Howling Frog Books

Even this edition wouldn't have helped. This month's theme is Realism in Fanda's Literary Movements Challenge.  I chose to read Henry James' The Wings of the Dove , which is one of my Classics Club titles.  I quite enjoyed Portrait of a Lady a couple of years ago, and figured I would enjoy this too. Boy was I wrong.  Wings of the Dove is 700 pages long; 300 pages into it, I was unhappily slogging and sometimes skimming.  I had never gotten to care one bit for any of the characters.  I was curious about the scheme that is the center of the plot, but it hadn't even gotten started yet and I was losing patience.  I felt that there was so much detail and nuance and fine shading of feeling that the characters and plot were lost in the morass--a real forest-for-the-trees situation.  I eventually told myself to stop suffering and put the dang book down already, and promptly felt better. So I am hereby admitting defeat on this title.  It's my first Classics Clu

Last of the Mohicans , by James Fenimore Cooper At last, I have finished my Unreadable Book!  Friends, let me just warn you about this one: don't bother unless you have a really good reason.  It's been on my TBR pile for a couple of years, after a bookish friend of mine (IRL!  I have friends who like to read as much as I do!) said that it was her very favorite book.  I kept meaning to get to it, but American literature is not one of my big favorite things and somehow other books always line-jumped ahead.  This year I put it on my TBR list for Adam's challenge so that I would jolly well HAVE to read it, and... 1827 painting by Cole illustrating a scene in "Last of the Mohicans" Last of the Mohican s is a riproaring frontier adventure with lots of action and suspense, buried under a mountain--no, a mountain range --of excessive verbiage.   Cooper was writing in the 1820s, and his prose combines a 19th-century enthusiasm for euphemism and verbosity with a re