, multiple cases and it is a rather short read at that. To that is added the personal lives of the detectives and you end up… →

  • Gooseberries

    This collection of three short stories was my introduction to Chekhov, and it failed to really sway me. The writing was good, if a bit depressing, but the stories failed to grab my full attention. I have to admit that the shorter the story, the less likely I am to like it. It is too… →

  • Gideon the Ninth

    First read in the #ReverseReadathon How would I even start talking about Gideon the Ninth? I had come across it so many times on all the bookish channels, that I was seriously hyped for it. Then, it was in Amazon sale for only 2$ and there was not a bone in my body that could… →

  • How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

    Michel de Montaigne was apparently one the most important French Renaissance philosophers, but I had never heard of the good man before picking up this Little Black Classic which bundles six of his essays. I was pleasantly surprised. His ideas were not particularly shocking (at least not today) but the meandering way in which it… →