"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Friday, November 12, 2004

Willa Cather - Later Novels

A Lost Lady - Nebraska/Denver.  Woman married to older guy who dies.

The Professor's House - Chicago.  A professor doesn't want to move to his new home.

Death Comes for the Archbishop - Latour and Vaillant.

Shadows on the Rock - Quebec c. 1700

Lucy Gayheart - Music student moves from Nebraska to Chicago and returns after singer drowns.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl - Virginia story of slave and owner


Wednesday, November 03, 2004

The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper, 1826)

Recounts events of 1757.  There were some pretty dramatic scenes from the French and Indian War (or Seven Years War) (an interesting world war).  I liked the book quite a bit.  Magua - bad Indian.  Mohicans were good (Uncas).  Hawkeye - the laconic, skilled, backwoodsman.  British and French soldiers.