Loved itIn fact, I think it is the best Anthony Trollope book. Though The Small House at Allington may be my favorite, The Way We Live Now is the best, but also so is He Knew He Was Right.
Review 1 of 6
The way we live now (1875)
Others: Positive From a review of the Anthony Trollope canon in The Economist (2020/04/08 edition): “The Way We Live Now” (1875) is as much a portrait of the last few decades as it is of the high Victorian age, and every bit as addictive as HBO’s hit series “Succession”. The novel’s anti-hero, Augustus Melmotte, is one of the great portraits of the businessman as ogre—a “horrid, big, rich scoundrel”, “a bloated swindler” and “vile city ruffian” who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Robert Maxwell (and to living figures who had best not be named for legal reasons). Despite his foreign birth and mysterious past, Melmotte forces his way into British society by playing on the greed of bigwigs who despise him yet compete for his favours. He buys his way into the House of Commons; he floats a railway company that is ostensibly designed to build a line between Mexico and America but is really a paper scheme for selling shares. The Ponzi scam eventually collapses, exposing Britain’s great commercial empire for a greed-fuelled racket and its high society as a hypocritical sham. “The Way We Live Now” is an excellent place to begin an affair with Trollope. It is relatively short by his standards and exquisitely executed. If you don’t like it, Trollope’s world is not for you. If you do, another 46 novels await you.
- ISBN:
- 9781504061063
- Length:
- 502 pages
Genres: historical fiction, classics
Lists: …
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1 of 6
The small house at Allington
Anthony Trollope
1864 · 605 pages · 7 reviews
Others: PositiveThe Chronicles of Barsetshire, Book 5: The Small House at Allington The Small House at Allington introduces Trollope's most charming heroine, the betwitching Lily Dale, onto the Barsetshire scene. She so endeared herself to readers of the Cornhill Magazine, where A Small House was first published in serial form, that Trollope was bombarded by letters begging him to marry her to her lifelong adorer Johnny Eames. Lily is the niece of Squire Dale, an embittered old bachelor entrenched in the "Great House" at Allington. His sister-in-law lives at the adjacent "Small House" with her two daughters Lily and Bell, and the action centers on the relations between the two houses and on the romantic entanglements of the two girls. We also meet Sir Raffle Buffle, the bullying head of a government department, the heartless Lady Dumbello, and the shallow Adolphus Crosbie, who gets his just deserts in the form of the frigid Lady Alexandrina de Courcy. Trollope's characteristic theme of the invasion of a pastoral, conservative world by brash and progressive forces from London gives him an opportunity in this novel for vivid, contrasting descriptions of gracious country living, with croquet and tea on the lawn, and of the cut and thrust of London life in the 1860s. - Back cover.
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José Rizal
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Also classics and historical fiction83%Books and Things loved both14%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations3%Great Expectations
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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.
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Others: PositiveThe Chronicles of Barsetshire, Book 1: The Warden The tranquil atmosphere of the cathedral town of Barchester is shattered when a scandal breaks concerning the financial affairs of a Church-run almshouse for elderly men. In the ensuing furore, Septimus Harding, the almshouse's well-meaning warden, finds himself pitted against his daughter's suitor Dr John Bold, a zealous local reformer. Matters are not improved when Harding's abrasive son-in law, Archdeacon Grantly, leaps into the fray to defend him against a campaign Bold begins in the national press. An affectionate and wittily satirical view of the workings of the Church of England, The Warden, the first of the Barchester Chronicles, is also a subtle exploration of the rights and wrongs of moral crusades and, in its account of Harding's intensely felt personal drama, a moving depiction of the private impact of public affairs.
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