..Hey Everyone!!
I hope you’d enjoyed ‘Horoscopes for the Dead’ by Billy Collins and ‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison!! Both were EXCEPTIONAL works!!
Why do I believe this?
Because before I’d opened either cover, I’d looked forward to studying how Collins and Morrison’s deployment of literary attributes (e.g. figurative language, active voice, etc…) would glue me to the pages. Except after I’d closed them, I’d realized I’d indeed been stuck to the pages but owing to a different reason…
Realism…
In literature, realism’s when an author makes no attempt to ‘doll-up’ a story (i.e. lighten a character’s daily hardship) through literary effects. Instead, an author presents adversity through honesty/truth.
When I’d picked-up each aforementioned literary piece, it hadn’t taken long to recognize their author wouldn’t sugarcoat anything which had produced a magnetism that’d kept me reading. More often than not however, suspense and tension are the forces used to gravitate the reader, but in this case, a rarer element was used.
Nonetheless, we’re still amid the early months of the year, a time when I love to nosedive into my favorite novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde. Given this (and the fact my copy has crumbled), I’d visited a bookstore called ‘Half-Price Books’ on Cleveland’s eastside where I’d picked-up a fresh one. Except given my recent exposure to realism, I also picked-up a couple other novels, all written by a highly-celebrated novelist known for weighty dosages of realism…
George Eliot…
Mary Anne Evans (1819 – 1880; or alternatively, Marian Evans), was a wildly successful English poet, journalist, and translator who had lived in Victorian England. Although she was already a time-honored scholar, she preferred to publish fiction under a male pseudonym so everyone would take her stories seriously.
Eliot wrote/published several popular novels (‘The Mill on the Floss’, ‘Middlemarch’, ‘Silas Marner’, etc…), but for the month of March, we’ll study her first, ‘Adam Bede’, a story about a righteous/intelligent carpenter who falls in love with a woman who—just before their marriage—becomes pregnant by another man.
Before recently however, I hadn’t read a word of Eliot. But after the initial chapter of ‘Bede’ (I’d read yesterday), I’m looking forward to spending the next few days reading the entire work!
Hence if you’re probing for a book with realism, appealing characters, and picturesque prose, stop-by your bookshelf, bookstore, or local library, snag ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot, and read it with me this March.
Many thanks, & we’ll ttys!!
Phil