Much Ado About Nothing Becomes Everything
589366
This 80-minute long album is a Morton Feldman-like exploration of time, where quietly over the stretch of time five musicians improvise, adding notes and phrases in harmony or in contrast or in commentary. The instrument that commences the enterprise after 3-minute piano percussive introduction is a Korean haegum, a cousin of the Chinese erhu fiddle, which is played by Soo-Yeon Lyuh. The deeper string sound is from the cello of Danielle DeGruttola. Discordant piano chords arise soon; and they come from Tania Chen. Further percussion is the art of William Winant. Finally, Henry Kaiser plays his various guitars, from 13-string acoustic harp guitar, to several electric guitars, to 6-string acoustic bass, and a 7-string electric. Not much happens that the listener can chew on, which is the point: as the "Chapel" in the album title suggests, this music is the background or focus of a meditation. In Zen meditation, the teacher will tell the student that if she becomes bored, she should continue for another 30 minutes, and if boredom persists, then maintain the practice for another 30 minutes; eventually boredom will depart and everything will become first interesting than finally perceived just as it is. This album may drive the impatient up the wall, but without thinking about it and just letting the sounds flow, the music may become witty and then, about after 1/3 into the single track, somewhat noisy and energetic. Toward the end, with Winant's bells and the guitar's metallic glissando, and the haegum's sirened string slides, the piece becomes wildly interesting and encompassing. There is no plan to this album; it is stream of consciousness and gestaltic interplay. Continuous but numbered sections would have been useful. The cover photos are of a typical Korean temple and the bold psychedelic designs continues within, in coffered ceilings. The wood art on the wall of the recording studio is similar to the works of Joo Carlos Galvo (though not by him). The album title, Megasonic Chapel, is based on the recording studio, Megasonic Sound, Oakland, CA. Musically, the album is a mess of self-indulgence, but in context of a spiritual listener, then function becomes key and reason emerges from madness.
3268448
It took me a while to finally check this book out of the library, and, yes, I admit it. The reason for all of that time elapsing was mainly the title and the cover. I usually try not to break the age old "never judge a book by its cover" rule, but every now and then I slip up. This time, however, I was able to recover my balance before I fell completely.
MUCH ADO ABOUT PROM NIGHT is a very witty rendition of Shakespeare's classic play "Much Ado About Nothing." McCant's story, however, takes place in a Southern California high school during the weeks preceeding the school's highly anticipated Junior Prom. The protagonist, Becky is a counselor for the school's somewhat controversial Peer Counseling Network (PCN). and many of the best parts of the book are from when she's helping her "patients" through the agonies of pre-prom stress. Her friendly adversary is the liberal-minded Jeff, editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. Their verbal sparring was another of my favorite parts of this book as I've always apprecited intelligent arguments.
Overall, this is quite an enjoyable book. It's not great literature, that's for sure, and the story seems to run out of steam towards the very end, and some of the characters seem a little flat, but I still enjoyed it. Good reading for the beach or something like that.
Enjoy!
2890316
I first read "Resurrection" as a teenager. Rereading it forty years later, I was in a much better position to appreciate the breadth of Tolstoy's vision and his passion for justice. As his final novel, "Resurrection" is a kind of summing up by Tolstoy of the absurd and oppressive conditions of daily life for people living in the corrupt, stratified society of late 19th century Russia.

The plot is relatively simple. A young prince finds himself on a jury determining the fate of a prostitute, Katusha Maslova, accused of poisoning her client. Turns out, Prince Nekhludov had seduced the girl ten years before which began her descent into a life of drinking and prostitution. Conscience-struck by a mistakenly arrived at "guilty" verdict, Nekhludov decides to do everything he can to have the conviction reversed or, failing that, to follow Maslova into exile in Siberia, even to marry her, as restitution for the part he played in her downfall.

As Nekhludov files appeals in Maslova's behalf, he comes into contact with different officials of the legal system who are arbitrary, corrupt, incompetent and brutal. As Maslova is absorbed into the prison population and then transported to Siberia, the prince becomes immersed in the vast machinery of the prison-industrial complex. His desire to save Maslova is transformed into a bigger quest to expose and reform a massive system which imprisons millions of people unjustly. His quest for personal redemption is linked to the need for a radical transformation of all society.

