If memory serves, Jane Austen has been a highly esteemed author for most of my life, mostly because of “Pride And Prejudice”. The first...

The “formalist” approach to literature says, among other things, that the author's opinion of what a piece of writing means is no more or...

For a fairly simple story, the title of this novel is – let's face – a trifle confusing. “Elective Affinities”? What the heck does that...

First of all, the title. Jean-Phillippe Rameau (1683-1764) was one of the dominant composers of 18th-century France, and one of the most...

Authors who take pen names are nothing new – Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens, for instance, or even J.K. Rowling for Joanne Rowling. It's...

For a story so crowded with incident, “Castle Rackrent” is surprisingly short. This works largely because the first-person narrator,...

I'm sorry to tell my millions of readers that I can't really tell why this work appears on the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”...

I find myself struggling to remember novels in which priests, monks, and nuns appear in a decent light. This isn't one of them. Denis...

Denis Diderot was a critical thinker and writer immediately before the French Revolution, though not as well-known as Voltaire and...

It's taken me far longer to read “Camilla, A Picture Of Youth” than almost any other book of equivalent length. While I was slogging...

This is one of those novels that I hesitate to comment on, simply because I'm not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and as you can tell...

Everyone agrees that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a great author and very likely a great man. Some of his work, such as “The Sorrows Of...

Here we see one possible disadvantage of reading the books listed in “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” in their order on the list...

Here's one of the earliest of the so-called “slavery narratives,” works from those who lived through slavery times. Thus, they are...

Reading very long books normally doesn't cause me any problems. “The Adventures Of Caleb Williams” isn't exceptionally long – the edition...

I have a confession to make; I had even more trouble getting through “A Dream Of Red Mansions” than I've had getting through the other...

I expected a lot of sexual content from “Justine” - after all it's by the Marquis de Sade. Surprise surprise, its sexual content has...

This is a story by an Englishman, written originally in French, about a caliph in and around what is currently parts of Arabia, Persia,...

“ "Anton Reiser" doesn't read like a novel, a memoir, an autobiography, or a philosophical treatise. At times, it reads like all those...

Okay, I read “The 120 Days Of Sodom” because it's on the list, but I can't imagine why it's there. Now you know what you're in for if you...