"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))

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

A Room With A View (E.M. Forster, 1908)


Not very good, but fortunately pretty short. I liked A Passage To India, maybe because I almost always like stories premised on different cultures coming into contact. I listened to Where Angels Fear to Tread on cassette, thought the reader did a nice job and enjoyed the story. So I was looking forward to another Forster book. Unfortunately, this one had cartoonish characters and just wasn’t very interesting. The timing is interesting – in 1908 I think big chunks of upper class or aspiring-to-upper class England still lived like it was Victorian times, though changes must have been well underway (with the remnants blown away in World War I).

Forster apparently was quite impressed with Italy; this book overlapped with some of the Italy material in Where Angels Fear to Tread.

I’m done reading Forster’s stuff.
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