Along Nekhludov's journey, Tolstoy discusses the evils of property ownership, religious hypocrisy, uneven accumulations of wealth, unequal applications of the law, the treatment of political prisoners v. `common' criminals, and the big question of who really has the right to judge and punish others. In long, harrowing scenes of the travel to Siberia by train, cart and foot, Tolstoy conveys the misery of the people and the insanity of the system. In dozens of short character sketches, he describes how individuals got caught up in the system, how many of them have no hope and how many die from disease and exposure. "Resurrection" is a powerful cri de coeur from one of the world's greatest writers.

I liked the way the Nekhludov-Maslova story was finally resolved in a way I didn't quite expect, with Maslova essentially working out her own salvation. But I was disappointed by the final chapter of the book in which Tolstoy quotes the Gospel of Matthew at length. It felt tacked on and inadequate, as though Tolstoy felt he had to toss some generic nostrums to readers. There's nothing wrong with promoting humility and forgiveness and I understand these values are consistent with the theme of "Resurrection," but exactly how these qualities are supposed to magically conquer the intractable, pervasive injustices that have been so vividly described throughout the book left me scratching my head. I'd bet on the godless revolutionaries myself.
464603
It's important, when reading this, to remember that "David Copperfield" was originally published in 20 monthly installments, rather than as a single work of fiction.  Each installment was only 3 to 4 chapters long, and the final two installments were released together as a double-volume.  This was kind of like 19th-century Netflix; you got to watch the two-part series finale all at once rather than have to wait another week to see how it all turned out.

When read as a single novel, there's a fair bit of repetition involved (and Dickens famously was paid by the word, which led to the invention of such loquacious characters as Mr. Micawber, who never uses five words when 50 would suffice).  I read it basically a chapter a day, with most chapters taking up about 30 minutes of my time.  In this method I still got through the book faster than the 19th-century target audience would have done, but still got to live with the story for more than two months of my life.  I felt somewhat bereft when it was all over.

While "David Copperfield" is deemed highly literary today, it was also the cutting edge of popular entertainment when it was written and released.  The book follows David Copperfield (whose life, in many respects, followed the broad contours of Dickens' own life) from birth through adulthood.  There are many self-contained episodes throughout the book, but there's also a fairly regular cast of characters who show up in every installment.  Each of these characters are vividly portrayed, and quite memorable: David's childhood nurse, Peggotty, and her extended family; David's two school classmates, Steerforth and Traddles, whose lives go off in quite different directions; Agnes, Dora, and Emily, the three women in David's life; Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick, who serve both as comic relief and as David's moral compasses; and the Murdstones and Uriah Heep, because every story needs despicable villains.  You won't forget many of these people in a hurry.

While not all of these characters are present for the whole novel, they each get their own story arc; nobody disappears throughout the book, and David runs into them over and over again even as his life takes him to different places and social ranks.  This is true, incidentally, of minor characters, many of whom return in the final chapters just so we can see what they've been up to.

"David Copperfield" is a richly rewarding experience to read; while there are lots of soap-opera twists, alternating with moments of high comedy and profound tragedy, the writing style is also very compelling, with Dickens being a master of comical or cynical observations; it's laugh-out-loud funny in many places.  Dickens was also interested in the law, which is how I make my living; his sardonic observations on the state of 19th century British jurisprudence are accurate and funny; the profession really hasn't changed all that much in the past 150-plus years, has it?

