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I finally broke down and bought this 1959 novel because I’ve heard so much about it over the years. The Haunting of Hill House contains the requisite features of any ghost story: musty rooms, disorienting angles, a cold spot, disembodied voices, and terrifying noises. What makes it special is the way…

This Pulitzer Prize winner from 1921 reads almost like a Jane Austen novel, except for its mildly feminist theme. Alice is the daughter of Virgil Adams, a man of middling means with no hope of rising above his post at the firm where he has always worked. His wife nags…

Plot-wise, The Weather in Berlin is basic: a movie director, famous for a film he made many years ago, gets a chance to repeat his success. The complications are minimal. The characters are of secondary importance. So what makes this book worthy of a four-star rating? The answer lies in…

Stories about precocious children always remind me of J. D. Salinger’s Glass family; brilliant, but victims of their own intellect. “Too smart for their own good,” T. S. Spivet’s father might say. The crotchety rancher doesn’t seem to know what to make of his twelve-year-old son and his obsession with…

Why bother reviewing a book written more than fifty years ago? Because (1) I’d never heard of it until recently; (2) I suspect many others haven’t either; and (3) an author who can lure you through a story running almost six hundred pages across minefields of mythical characters and untranslated…

If you’ve read George Orwell’s 1984,you’ll quickly recognize its origin in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Both books depict totalitarian societies in which individual liberty takes a backseat to the welfare of the state – obvious references to Stalinist Russia. Zamyatin’s narrator, D-503, is chief engineer for the Integrator, a spaceship built…

This 1899 novel can be described best as a saga of greed and murder. McTeague is a large, slow-witted man who has escaped a mine worker’s life by learning dentistry from a traveling charlatan. Setting up his practice in San Francisco, he goes quietly about his business until a drinking…

I wish I could grant this novel a five-star rating. Though spoiled by vulgar language and an explicit sex scene, Sounds Like Crazy is one of the most original and well-executed novels I’ve ever read. Holly Miller, a thirty-year-old waitress, shares her life with The Committee, five inner personalities born…

Structurally, Far from the Madding Crowd is about a fickle young Englishwoman trying to do two things for which she is unqualified: run a farm and juggle suitors. Bathsheba Everdeen, a poor but beautiful maiden, inherits her uncle’s farm shortly after refusing a marriage proposal from Gabriel Oaks, a good-hearted…

A cat bite is the through-line for this novel of despair about a childless middle-aged couple who feel the world crumbling around them. Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a declining section of Brooklyn Heights. Otto has just dissolved his law partnership with Charlie Russel due largely to personality differences.…