Reading Roundup, April 2025

This post is very late for a monthly roundup, but you’ll forgive me as I’ve just spent two weeks in Japan! It took me a few days after returning home to get my bearings and type these up. Next month: Stephen Spender, Donna Tartt, and perhaps a third book.

Nottingham Lace, E. M. Forster
I read the unfinished manuscript which would have been one of E. M. Forster’s first novels, now included in the Forster Abinger edition volume entitled “Arctic Summer & Other Stories.”

( Read more... )

Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, J. E. C. Welldon
This book imagines itself to be a school novel of the late Victorian tradition, with an odd-couple romantic friendship amidst a background of Muscular Christianity. It also imagines itself to be an Austenian romance crossing class lines. It also imagines itself as a tragedy of youth in the vein of Goethe. Don’t you like all of that in the same novel?

( Read more... )

Stoner, John Williams
In Stoner, we follow William Stoner from his late adolescence through his fateful exposure to the academic field of English literature, in college, and subsequent career as a professor. As the son of poor farmers in a still-young (early 1900s) Midwestern USA, he was fated to experience some hardship—but the slow-burning tragedies of his full life are thoroughly the product of his own choices. This is an engagingly well-written story which sometimes allows you to forget its heaviness as you fly through the pages, but death and defeat haunt William Stoner, and the end of the novel will not allow you to forget that.

( Read more... )