Best of all, among all the Dickens' novels, this may be the one with the fewest anti-Semitic statements; I was only able to count one in the whole of the book's 64 chapters.
2029880
Composed long before there were rules about what a novel is supposed to look like, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" is a visionary piece of literature, a book so original in construction it almost defies genre.  Conceived by an Anglican vicar who, under the comic influence of Rabelais and Swift and equally informed by Cervantes and Shakespeare, turned to writing fiction later in his life, it is an inadvertent masterpiece, the product of a writer who just wanted to have fun and entertain his readers and ultimately entertained generations.
The book is not a fictitious autobiography, although its narrator Tristram Shandy might have intended it to be; most of the story is concerned not with his life but with his idiosyncratic family and the circumstances surrounding his conception and birth, with many digressions on various related and unrelated subjects.  His father Walter, whose conjugal duties coincide with his having to wind the clock the first Sunday of every month, compiles a compendium of information he calls the Tristrapoedia for the education of his newborn son.  His uncle Toby, an expert in military architecture, rides a hobby-horse and occupies his time with the science of besieging fortresses.  Other characters include Corporal Trim, a former soldier and now Toby's valet and factotum; Dr. Slop, a dwarfish physician who delivers the baby Tristram; and Yorick the parson, who naturally is descended from the infamous jester of the Danish royal court.
There are two aspects to this book that distinguish Sterne's style.  The first is that he provides several different channels of narration and never really settles on a main plot thread; he interrupts the flow of one narrative with another, delivering narrative flights of fancy like a marriage contract, a sermon, a notice of excommunication from the Catholic Church, a travelogue for France and Italy, and amusing anecdotes about extracurricular characters.  In this way he presages the modernism of many twentieth century authors.
The second is that he does not restrict his text to English words; he intersperses Greek, Latin, and French passages where he likes, and on occasion he does not even use words at all, but symbols and glyphs to express certain concepts.  A cross appears in the print when a character crosses himself; a character's death is memorialized by a black page; a blank page is provided for the reader to draw (mentally or physically) his own vision of the voluptuous Widow Wadman, who has a romantic eye for Toby; long rows of asterisks and dashes are used for things that are better left unsaid.  At one point Sterne even draws squiggly lines to illustrate the sinuosity of his narrative, celebrating his own whimsy.
"Tristram Shandy" was published in nine volumes over the last nine years of Sterne's life, and whether these were all he had intended is debatable because the narrative is implied to have neither a beginning nor an end; it seems very much like a work in progress.  As such, by modern literary standards it may not be considered a novel, but in the sense of its unconventionality, its supply of so many bemusing surprises for the reader to discover, it is as literal an example of the term "novel" as there is.
1505610
The title may be a little deceiving; Animal Farm is no children's fairy tale about a farmer happily living in symbiosis with his animals. Animal Farm's main objective proves to be a satire about the totalitarianism and an allegory to the communist rise in Russia. Through surreal circumstances, George Orwell conveys the development of a totalitarian society on a farm in England. The animals oust the farmer while the pigs, which are the cleverest and wittiest animals, assume power, just as Stalin took hold of Russia after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II and death of Vladimir Lenin. Throughout the book, unexpected and deplorable events plague the farm, as the animals are mistreated unknowingly through the use of propaganda. Orwell keeps the reader engrossed in the novel as events are ceaselessly happening at every twist and turn. A perfect villain, the pig napoleon, portrays Stalin and slowly destroys the moral and the will of the animals through perpetual and ever growing subtle oppression and manipulation. Napoleon was the obvious choice for least favorite character, while Benjamin, the old donkey added to the novel with cynical comments and remarks foreshadowing of events, was a favorite character. I liked the constant action and flow of events, as well as the underlying morals and messages conveyed through the animals' actions. It was also interesting to trace Russian history with the events of the book, and one will find that Orwell slyly incorporated many events into the book, such as the exile of Trotsky and the formation of the KGB. However, the ending, although politically satisfying to the satire aspect of the book, leaves much to be desired about the well-being of the farm; for Orwell closes with the animals unable to distinguish the pigs between the humans, whom they were trying to liberate themselves from in the first place, yet the future of the farm appears just trail off spiraling downwards. Also, the fate of Snowball, the pig who assumes the allegoric character of Trotsky, is left unknown. Orwell mentions Snowball's whereabouts in passing and many times it is possibly misconstrued through Napoleon's propaganda. Through reading the novel, I gained erudition in the area of Russian history as well as knowledge into the character of humans and the corruption that can be caused by power. I also learned much about the concepts of propaganda, totalitarianism, and communism. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books with profound philosophy towards the character of humans or those who enjoy political satires. For those just looking for an entertaining story, Animal Farm does not lack in a compelling storyline, but has symbolism that is much deeper than the literal action. This being my first George Orwell novel, I would look forward to reading any other books written by him, for I enjoy his style of writing and enjoy the greater morals dealing with society and human character. Though ironic that such a profound lesson can be taught through the simplest of creatures, this book is another reminder that sometimes the simple things in life are the most important.
1498207
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,-
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
----William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

Based on Shakespeare's famous play, Much Ado about Nothing , Marian Manseau Cheatham, a Chicago based author, has penned her latest novel, Ruined which explores the roller-coaster ride of the emotions of teenagers and their impulsive attitude over everything in the twenty-first century.

