I think it’s fairly obvious that I love reading. More often than not, I read books that have me delighting in the quality of the writing or the cleverness of the story. But sometimes I come across a passage that truly stands out, where I stop and say to myself, […]
Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy Hardy’s novel of romantic entanglements and farming rural life, set in fictional nineteenth-century county Wessex is the perfect book for a summer read. This tale of Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, first published in 1874, takes its time, and let’s the reader […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.