General Fiction
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Victorian literature has always been
a passion, and you can find information about
Anthony Trollope's
The Barsetshire Chronicles below as just one example of a
Victorian series I'd recommend. Other fictional works outside of and
within the Victorian period which I would recommend include Seasons of Sun & Rain Einstein's Dreams Back to the Moon Beulah If on a winter's night a traveler Seasons of Sun & Rain
(1999) Dorner used to live in Winona, Minnesota, where I lived for many years with my parents. She taught at Winona State University where I was fortunate enough to take a class in the Victorian Period from her. I still remember some of her lectures because they were that informative and entertaining! Each of her books has been enjoyable to read. She has written a number of mysteries that I would place in the same category (in terms of type of mystery and quality) with those of Mary Higgins Clark or Lilian Jackson Braun. All three have very real characters and a difficult puzzle to figure out. In addition to a book of short stories, Dorner recently published Seasons of Sun and Rain which is about a group of 50-something female friends who spend a week's vacation together, deal with memories -- good and bad -- and struggle to understand their connection to each other. One of the group is now suffering from Alzheimer's. The characters are very alive, full of contrast and struggles, and the book offers some intriguing questions about memory, friendship, and identity. The dialogue is great and keeps the pages turning. Einstein's Dreams A friend of mine at graduate school in Duluth recommended this book to me, and since then I have recommended it to a number of people. This brief book fictionally represents the chaotic visions of time that could have been present in Einstein's mind. What the book does essentially is to make its readers re-think their perceptions of time. Lightman presents a variety of different "worlds," versions of Earth, in which time is different (time goes slower the further away from the surface you are; everyone lives for only one day; everyone is doomed to repeat everything they do but most do not realize it). Although it's resorting to an overused phrase, the book blew my mind and continues to do so whenever I pick it up or discuss it with a class (as I've taught it twice now in a course focused on science and math literature). Lightman has written other books and essays and I also highly recommend The Diagnosis, but I think Einstein's Dreams is perhaps his most creative, imaginative, and intriguing work. Back to the Moon If you've seen the movie October Sky (well worth watching) or read the book Rocket Boys, you've been introduced to Homer Hickam. The movie is a version of his own memoirs about growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia, where he and his friends learned to build rockets for which scientific work they received college scholarships. Hickam went on to work for NASA. Back to the Moon was his first novel and is a fascinating suspense story about the politics and money involved in energy sources; Hickam talks in the introduction/preface about a potential energy source that NASA has yet to explore, and the novel suggests that big business and government interests would never allow such an exploration... It makes you think, but is also just a really good novel. The Barsetshire
Chronicles (1855-1867) When I was growing up I read Barchester Towers and enjoyed it, but at the time was completely unaware of how good the other five books in the series are. As an offshoot of my dissertation reading, I decided to read through the six Chronicles of Barset, and enjoyed them so much I wish I could convince others to read them too so I could talk about them! While some are longer than others, the recurring characters, the sarcasm and satire, and the poignancy of some passages made me feel as if I walked and talked with the characters. The Warden, the first book, is relatively short and easy to read. It introduces Mr. Harding, who is an elderly minister, and his daughters and son-in-law. Barchester Towers, the second book, is probably the most famous of the six and has a lot of humor. Some of the humor in each book relies on a little bit of knowledge of the period, BUT this is easily gained by a quick reference to the footnotes and the books CAN be enjoyed without understanding all of the references. I look
Beulah
(1859) I literally found this book by accident as I was looking in my local public library for the second mystery by Janet Evanovich (Two for the Dough), which is another series I highly recommend. Evans - Evanovich...the cover of Beulah popped out at me so I picked it up. Evans was a nineteenth-century American writer from the South, but I must confess that at times her book seems like it could take place anywhere. I understand from the introduction that her next book deals more explicitly with that particular setting. Beulah follows a young orphan girl through a very well-written and convincing crisis of faith in Christianity and search for an alternative belief system. I decided to read it after the back described its in-depth theological discussions. The description was accurate. Evans manages to include within a very engaging story references to and discussions of wide-ranging philosophers--from Plato to Comte--including Emerson, Theodore Parker, Thomas Carlyle, Feuerbach... The novel was compared at its publication with Jane Eyre and George Eliot's Adam Bede. It is more like Jane Eyre meets George Eliot's life. Evans herself apparently went through a lengthy process of growing doubt in a Christian God, like Eliot and the character Beulah. Beulah is a well-written book (I really wanted to know the ending, which is an excellent sign) that was especially interesting to me because it deals with the nineteenth-century crisis of faith and doubt, something I read a lot about during my dissertation writing process. It also demonstrates, as the novels I use in my dissertation, that nineteenth-century women were actively and intelligently entering into theological and philosophical debates through their novels. If on a winter's night
a traveler At a meeting of the UW Colleges English Department, the guest speaker recommended this book for use in an Introduction to Literature course, and also just as a good book to read. I picked it up afterwards and really enjoyed it. It's a "self-conscious" book in which Calvino, a twentieth-century Italian writer who is now deceased, intersperses the first chapters of a number of different novels he creates with chapters which address "you" the reader and your attempts to read the book If on a winter's night a traveler. It's often humorous, at some points frustrating, and at all times a well-thought out exploration of fiction as a form. I later found out that the novel was in part a response to an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, part of his book Ficciones, which I have since purchased but not yet read. In case this might help contextualize Calvino's book more, it also reminds me of Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy and the second volume of Cervantes' Don Quixote because of their similar ventures into textual self-awareness. I've read a few other volumes by Calvino since reading this text, and I'm at the point where I would recommend anything he wrote. He is always interesting. The Scapegoat I first read du Maurier's Rebecca in an honors class in
college. After I finished reading this book, I wished I were in a class
so I could sit and talk with others about it for three hours. It's an
intriguing story about a man with no family or friends who is forced to
change places with another man whose family and friends hate him -- for
good reason. We discover the truth behind the man's past as the book
proceeds, and at the same time du Maurier makes interesting commentaries
on family, relationships, the self, the doubled self, and good and evil
within each of us. It definitely held my attention and there are lines
in the book that truly show her genius for writing. |
forward
to reading more of Trollope's novels and have bought copies of the
Palliser novels to tackle in the future.