Synopsis:
Blythe Messina, the senior year student of Stratford High is no longer in a relationship with the lacrosse star of her school, DB Whitmore. But it is getting impossible for Blythe to get over DB Whitmore when her uncle Leo is sponsor of the whole lacrosse team. Her niece, Bonni Messina is falling for another lacrosse star named Cory Rash. But when scandalous and illegal photos of Bonni and the lacrosse captain are texted among the whole school, Boon's reputation is immediately jeopardized. She begs for innocence, but no one believes her, not even her boyfriend, Cory, who insults and dismisses her in front of all their friends, except Blythe and DB. But are they going to stay together even after uncovering the truth? Will they even be successful in uncovering the mystery behind the pictures provided there's too much animosity between them?

It's quite clear from the blurb that it's a modern take on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and honestly the author has done a great justice to Shakespeare's one of the greatest plays. The author has crafted the story well with her own words and with modern twist, including the cell phone scandal among a bunch of teenagers. Even the author has skillfully and quite strikingly depicted their impulsiveness, rage and jealously and their fragile hearts, I can't agree more with her story. And mind it, this story has a realistic edge to it, since the characters are very believable and this sort of stuff happens almost every day in a modern day world. With her articulate narration, the author has made her plot thoroughly compelling and very gripping. With short, simple words, she has instilled her readers interest into the story right from the very first page. The only problem was that, I wished, the author could have kept the whole crime against Bonni under wraps and along with Blythe and DB, we too could have uncovered the culprit at the same time. That was my only disappointment. Overall, it's a very sweet, nice and heart-touching story and of course an eye-opener for many teenagers, since it teaches how not to trust some friends by understanding their instincts.

Verdict: Read this book and see how in a modern day world too Cupid can not only kill us with his arrows, but also with traps sometimes.

Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Marian Manseau Cheatham, for giving me the opportunity to read her book.
2778338
This play is really much ado about nothing.  It many impressive elements of a number of styles: absurdism, realism,  modernism. I don't see anything impressive about it as a whole.  The whole thing as mounted is ambitious, but I can't mesh that with what Nicky silver himself says about it in "etiquette and vitriol."  Basically, I feel similarly to Greg about the quality of the play, but not it's stature.  I think the points it makes are knowing, but ultimately immature.  Pterodactyls is a funny play, but you don't remember that leaving the theatre or after reading it.
3848525
It's Shakespeare with a twist in this existential look at nobodys. The two minor characters from "Hamlet" are the major characters in this look at life, the human mind, destiny and death. Written with Stoppard's trademark razor-edge wit, "R&G" ranks up there with some of the finest plays written this century.
3417073
When young Symington Smythe discovers that his father has bankrupted himself trying to climb the social ladder, he decides to pursue his dream of a career as an actor.  In 16th century Britain becoming an actor meant going to London, so off Smythe went.  After being robbed so often that the last highwayman took pity on him and gave him enough for dinner, the young man finally stumbled into the Hawk and Mouse which is so crowded he is forced to share a room with a stranger.  Not just any strange, but Will Shakespeare himself, also off to London to make a start in the theater - as a poet.  In short order the men become fast friends and travel the rest of the way together.
Once in the town Smythe (now renamed Tuck by Shakespeare) and the young bard have a bit of luck and meet Sir William Worley and Kit Marlowe in the midst of a brawl.  When the smoke clears Worley offers Tuck and Will the opportunity of positions at the Queen's Men Theater.  Well, 'positions' is a bit of an overstatement.  Actually, they are given jobs as hostlers, attending the horses of the audience.  Tuck and Will are undaunted, sure that time will favor them (assuming they can get rid of the smell of stable.
On the other side of town, in a much better neighborhood, lives Elizabeth Darcie.  She discovers she has a major problem.  Her father has decided to marry her off to gain preferment and a chance at a title.  Elizabeth, who is quite independent for this age, is outraged.  Prepared to do anything to put off her suitor, she is pleasantly surprised when her proposed husband confides to her that he loves another and has no desire to wed her.  Or does he?  The next day he appears to press his suit, and on the next he is stabbed and dies at her feet.  And then he reappears once more.  All of this panics Elizabeth and catapults her into the arms of Tuck, who is determined to investigate, despite warnings from Will and the other actors.  In short order the plot becomes as complex as one of Shakespeare's own and every bit as exciting.
I was attracted to 'A Mystery of Errors' because I am familiar with Simon Hawkes other works, which are primarily science fiction and fantasy.  Thus, I really didn't know quite what to expect.  Hawke has never shown any interest in historical mystery stories or the stately prose of Elizabethan rhetoric.  The book begins slowly, as Hawke works at the construction of his setting in 16th century England.  Which is no small task.  The slow pace of the first chapters, combined with an excessive use of flower speech put me off a bit and I feared that Hawke was too far out of his element.
Then, as they say, a miracle happened.  The action and intrigue of the plot picked up, the characters lost their stiffness, and everything took on life.  I cannot testify to the 'historicity' of the book, but it presents a believable England complete with spies and retired pirates.  Thus I found the book a light weight, extremely enjoyable, page-turner.  Not quite a farce, but a solid comedy in the Shakespearean style without the burden of iambic pentameter.  I also enjoyed the little the countless tidbits of Shakespearean lore that wander in an out of the story, playing their part as puns and puzzles.  This is a book appropriate to Shakespeare lovers of all ages.  I believe you will find it 'as you like it.'
4300316
The nineteenth century was probably the height of the big fat European melodramatic novel.  At the same time Dickens was churning them out in England, Victor Hugo was working across the channel.  They cranked out thick books with complicated plots, often dependent on coincidence, utilizing a huge cast of characters from all walks of society.  Common characters included kindly old men, secret benefactors, truly vile villains, sweet children who died innocent, and young girls who took on tremendous responsibilities.  Characters often have a dark, secret past that causes them operate under assumed identities.  The stories often take place against a background of social upheaval.  All of these things are present in LES MISERABLES.  Then novel begins when Jean Valjean, arrested for stealing bread, escapes from prison and while committing a robbery upon a priest, is taught a lesson in humility and sacrifice by the priest and vows to reform.  And so begins a sweeping novel set in the early days of post-Napoleon France, when there were still echoes from the French revolution reverberating.
When the novel sticks to the story, I very much enjoyed reading it, but too often Hugo adds a chapter commenting upon social problems, citing ad infinitum episodes from ancient history and French philosophical works.  I consider myself an educated person, but I honestly got only a fraction of these references.  I don't really like abridgements, but if one is not going to include footnotes and annotations, an abridgement is probably not a bad idea.  I chose this edition because the cover blurb states that it is the only completely unabridged paperback edition.  It is 1, 463 pages long.  Most of the time I was counting the pages left to go and calculating how many pages I would have to read per day in order to finish within a reasonable amount of time.
A lot of it is quite moving, some of it I found infuriating, but on the whole it was heartbreaking.  Im glad I read it, but it took a lot of time and effort.  It bears only a slight resemblance to the musical (which I consider a travesty).  Im not so sure that its really the must-read, all-time-great that its touted to be, but its worth reading.  Four stars.
4889398
"Hamlet" doesn't need any introduction -- the tortured Dane, the ghost, meditations on suicide and a climax full of death. But as well-known as the storyline is, the play itself is what deserves the attention, both for Shakespeare's shadowy plot filled with uncertainty and treachery -- and for his brilliant, immortal writing, which takes on a new dimension when read on the page.

Prince Hamlet of Denmark is understandably upset when, only a short time after his father's death, his mother Gertrude marries his uncle Claudius, who is now the new king. Who wouldn't be unhappy? But when Hamlet encounters the tormented ghost of his father ("I am thy father's spirit/Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night"), he learns that his dad was murdered by his uncle -- but he's plagued by indecision, since he's unsure if the spirit was truly his dad.

In response to this vision, Hamlet's behavior becomes more bizarre and erratic -- he dumps his girlfriend Ophelia, arranges a play that mimics real life a little too closely, and generally acts like a loon. But when an argument with his mother ends in tragedy -- and the death of one of Ophelia's loved ones -- Hamlet's fate is sealed as Claudius begins plotting to get rid of him too.

