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The Portrait of a Lady.
New Insider content from Monday – reactions to the Carlos Ruiz re-signing and the Tim Hudson contract. My only previous experience with the American writer Henry James was a failed attempt to read The...
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Little Women.
I’ve been busy this weekend, with Insider posts reacting to the Jhonny Peralta signing with St. Louis and the Brian McCann signing with the Yankees. I’ll continue posting reaction pieces as needed this...
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The Count of Monte Cristo.
I’ve been lax in book blogging lately, between year-end lists and a run of longer reads (a few of which were duds) and the mystery/detective novels I don’t review unless it’s by an author I haven’t...
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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
The titles listed in Bloomsbury’s 100 Must-read Classic Novels (actually 99 novels plus Chekhov’s short stories, which is totally cheating) were largely familiar to me before I’d even started working...
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The Yard & Adam Bede.
The Yard, Alex Grecian’s first prose novel – he’s previously co-authored the graphic novel series Proof – is a hopelessly formulaic, lurid crime story that feels far more like an attempt to create a...
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Bleak House.
My second “mock” draft for 2014 is up for Insiders today. I’ve had mixed views on Charles Dickens over the years, loathing his work when forced to read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities in high...
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Les Misérables (book).
My breakdown of the Jeff Samardzija trade is up for Insiders now. Victor Hugo’s The Wretched (Les Misérables) is by far the longest book I’ve ever read, over 1300 pages and well over half a million...
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The Heart of Midlothian and other recent reads.
I hosted the Baseball Tonight podcast today, and will do so three more times in the next week – Thursday, Friday, and Monday the 18th. Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian was the last of his Waverly...
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The Magic Mountain.
I have a new post for Insiders up on ten breakout players from 2014 whose performances look sustainable to me. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was, until this month, one of the only novels to ever...
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War and Peace.
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace appears on most lists or rankings of the greatest novels ever written; Daniel Burt had it second in his all-time rankings in The Novel 100, and it appears on the Bloomsbury...
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