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sinceremercy's reviews
45 reviews
Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier
4.0
Starts off somewhat slower than I was expecting but I really started enjoying it once Théodore showed up! I will admit to having skimmed some of the long scenery descriptions however on the whole it was thoroughly enjoyable and holds up surprisingly well in my opinion even by modern standards as an example of good [explicitly] queer literature.
The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator by Joakim Palmkvist
3.0
The translation of this is great! The prose is really smooth and readable, not dry but not inappropriately casual either. Largely the story was well told and the victim was treated like an actual person; the parts that are dramatised are not distracting and the transcripts from interviews and such are not boring.
The pacing felt somewhat uneven. At parts I was gripped and read avidly. At another part I set the book down for like a month. Therese gets a LOT of focus, at some times possibly to an excess, but oddly we don't get very much of her reaction at the end when the investigation actually pans out.
Ultimately if you like true crime, this is a good read. I did like it, but it was also nothing exceptional.
The pacing felt somewhat uneven. At parts I was gripped and read avidly. At another part I set the book down for like a month. Therese gets a LOT of focus, at some times possibly to an excess, but oddly we don't get very much of her reaction at the end when the investigation actually pans out.
Ultimately if you like true crime, this is a good read. I did like it, but it was also nothing exceptional.
All the President's Men by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein
3.0
My professor warned us that this book was Very Dry, but I totally disagree! It reads like true crime, and well-written true crime at that (probably because that's basically what it is). The facts of the case are clearly center stage, but you don't miss out on the tension and emotion in the story and you get a good feel for Bernstein & Woodward as people. So, I do think it's an entertaining read-- not that that's the most important reason to read it.
For obvious reasons it feels extremely relevant in the modern day, which is not a "good" thing but does make it more impactful reading.
For obvious reasons it feels extremely relevant in the modern day, which is not a "good" thing but does make it more impactful reading.
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
4.0
I quite like Pamela and am a little surprised by the apparent widespread dislike for the title character, who is in my opinion considerably less annoying than the average 15-16 year old girl.
I find the novel to be Unfortunately Plausible and maybe has extra relevance today in the "#MeToo era" or whatever you want to call it.
B----- remains terrible all the way through and his "reformation" is not at all satisfying but that too is realistic. I am impressed by Richardson's ability to convincingly write both a teenage girl who is being abused and a horrible abusive man who, even when he is "better", does not in any way become a different person. From a psychological point of view all of the characters are impressively realistic and consistent in my opinion although this seems to be a controversial one.
I find the novel to be Unfortunately Plausible and maybe has extra relevance today in the "#MeToo era" or whatever you want to call it.
B----- remains terrible all the way through and his "reformation" is not at all satisfying but that too is realistic. I am impressed by Richardson's ability to convincingly write both a teenage girl who is being abused and a horrible abusive man who, even when he is "better", does not in any way become a different person. From a psychological point of view all of the characters are impressively realistic and consistent in my opinion although this seems to be a controversial one.
Joseph Andrews/Shamela by Henry Fielding
3.0
I didn't like Shamela (which I read first). To my surprise though I really did like Joseph Andrews as a novel in its own right. It's definitely more comical in tone than Pamela and the narrator has a very prominent voice. Fielding offers both Joseph and Adams as 'virtuous' male characters, the one a figure of chastity and love, and the other of charity, sort of as a counterpoint to Pamela's main male character who is consistently terrible. More over, Joseph Andrews offers a much broader look at 18th century English society and its flaws, the problems with the class system and the way marriage works, etc, whereas Pamela is a much more intimate story.
There is unfortunately a "stolen by g****ies" plotline that pops up at the end of the story, though.
There is unfortunately a "stolen by g****ies" plotline that pops up at the end of the story, though.
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
2.0
I didn't like this book as much as my classmates did, and I only finished volume 2 a month after class ended (woops). I was never able to get past the impression that this was an older man writing a teenage girl having sex; unlike Pamela, she never felt like a believable character. However my classmates disagreed with me on this and part of that is I guess the genre (porn).
While this novel seems much more in the tradition of French hedonism, it in fact clings to the English bourgeois tradition in some surprising ways. The novel argues that pleasure is pleasure, that sexual love, while separate from romantic love, can coexist with it, and that vice can lead to virtue. Fanny even "reforms" a man who has a fetish for virginity, a kind of subversion of the trope of the gentleman reforming the prostitute. However, men who have fetishes (such as the sado-masochist client) are still depicted as having something fundamentally wrong with them and are physically/mentally unhealthy. And Fanny, after spying on two men having sex, is so furious at their "criminal" actions that she runs to try to summon the whole house against them, apparently intent on a lynching. So much for pleasure being pleasure.
On the other hand, she does this only after watching them the whole time, with the act described in the same erotic detail as other acts, and the men do manage to escape, so...
While this novel seems much more in the tradition of French hedonism, it in fact clings to the English bourgeois tradition in some surprising ways. The novel argues that pleasure is pleasure, that sexual love, while separate from romantic love, can coexist with it, and that vice can lead to virtue. Fanny even "reforms" a man who has a fetish for virginity, a kind of subversion of the trope of the gentleman reforming the prostitute. However, men who have fetishes (such as the sado-masochist client) are still depicted as having something fundamentally wrong with them and are physically/mentally unhealthy. And Fanny, after spying on two men having sex, is so furious at their "criminal" actions that she runs to try to summon the whole house against them, apparently intent on a lynching. So much for pleasure being pleasure.
On the other hand, she does this only after watching them the whole time, with the act described in the same erotic detail as other acts, and the men do manage to escape, so...