Small warning: like all Shakespeare's plays, it's best to read "Hamlet" after you've seen a good performance, because the entire thing was intended to be acted out. Otherwise, it's like reading a movie script to a movie you haven't seen -- easy to get lost, and the dramatic effects aren't easy to connect to.

But if you HAVE seen a good performance of "Hamlet," then the play will just jump off the page. The plot is a relatively simple one, but it's tangled up in all sorts of moral dilemmas, personal doubts, deteriorating personal relationships, and a creeping undercurrent of darkness. The best part is that Shakespeare leaves you with all sorts of questions that are left up in the air -- is Hamlet crazy or just faking it? Is the ghost really his dad?

And, of course, it contains some of the most intense, powerful examples of Shakespeare's work here -- vivid, nasty imagery ("In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed/Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love/Over the nasty sty"), some bleak humor ("you're a fishmonger"), and Hamlet's immortal soliloquies. It's also one of Shakespeare's most quotable plays -- obviously you've got bits like "Alas, poor Yorick," "to be or not to be" and "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," but there are countless other familiar phrases littered through the text.

On the page, Hamlet is basically an embittered young man who is torn between his doubts and convictions, but is still determined to fix things ("O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!"). A lot of the supporting cast are hard to follow, but there are some brilliant and enduring roles here -- the incestuous queen Gertrude, the subtle menace of Claudius, the windbag Laertes, and Ophelia, whose uncertainties spiral into madness after her ex-boyfriend kills her dad.

It's best to get a grip on this classic tragedy by watching an actual performance, but reading "Hamlet's" text is a vivid experience on its own. Brilliant, complex and intense.
580932
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie is a story that uses an old nursery rhyme that regards ten little Indian boys as a ploy of murder. With this said, the plot is easily foreshadowed, ridding of any element of surprise for method of death, yet the play also has a sense of suspense with who is behind the murder of the ten visitors of Devon Island.
 One of the negative aspects of the play is that there is no character development. The author does not include a lot of details or characterization, and due to this, the plot becomes slightly confusing in regards to which characters the author is referring to. Personally, I had to turn pages back in order to clarify which character had died.
 Some parts of the novel that you might find more favorable are that the novel includes a murder mystery and that it is an easy read with action. You can relax on a couch and read it within a few hours.
 Overall though, I do not recommend this book unless you are looking to kill time. There is no depth to the novel, and the only part of the book that I enjoyed was the manuscript document included at the end revealing the murderer.
2747060
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD is the only novel by Thomas Hardy in which the majority of the characters do not crash into chaos and tragedy.  In fact, it ends on an up note with a long anticipated marriage.  This is not to say that this is a comic novel; there is no such thing for Hardy, but before his world view had totally ossified in his later books, here at least he was able to end with his major characters reaching some happy resolution.

The setting of the book is the village of Weatherbury, a place that resonated nostalgically with his readers as a recently lost pastoral Eden, where mechanization and industrialization had not yet taken sway.  It is here that his characters, as always, either rise in harmony with the immemorial earth or fall in conflict with it. The novel opens with the appearance of Gabriel Oak, whose name allies him to the eternal rich soil underneath his farmer's soiled boots. He is in harmony with nature and lives by its natural laws.  Enter Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine, who does not. She is proud, willful, and more than a bit of a flirt.  When he proposes marriage, she rejects him. Later, she flirts outrageously with the wealthy older William Boldwood, and when he understandably responds, rejects him too.  Later she meets the handsome, dashing soldier, Sergeant Troy, but decides to marry him, mostly because of his sexual appeal, which Hardly emphasizes in Troy's Freudian penchant for twirling his sword directly under her nose. Hardy injects what soon proves to be his usual tragic plot complications and lethal coincidences. Bathsheba encounters Fanny, the former lover of her husband, who has a child by him and conveniently and melodramatically dies right in front of her house. Troy dashes off for parts unknown in disgrace over the incident only to reappear a year later where he is shot to death by Boldwood, who in turn winds up as insane in a mental institution.  The concluding marriage between the now widowed Bathsheba and Oak seems forced and totally unconvincing, especially since she spent the better part of the novel expatiating on their inherent incompatibilities.

