Monday, January 29, 2007

"The Terror", "Proust in Love", and "The Road to Middle-Earth"

Books I'm reading or have recently read will now show up in the librarything sidebar.

The Terror
was a 700+ page terror, but a boon for fans of suspense, adventure, historical fiction, and fantasy. It reminded me of a Preston/Child novel. Loved it. I read it in a day and a half, partly because I was sick and partly because the "weather outside was frightful."

Proust in Love is an interesting combination of biography and literary criticism. How could Proust's amorous adventures not affect his incredible book, which is considered the apogee of novelistic studies of love in its multiple forms? William Carter makes his point delicately, with intimate details from Proust's correspondence and from biographies written by those who took their shine from his luster.

The Road to Middle-Earth is more pure literary criticism, but of definite interest to fans of Tolkien's work. Shippey makes the argument that Middle-Earth began as an exploration of Old English words for which there was no definition. Tolkien knew that the author of Beowulf would not have used certain words without their having a meaning, if not being literal things, at the time of composition. Leaves much to ponder about the history of our language and the depth of Tolkien's thinking.

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