Classics Considered

Portrait of James Thomas Fields (1817-1881), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and William Davis Ticknor (1810-1864). Over on Instagram , I'd mentioned I've been getting into Hawthorne's short stories again.  He's a favorite author of mine, and when I read the collection Twice Told Tales (already five years ago, wow!), I was blown away by the craft of his shorter works.  I finally broke down and bought the complete Tales and Sketches, and for my first reading chose "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," one of the more famous ones. The story is set up simply enough: a young man and clergyman's son, Robin, sets out one day to seek his fortune.  More specifically, he leaves the countryside and arrives in Boston in order to get in touch with Major Molineux, a relative who had once offered to help him get started in life. It's a dark, gloomy night in Boston.  Robin goes from door to door, inquiring for his kinsman.  Everyone laughs at him, while he wand...

Looking for your next great read?  This episode features six little-known classics and why I feel they should be famous.

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt  is from the trio of C. Augustus Dupin mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe .  It is closely based on the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, except the setting is Paris instead of New York City.  Marie Rogêt leaves her home one Sunday evening, purportedly to visit a relative, and she is not seen again until her body is found floating in the Seine.  The newspapers are full of speculation regarding the mystery, but Dupin's only concern is to reconcile the known facts with each other and, slightly different than his British counterpart, to eliminate the unlikely . I remember when I first read this story, years ago, and found it to be pretty bland.  It is more of a commentary than a story.  The one thing that stood out to me this time was the brutality of the crime, much worse than the average Holmes story, but more true to life in that it was based on real life.  I think we tend to have a rose-colored perspective of the 19th centu...

And my first story for the Deal Me In challenge comes from Tanglewood Tales .  How appropriate! "The Golden Fleece" is the last story in Tanglewood Tales , a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys .  Through the frame plot of a young student, Eustace Bright, retelling Greek myths to his little cousins, Nathaniel Hawthorne takes us through the highlights of these sanguinary dramas in a quaint, cosy, and child-friendly format.  "The Golden Fleece" recounts the epic quest of Jason and the Argonauts, as they embark in a fifty-oar ship to find the mythical ram's fleece and reclaim the kingdom that was stolen from Jason's father. I enjoyed this story quite a bit.  It was entertaining and often funny, a nice balance to the darkness of Gatsby to start off this year's reading.  The abrupt ending - and a few loose threads - were the main things I wished had been tidied up.  However, those are more or less due to the myths themselves and not Hawthorne's ...

It is puzzling to me why Twice-Told Tales is passed over for The Scarlet Letter as required/recommended reading in U.S. schools.  I cannot yet compare the contents of the two, having avoided Scarlet Letter this far, but in the context of his other writings such as Blithedale or Seven Gables, Twice-Told Tales strikes me as quintessentially Hawthornesque writing in a more "fun-sized" format. And Nathaniel Hawthorne , especially in Twice-Told, is more contemporary than he is usually perceived.  Born in Salem, MA, in 1804, he lived the first several years of his post-graduation life in a solitude worthy of a 20th-century existentialist. *   Hawthorne's melancholy outlook, however, is intertwined with his own religious feeling, skepticism of society, the legacy of American history, and the two sides of death: the ugly and the beautiful.  Always in his writing runs this thread of contrast between the Jekyll and Hyde characteristics of the world, in which Hawthorne hesit...

Retreating (contentedly) into Tanglewood Posts have been infrequent enough this year; I didn't expect to be 'absent' two months!  Real life has found ways of distracting me from books, but I am anxious to leave my post- Amerika reading rut and morph into summer "heavy" reading. A review for Twice-Told Tales is forthcoming.  I am going through and reading the stories I skipped before, as well as re-reading a few.  While it hasn't got me out of the rut, completionism has been very worthwhile.  "The Gentle Boy" and "The Prophetic Pictures" are probably my favorites so far - the plots are novel-worthy. Summer "heavy" reading is a tradition of mine where I read one large book over the summer.  This year, I may just go for number of books, instead of pages of one book.  I'm taking suggestions for my summer read(s) , preferably something from the uber long list - please comment with any ideas of what you'd like to see!  

New England, early 1800s.  Hepzibah Pyncheon, a hermit-like woman with a severe face and a soft heart, lives quietly in the seven-gabled Pyncheon House.  She is rescued from poverty only when her young relative, Phoebe, comes to live with her and help her run a small shop.  Phoebe is interested to meet the other lodger at Pyncheon House, a daguerreotypist by the name of Holgrave, but more mysterious is Hepzibah's desperation to protect her brother Clifford from the influence of Judge Jaffrey, a cousin and seemingly benevolent man.  As Phoebe and Holgrave discover, the key to the Pyncheon siblings' troubles is deeply connected to the house's history, and that of its sinisterly respectable founder, Colonel Pyncheon. I must say I found Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The House of the Seven Gables to be overall disappointing, in comparison with The Blithedale Romance or The Marble Faun .  If this were a movie, I'd sum it up by saying that the concept was great and the exec...

By Andreas Tille (Own work) [ GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons By Aaron Logan (http://www.aaronlogan.com/ and http://www.lightmatter.net/gallery/albums.php) [ CC-BY-1.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons By AngMoKio (selfmade photo) [ CC-BY-SA-2.5 ], via Wikimedia Commons Kleuske at nl.wikipedia [ GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons I went to Rome this summer; Hawthorne was my tour guide.  I saw catacombs, cathedrals, gardens, tombs, fountains, picture galleries, countryside--he described it all, with great detail.  And we met some interesting people, too. There was Kenyon, the American sculptor, studying the statuary and working on a portrayal of Cleopatra.  He's a "well-informed" gentleman, with an unfortunate tendency to go off onto long, philosophical discourses whenever he has an opportunity to do so.  It is very like him not to choose a Roman legend as his subject...wherever he is, his truest thoughts seem elsewhere. They revert...

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne Edition:   Oxford World's Classics, paperback. My overall rating:  4.5 out of 5 stars 19th century New England.  A group of men and women set out to establish "Blithedale", a community of farmers whose aim is to set an example to the world of their peaceful, profitable, and simpler life.  Blithedale is led by three celebrities:  Miles Coverdale, a poet and the narrator; Hollingsworth, a philanthropist; and the elegant "Zenobia", an author and women's rights advocator.  They are also joined by a strange, timid girl, Priscilla, whose very existence and loving personality changes their lives--or rather, it helps bring to light the true characters of those around her. This book was not originally on my reading list; I chose it at random at the library, because I'd been wanting to read more Hawthorne and it looked very readable.  I really didn't know what to expect. As a work of American literature, I think Th...