While Woolf can easily be criticized for neglecting to research the technical details and for writing only about the upper classes and their manias, to dwell on these issues would be entirely beside the point. E. M. Forster put it best when he described The Voyage Out as “…a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis.” Continue reading →.

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather was first published in 1925. Split into three parts, the first and last take place in a small college town on Lake Michigan. These two parts tell the story of Professor St. Peter and the changing relationships within his family. The middle section is Tom Outland’s narrative about his adventures in the Southwest where we enter with him into a world of desert mesas and long hidden civilizations. Continue reading →.

If the prior two books lacked romance, this one makes up for it. Anne and two college friends share a quaint house in Kingsport, and there is a constant stream of “beaus” coming through the door. One of the friends, Phillippa Gordon, is an excellent addition to the book. She is vain, but knows it, and that somehow makes her utter superficiality less annoying. Even she has her share of romance, happening upon it–as seems the theme of this novel–where she least expects to find it. Continue reading →.

Womanless, homeless and broke–this is the way Jim Qwilleran finds himself at the beginning of any early Cat Who novel. In The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern Jim is richer only by the company of one cat who shares his interesting in solving crimes. He is older by six months. He has a job, albeit with a shaky future. Continue reading →.