Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 SPOILERS ABOUND (not only for this novel, but for Anna Karenina, too) If you've been following along, you might recall my brief and unsatisfactory meeting with Emma Bovary, about twenty years ago: a passing acquaintance, which offered only a brief glimpse of the
Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 If you've been following along, you'll know that I was thrilled to join, and have wholly enjoyed the early discussion connected with, Frances' readalong of this classic novel, one which I had false-started with as a younger woman but had
Jonathan Franzen Freedom Harper, 2010 If you happened to have read my response to The Corrections last month, you might well have expected my response to Freedom to appear here sometime in 2020. But although it took me nearly ten years to get around to reading the first, it took only
Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 Emma Bovary and I have met before, but we were not long acquainted. I started to read Flaubert's novel in between high school and university, but I never finished it. Not even close, actually. When we last moved house, I
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections Harper, 2001 They splotch the busy reader's bookshelf: those oversized contemporary novels that you haven't read yet. You expect Dickens and Trollope and Tolstoy to span the reading weeks, but you expect contemporary novels to be more portable, more succinct, more zip-through-able. It makes it harder
