Review:An imaginative concept carried out with beautiful writing. Taking the story of "The Stranger" by Camus told from the point of view of the unnamed arab boy who was murdered by the protagonist in the original story, filling him out with a history and coloring in the background that was omitted. The story told from the other side. Brief, compelling and angry. Read more

Review:This book will make you love mythology again, or will serve as an excellent introduction for those who are unfamiliar. Visual presentation is superb, from typography to color composition. I also have one of the earlier editions that don't have the illustrations, but the simple presence of colors in this one just makes the book much easier to follow and remember certain portions. Read more

Review:"Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it." -Homer (Hector speaking)

The Conflict

At the brink of war, two great nations fought for the sake of glory and honor. One for the rescuing of Helen, the wife of Agamemnon, who was stolen by Paris, and the other for the protection of the fate of Ilium. On the defensive you have the Trojans of Ilium (commonly referred to as Troy), and on the offensive you have the ... Read more

Review:I slogged through the first half of this book and finally gave up. It's just stultifyingly dull. I was reading it as one of those classics that everybody has read, and I remember liking Lawrence's The Rainbow in college, but life is too short for me to bother finishing this one. Read more

Review:This book is spectacular, but advertised as containing audio version as well. The end of the book has a chapter called "Link to free audio recording of Seneca's Letters." The chapter just says "The Letters of Seneca," with no link. The text is not live either, so it's not like you touch it and it goes to the link in question. Read more

Review:The only thing wrong with this book is its pseudo-authenticity. Graves was enough of a classical scholar to give an air of verisimilitude to an entirely too hairy and over-convincing narrative. It sounds like real Roman history unless of course you have read real Roman history. A trap for the unwary, but a corking good read. Read more

Review:I finally finished The Magic Mountain about our aimless young Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps and, in a Kafkaesque twist, ends up staying there for seven years because of a mild fever. Reading the book was like catching a mild fever (in a good way), and, in taking more than a year to finish it (I was reading many other books), I feel that I, too, absurdly overstayed the length of my visit.

I read the book once, independently, with no assi... Read more

Review:The recording offered here by Blackstone Audiobooks is an astonishing bargain. Frederick Davidson's unabridged (13-hour 11-CD) rendition of Jackson-Knight's classic prose translation of the Aeneid is well done and at a price that beggers belief. The only reason I hesitated before giving it a well-deserved five stars is that I personally found Davidson's delivery to be rather camp to my English ear, which did mean I had to listen for a while to tune into the words. Then it was wonderful. Read more

Review:These are my favorite of all the Greek tragedies and my favorite plays by Sophocles. This translation is excellent. It captures the poetry and elevated language that ought to go with tragedy. I would definitely recommend reading this one. Read more