July 2025

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Read this out of a sense of duty. Not bad, but guilty, like all Woolf's work, of a definite lack of anything approaching a story.
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
Enjoyable children's novel.
Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
Excellent adventure novel, written with real style.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk & Other Stories
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton
Entertaining tale of a young woman who becomes embroiled in a mother-son conflict over the contents of the family home. Tour de force in terms of technique.
Andre Gide, The Immoralist
Companion novel to Strait is the Gate, I found this highly distasteful from start to finish. I'd place it alongside Death in Venice, a tale of a fundamentally selfish person finding all kinds of spurious justifications for their villainy.
Goncourt Brothers, Journal
Priscilla Parkhurst Clark, Literary France
The most useful look at French literary culture I've yet located.
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel
Hit and miss, as these collections of essays inevitably are.
Joseph Conrad, Almayer's Folly
His first novel. Has its weaknesses, but I really enjoyed it. Excellent mother and daughter characters, who are intent on ridding themselves of Almayer, the husband and father who they view (rightly) as a weak-willed failure.