Tag: Classic

BOOK REVIEW: War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Posted September 4, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 11 Comments

You can go on reading books after books for fifteen days or you can read Tolstoy’s undoubtedly masterpiece: War and Peace. How was it, you ask? Easier than I expected. Choosing the right translation plays a major role when you are reading books written in languages you are not familiar of. We will talk about that more, later. Saying that I haven’t read Tolstoy before will be an understatement since I remember my failed attempts with Anna Karenina, twice I think. The Confession is a petite novella and is lying on my shelf just like that for months. Not a single attempt-to-read yet. War and Peace is humongous. Lots of characters introduced in first few chapters will seek you attention. […]

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BOOK REVIEW: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Posted August 14, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 16 Comments

Notes From Underground is not doubt one of the most challenging books I have read in years. It needs a reader’s attention from the page one and till the last page. It must be read when you aware that you are conscious and you are reading the book. This book needs time absorb in a reader’s intellect. It has the power of to kick you in your guts straightaway from the first line of the book. The narrator introduces himself as a man who lives underground and refers to himself as a ‘spiteful’ person whose every act is dictated by his spitefulness. Many people would say that Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Franz […]

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BOOK REVIEW: A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Posted August 2, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 32 Comments

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is a book full of quotes. It is the book, in which the lines must be quoted and not para-phrased. I remember first picking up this book when I was fifteen but never finished. Until last year, when I finished the book. Charles Dickens has been a very important personality in my life. I got to know him when i was thirteen when I remember reading Oliver Twist which had an impact over me at that time. Dickens characters always has never failed to amaze me but A Tale of Two Cities is all about the storyline which is set during era of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It is a story of love, betrayal, […]

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BOOK REVIEW: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Posted June 27, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 51 Comments

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens is considered to be the most closest work resembling Dickens life. It is autobiographical. is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. There is a funny anecdote related to this book. At the time when I was reading David Copperfield, a friend of mine tells me that the first book Sigmund Freud gave his fiancee, Martha Bernays, on their engagement in 1882. At the moment, I wanted to question his anecdote but I thought it otherwise. I said to myself, ‘Why not read this 900 pages book and find the answer to that ‘why’ myself?’ And indeed I did. […]

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BOOK REVIEW: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Posted June 15, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 11 Comments

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is written in 1892 as journal of a woman who failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country and is forbidden by her doctor and her husband to write. The novella can be regarded as the an autobiographical work of the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She was a prominent figure during the first-wave feminist movement in the United States. Much of her life’s work was influenced by the experiences of her early life. Narrated by an unnamed protagonist, the journal records are basically a reality of the protagonist’s own beyond the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wallpaper, a pattern that has come to symbolize her own imprisonment. Gilman formulated her protagonist’s […]

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BOOK REVIEW: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Posted June 11, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 12 Comments

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. The title, ‘Bleak House’ isn’t exactly an invitation for a reader to pick it up, and not a famous one either in terms of other Charles Dickens novels, especially A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Even though it is not as famous as Dickens other novels yet it is one of the vast book and includes engaging variety of minor characters and sub-plots. The novel starts by a description of a murky November day in London. Thought out the novel Dickens’ descriptions of fog over the London in various words and styles is extraordinary. This novel share the brilliance of Dickens’ […]

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BOOK REVIEW: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Posted June 3, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews, science fiction / 4 Comments

Herbert George Wells starts the book THE TIME MACHINE by arguing that the ‘Time’ is itself a separate dimension. Through the protagonist of the book, Wells present a theory that the first three dimensions are occupied by the space and the time is the fourth dimension. Just like the narrator of the book, as a reader of the text, I felt eccentric while coming across the aforementioned theory of Mr. Herbert G. Wells. In the book, an unnamed narrator tells the story of a time traveller whom he met and who then takes over the narration to describe about an event that happened to him. The Time Machine is all about imagination. Both of the person who wrote it, and the person […]

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BOOK REVIEW: The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis

Posted May 20, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Goth, Reviews / 15 Comments

THE MONK by Matthew Gregory Lewis was first published in 1796. It is an early gothic novel and despite being written over two hundred years ago, now considered under the classification of classic, it is a real page turner. Matthew Lewis has described the story in an effective manner, and this book is a good display of his story-telling. Previously read a few books related to the specific genre: Gothic, I am very much fascinated by the writings, the display of the words, and different type of plots. And by other books I mean Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I don’t know if Dracula by Bram Stoker is a true horror or can also be considered as a part-gothic but […]

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Book Review: A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf

Posted April 2, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, Reviews / 0 Comments

There are few writers who write their diaries in a fashion of self-talking. Just to clear one’s mind from all the wandering thoughts. I think, that one of the sole purpose of keeping a diary. While reading A Writer’s Diary, one has to keep in mind that diaries does not have a specific design by which they are written. It’s diary, it can be tedious, and full of blissful thoughts at the same time. It can be an account of one’s daily musings, or be a thoughts keeper from time to time. Virginia Woolf’s A WRITER’S DIARY, is a latter case. It’s an account of twenty-three years, starting from 1918 when Woolf was 36 to her final entry four days before her suicide in […]

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Book Review: Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

Posted March 17, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 0 Comments

To truly enjoy reading literary classics you have to be transported back to a place and time that’s very different from our own. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte is a perfect platform. It’s a tale of the experiences of a governess. The story is a semi-autobiographical work of Anne Bronte who, before getting published was a governess herself. Published in 1847, is a novel about a young woman, in Victorian England, Agnes, is the younger daughter of an impoverished clergyman. Her parents had married against her mother’s family’s wishes and when their fortune was wrecked Agnes determines to help out by working as a governess. The first family she works for are the Bloomfields. Mrs Bloomfield tells Agnes her children […]