Others: Positive A German veteran of World War I observes the changes of the early Twenties.
Genres: historical fiction, classics
Lists: …
Quintus Smyrnaeus
1999 · 316 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveHomer's Iliad begins towards the close of the last of the ten years of the Trojan War: its incidents extend over some fifty days only, and it ends with the burial of Hector. The things which came before and after were told by other bards, who between them narrated the whole cycle of the events of the war, and so were called the Cyclic Poets. Of their works none have survived; but the story of what befell between Hector's funeral and the taking of Troy is told in detail, and well told, in a poem about half as long as the Iliad.
What made the match, strongest first
Charles Dickens
1861 · 484 pages · 9 reviews
Others: Leaning positiveGreat Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
What made the match, strongest first
Arthur Miller
1953 · 152 pages · 0 reviews
The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.
What made the match, strongest first
William Maxwell
1980 · 135 pages · 2 reviews
Others: PositiveOn a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers - one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy - has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys - now a grown man - tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who had the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at.
What made the match, strongest first
Anne Brontë
1847 · 186 pages · 2 reviews
Others: MixedIn her Introduction to an edition of "Agnes Grey," Barbara A. Suess writes "Bronte provides a portrait of the governess that is as sympathetic as her fictional indictment of the shallow, selfish moneyed class is biting." Anne Bronte relies on her own personal involvement in her duties as a home teacher to bring Agnes Grey to life. Agnes, a rector's daughter, must take employment as a governess to help her family make financial ends meet. But her situations with the spoiled, self-obsessed Bloomfield children and later with the ruthless Murray family forces her into a lonely, humiliating experience that is a wearying one extraordinarily blossoming into a romantic relationship with the local vicar, Edward Weston. Agnes' concern for her family brings her to these unfortunate trials where she suffers stupid and egotistic proprietors and their over-indulged progeny. She was not able to foresee the hardships she would have to undergo along with the class snobbery to which she was also subjected. And yet a career as a governess was the only "respectable" job available to an unmarried woman in Victorian England. Bronte's simple and uncomplicated rendition of these sordid affairs made circumstances surrounding such brutish conditions authentic enough to necessitate investigation and improvement.
What made the match, strongest first
Ernest Hemingway
1940 · 471 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveHigh in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels.
What made the match, strongest first
Loved itbut the one that actually I loved so much and ended up being one of my favorite books of this year was The Black Obelisk. It is dense, not an easy read I would say. However, it is also humorous in a satirical way, which I also historically really mesh well with.
