“You speak truly. That we never meet again is the wisest and only proper course. That I regret the past as much as you do yourself, it is hardly necessary for me to say.” After reading Jude the Obscure with a group on Instagram I decided to join their year-long Thomas Hardy Readalong—one book each …
Category: English LIterature
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy (1895)
He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them…They took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being …
Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie (1934)
Neatly folded on the top of the case was a thin scarlet silk kimono embroidered with dragons.“So,” he murmured. “It is like that. A defiance. Very well. I take it up.” This is my first Agatha Christie and my introduction to the famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. As a novice Christie reader and one who …
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Emma, Jane Austen (1815)
The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself: these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any …
Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)
The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes–when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward …
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
“Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated;…perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”Mary Shelley “Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery…”Victor Frankenstein The catalyst for Frankenstein Mary Shelley explains, is that she and her husband …
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde none could come near me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde was pure evil. What a …
Continue reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Night and Day, Virginia Woolf (1919)
You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, …
Villette, Charlotte Bronte (1853)
I had nothing to lose. Unutterable loathing of a desolate existence past forbade return. If I failed in what I now designed to undertake, who, save myself, would suffer? If I died far away from—home, I was going to say, but I had no home—from England, then, who would weep? Jane Eyre is one of …
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843)
“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” I have seen multiple film versions of A Christmas Carol, but have never read the book. I now …
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