In this early work, Hardy was setting in motion those forces that in future books would have a tragic hue much more somber than here. For Hardy, the essence of tragedy is the complex relationship that his characters maintain with nature. Those who call him the poet/novelist of gloom and doom are slightly off the mark here.  In the actions that they take, they choose to throw pebbles into a pool that is deceptively and lethally shallow.  As the pebbles land, the waves spread out and intersect with other and similar waves, causing unexpected tragic complications.  Nature is that pool and the pebbles are the purposeful actions taken by those who ought to know better, but in Hardy's world, of course, they do not.  His people suffer all the time, but they do so in a manner for which they must assume partial blame.  The marriage of Gabriel and Bathsheba will be the last happy moment for any of Hardy's characters in all the rest of his books.
1433943
It's been compared to a classical tragedy, and in some ways it resembles it. However, the most important element in a classical tragedy - from Aeschylos to Marquez - is the inevitability of unfolding of events.
Here the denouement arises from a bureaucratic mistake, then builds on the heroine's carelessness and her inexplicable failure to recruit her natural and obvious ally, namely, her brother and co-owner of the property in question.
Too much is built on these accidental foundations. Unlike, say, King Lear or Marquez' 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold', nothing in this story need have happened.
That is why in the final analysis, despite the fine writing and undoubted empathy, the book fails to convince.
550580
At first glance, the residents of the Novanglian College of Lucidity seem harmless, if a little eccentric. They prefer to call themselves by numbers rather than by names, and are fascinated by astronomy and philosophy. Octavian has lived with the members of the college for as long as he can remember, leading a life dressed in silk, wearing powdered wigs and never worrying about the status of his next meal.  His mother Cassiopeia, a displaced African princess and the only woman at the College, is treasured by the College's scholars. She entertains them with her wit, charm and beauty. With Octavian, though, she is reluctant to speak and doesn't want to answer his many questions about her life before the start of her residence at the College.

As Octavian grows older and learns more about the world, he discovers a horrifying truth: instead of being a cherished godchild to the College, he is its science experiment. In Massachusetts, in the years just before the Revolutionary War, the College wants to prove a theory, and Octavian is their test case: Can African boys and white boys, educated in the same environment, have equal success in their educations? In some regards, Octavian becomes everything the College could have hoped for, but studying science and philosophy also makes Octavian into his own person with his own ideas, not all of which the College agrees with.

After a "pox party," a gathering in which attendees are infected with smallpox in hopes of inoculation, ends in disaster for Octavian, he runs away from his life at the College. Although he is smart and has achieved beyond what most of the College's residents thought he could, he is still considered a worthless failure. He now must make a life for himself in a place that regards him as a lesser form of life, and he cannot trust anyone.

At times, Octavian's journey through brutality and enlightenment is just as dry as the Greek fragments he is forced to read. Despite this, the picture of pre-Revolutionary War life for Africans in America is something new and fascinating. Octavian faces his own chance at independence from the College less than a year before America declares its own independence from England, and the physical fights give him the strength to hold on to who he is even in the face of what was later deemed cruel and unusual punishment. If you live for philosophy and the language of classics, this is the book for you.

  --- Reviewed by Carlie Webber
2075193
Classics are classics because they have this characteristic: they say many different things to many different people throughout time. Otherwise, they become dated and then forgotten (although there are works of art unjustly -wrongly- forgotten). "Madame Bovary" can be read from different perspectives (i.e. it might be worth reading it more than once). For other reviewers, like Gabrielle Renoir, it is "a romantic novel about the dangers of reading romantic novels", which is an original and witty remark.  But it is also, as other reviewers have noted, a pure exercise in style. The legend around this novel includes the fact that Flaubert was bored with the story and the main character, certainly an unlikable woman. Supposedly, Flaubert tried to write a novel "about absolutely nothing", so that style and wording would be all in the book.  It is these things and many more: a novel about life in the province; a novel about the delusions of a bored small-town housekeeper; a novel about infidelity; a novel about nothing but pure grammar; and a novel about human nature. The plot is well known, so I won't summarize it. Reviewers who read French insist in saying that it should be read in the original. I'm looking forward to do it, as my French advances. Anyway, there is no way to stop recommending this masterpiece. It is not boring at all, although the story and the characters might be. That is genius.