January 6, 2009

Pride and Prejudice

Written by Jane Austen

“I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who could make you so.”
—Chapter 19, pg.93

Fun Facts

  • Jane Austen was only twenty-one years old when she finished writing the first version of Pride and Prejudice.
  • The original title of the book was First Impressions, however no copy of the original manuscript under that title is known to exist. She rewrote it into the version we have today fourteen years later.
  • Three months after she completed work on the first version of the book, Jane’s father offered it to a publisher who turned it down without ever having read the manuscript.

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TAGS: Bantam Classics, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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December 15, 2008

A Christmas Carol

Written by Charles Dickens

“‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’”
—Stave Three, Page 45

Fun Facts

  • A Christmas Carol is part of a series of five Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848).
  • The work has been adapted for theater, opera, film, radio and television.
  • Contemporaries noted that the story’s popularity helped redefine the importance of Christmas and the sentiments associated with the holiday.
  • Dickens wrote in the wake of British government changes to the welfare system. He wanted this book to reveal the plight of the poor and society’s responsibility to help them.

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TAGS: A Christmas Carol, Bantam Classics, Charles Dickens

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December 8, 2008

Siddhartha

Written by Herman Hesse

“All the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was one world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”
—Chapter Om (11), p.135-136

Fun Facts

  • Siddhartha is from Sanskrit, it is a combination of two words siddha (gotten) and artha (wealth). Together they suggest “one who has found meaning” or “one who has achieved his or her goals.”
  • Siddhartha is Hesse’s ninth novel. Hesse wrote it after spending some time in India during the early 1900s and first published it in 1922.
  • Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.
  • Hesse’s parents expected him to follow the family tradition in theology. Hesse entered the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn in 1891, but was expelled.

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TAGS: Bantam Classics, Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

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December 1, 2008

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Written by Mark Twain

“Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same—she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge.”
—Chapter 28, Overreaching Don’t Pay

Fun Facts

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a continuation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
  • Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
  • Mark Twain’s time as a riverboat pilot inspired his pseudonym and gave him material for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  • The novel has been banned many times by schools and libraries because of its language.

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TAGS: Bantam Classics, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer

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November 17, 2008

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Written by James Joyce

“His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendor that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had been acquainted with nobility.”
—Chapter V

Fun Facts

  • A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man is Joyce’s most personal work
  • It was first published in the United States in 1916
  • It was originally serialized between 1914-15 in The Egoist
  • The novel is a complete rewrite of another story originally titled “Stephen Hero”
  • The title is often referenced and altered in both literature in music
  • A film version was released in 1977 starring Bosco Hogan as Stephen Dedalus

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TAGS: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Irish novelists, James Joyce

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