During my Balzac phase in 2013, I loved Père Goriot. (The title of the Penguin is Old Goriot.) I experienced the thrill of falling into a spellbinding story and recognizing a tour de force. Père Goriot is said to be one of the best books in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy), a cycle […]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that everybody photographs everybody else standing beside Judith Shea’s sculpture, “Post Balzac,” at the sculpture park in Des Moines. Shea’s sculpture is based on Rodin’s 1898 “Monument to Balzac,” but they are very different. While Rodin shows Balzac wrapped in his coat, Shea reveals an empty coat. Shea said […]
It’s winter! What are you reading? It’s time for cocoa and books. And so I asked several bloggers, commenters, and friends for winter recommendations. Fiction? Poetry? Nonfiction? Cozy? Mysteries? Classics? You’ll find it all. You can read Part One here. And now: PART TWO, WINTER READING RECOMMENDATIONS Jean writes, Currently, I am reading “The Tale […]
Blogging can be boring. Same-o, same-o. Like a journalist, I can bang out a 700-word post anywhere: at Starbucks, in a bubble bath, or the wilds of the Wisconsin woods. I often do. There was the daily diary. Deleted it. There was Frisbee: A Book Journal (still twirling in cyberspace) and Mirabile Dictu since the […]
Some favorite books of the year (and more below) My husband and I started making “Best of the year” lists in the ’90s. We typed them up in an amateurish newsletter and mailed them to friends. Our friends laughed at our lists and made counter-lists. Did we really think the best book was X, the […]
Bloggers have so many projects. There are the reviews (in my case, the “bookish” posts), the group reads, the photos of bookshelves, the Year of This and the Month of That. Bloggers frequently complain of exhaustion, and no wonder. We’re essentially writing our own book newsletters, and some of us write too much. I wrote […]
Wouldn’t it have been fun to read Balzac as each volume of The Human Comedy was published in the nineteenth century? We would have read him furtively while cleaning our master’s study (I was a maid in my previous life, which is why I abhor cleaning), or openly if we were impoverished spinster stenographers wearing […]
I need a Balzac rolodex. Yes, I am a Balzacian. I went through a Balzac phase in 2013, and now I’m in another. I need a rolodex to keep track of the hundreds of characters in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, a cycle of approximately 95 novels, stories, and novellas. Recently I have inhaled three of […]
If you spend all your leisure in bookstores, you probably are too fond of books. If you spend your time hunting for the lesser-known novels of Balzac, you are probably obsessive. There are approximately 90 novels, novellas, and short stories in Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy), a series in which Balzac portrays French […]
Balzac mania. Others have had it, never I. I prefer Zola to Balzac and have read many of Zola’s 20 Rougon-Macquart novels. Of course I’ve also read Balzac over the years, and I love Cousin Bette. But Balzac is choppy. He includes too much background at the beginning of his novels. Once you get to […]
mirabile dictu 