In Review…1922

Ever since 2012, we at The Classics Club have accumulated a HUGE data base of reviews from our members. To honour all your hard work, reading and reviewing throughout this DECADE, we will celebrate with In Review.

In Review will be an occasional look back on what you’ve read and what you thought about it.

It will bring bloggers and books out of the vaults and into the open. We hope that by sharing some of your words here, you might discover new authors, or new bloggers. We hope you feel inspired to visit blogs you haven’t been to for ages. It may even prompt you to link your review here. We know all too well how easy it is to forget to link a classics club review!

Time and space will limit how many reviews we can highlight. The aim is to pull just a few from our archives to remind us all of the many wonderful authors, books and reviewers in our midst.

1922 was an amazing publishing year. Over the next few In Review posts we hope to share some of these much-loved one hundred year old stories with you.

• In 1921 Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize (for The Age of Innocence). Her next book, The Glimpses of the Moon, was eagerly anticipated and has been reviewed by three of our members to date.
  • Back in 2014, Karen K. only had a few unread Wharton’s left on her list. I wonder if she has read them all now? And if The Glimpses of the Moon is still one of her favourites? She said that,
    • “Wharton’s writing was excellent, with a lot of witty observations.  It was an easy, fast read, and I got really invested in the characters and how it would all play out in the end, which I found very satisfying.”
  • Kristina was another, more recent fan,
    • “The story was original and dramatic and truly engaging. Watching Susy and Nick attempt to navigate the world of the upper class with no money of their own was morally gray enough to be interesting, and I found myself constantly wondering how far I would go to keep my position among my friends if I were in their place.”
  • RelevantObscurity describes The Glimpses of the Moon as Wharton’s do-over of The House of Mirth where “the dependents, the bright, pretty things of wit and intelligence hoping to break into the community of the wealthy and achieve some level of stability and status.”

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• Over the seas, Virgina Woolf published her third novel, Jacob’s Room.
  • Our one and only review comes from Jason C. back in 2014. He prepares us by saying that, ” this particular novel marks the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s experimental phase“. Before describing his reading experience magnificently: “Her prose is incredibly dense and nearly impenetrable, thick as molasses. Woolf purposely keeps the reader at a distance, almost always in a perpetual state of disorientation where it is made immensely difficult to discern just what exactly is happening. Plot and character are irrelevant. For Woolf, she is more interested in presenting fragments and exploring ambiguity. A hall of broken-mirrors. One must read between the lines, it is all about what is happening beneath the surface. Woolf prefers dropping hints, using subtlety or oblique implications. The novel is a complicated jigsaw puzzle and just when the picture seems to be coming into focus, it soon becomes apparent that the box is missing some of its pieces.”
  • Perhaps there’s a good reason why we only have one member review of this to date!

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• Across the channel another challenging classic was tackled by J.E. Fountain – Marcel Proust and Remembrance of Things Past – all seven volumes, or 3165 pages in the volume that Joseph read. Unfortunately he felt like it was ‘lost time’ and was relieved to be finished with it.
  • “I’ve read numerous commentaries asserting the greatness of this novel, but very little explanation of what makes it great. I know it’s terribly presumptuous of me, but in my opinion it’s the emperor’s new clothes. I may just be very simple; don’t trust my opinion. Read it yourself when you can spare a couple months.”
  • Anyone?

Have you read any of these famous stories from 1922? If you forgot to link your review to our database, it’s not to late to do so right now.

We hope you enjoyed this brief excursion down memory lane.

^Photo credit: Aaron Burden on Unsplash