This page is the place you should start if you want to understand my unique take on book reviews. These books are books that, with rare exception, I have not read, yet. So you won’t find Dostoevsky’s  Crime and Punishment or Smollett’s Expedition of Humphrey Clinker on my list, since I read those when I was a younger man and a more avid reader. I would recommend both these books, as well as a thousand others that I have read but no doubt will never read again.

Then I was searching after answers to questions I had about life. This list is more an effort to

• evaluate the experience of literature to see whether it truly reflect my sense of the literary values I have found in others works
• evaluate the experience of literature to see whether I have missed something along the way
• to fill out some of the classics that I had missed along the way

The first thing you should read is my explanation of what I am looking for when I write, for this informs the way I read.

What I Am Reading This Week: An Introduction

So after reading this (who am I kidding?), you might find these links interesting for those books that have done the most to inform my view of the reading experience:

My Fifteen Favorite Books
Books I Have Not Read, and Why

There’s more to say than I can say in one single book review, so it may take time to make my literary values clear to the new reader, and even to myself. This effort represent, after all, an experimental hypothesis with all the flexibility of a scientific hypothsis’ being subject to new experiences and evidence, and not a final literary or critical answer set in stone for all time.

Individual Book Reviews

1. P. G. Wodehouse. The Code of the Woosters.
2. J. L. Carr. A Month in the Country.
3. D. H. Lawrence. Women In Love.
4. Roland Firbank’s Valmouth