Carl > Recent Status Updates

If the Bible is among the banned items, why is there so much using of the names of God and Jesus and Christ? Are the residents of Montag’s dystopia religious or not?

Ch.37 — Charles’ interview with Mr. Freeman — epitomizes what is so enticing about this book. It casts a delicate psychological drama within a creatively drawn context of history, class awareness, and science. The narrator’s position in the characters’ minds has rarely been used to greater effect, even if the moves on the chessboard are subtle ones.

I continue to enjoy Romney’s book immensely: analysis, history, digressions on collecting, personal stories.

I’m less convinced by her literary evaluations. Her effusive praise of Lennox’s output inspired me to start to read The Female Quixote. I’m not such a philistine as to condemn it after having read only four chapters, but comparisons to Cervantes seem (so far) wildly excessive.

Romney has inspired me to read The Female Quixote. I admit I start out skeptical, given my love of Don Quixote, but I’ll try to be objective. Romney’s praise for it does strike me as appearing hyperbolic. We shall see!

I’m loving Romney’s own book, however. Now that I’m teaching a new Women in Literature course, I’m finding dozens of passages ripe for inclusion for my students.

Such catholicity in its intelligence!

149: Charles’ critique of Victorian conventions
151: yearning for “a world without the tyranny of specialization”
152: “You do not bring the happiness of the many by making them run before they can walk.” (A lesson modern schooling is learning painfully, thanks to inundations of technology.)

I’m curious how this book will resolve itself. It doesn’t seem to be leading up to anything in particular, other than something about the ball, which seems likely to bear a big dollop of anticlimax. But you never know!

So much to appreciate about this novel, which I’m rereading after 35ish years (it’s like new). The narratorial style is extremely engaging; I love the knowing, wry tone, as it dips from 1867 into mentions of the start of World War 2, McLuhan, Proust, British “mods,” Brecht, and so on.

Jaggedness

Still loving the book; this comment is more about me as a reader:

It’s kind of a curse to notice errors in a book, in this case a typo (the “p” missing from “disappear”) and a misspelling (of “euthanized”) within a 10-page spread. It’s hard to be perfect as an editor, but I’ve read hundreds of books in which I’ve seen no errors. Maybe spellcheck didn’t exist in 1983, when this edition came out.