Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Hargrave reads voraciously and diversely — mostly antiquarian and classic books in translation. These are her book reviews.
While she reads more books than she could possibly write about, she does consistently post weekly reviews. New reviews are posted on Mondays.
Looking for one of the books that have been reviewed? Want to find some vintage treasures of your own? Second-hand and used books are unique and eco-friendly, and can be found at your local independent bookseller. If you’re looking for an American bookseller, you can check here. UK booksellers can be found here.
If you’d prefer to buy books online, many vintage and rare editions can be found at ThriftBooks.
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I decided to review not the entire Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame but, instead, focus on an excerpt of one particular chapter — ‘Dolce Domum’. Or, as I affectionately refer to it, Mole’s Christmas — based on the animated special ITV put out sometime in the 1990s which I watch on Youtube every year to start the holiday season.
When I saw Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas arrive at the local independent bookstore, I leapt at the chance to read something from a writer that my spouse loves while still enjoying the light, fun Christmas-y content.
n many ways, the collection met my expectations. It includes a lot of interesting ephemera from literature, some traditional Christmas classics, as well as excerpts from letters, newspaper items, and a substantial amount of poetry.
When I was initially planning this post, I was only going to review only The Things They Carried, but after reading In the Lake of the Woods, I think they go together thematically and both share a focus on war and the aftermath of it. And so I’ll discuss both here.
All three novels revolve around two brothers, Claus and Lucas. They are twins. Perfect reflections of one another. In The Notebook, they are abandoned at their grandmother’s during a brutal war (presumably World War II) in their country (presumably in Europe) and, using a notebook, they practice hardening themselves against outside threats and internal ones as well.
All Quiet on the Western Front is given from the perspective of the losing side, which is still rare when it comes to war literature, especially in translation and from this era.
Graves has the unique perspective of being in the middle and a bridge between the command that used soldiers as canon fodder and didn’t fight, and those that were the fodder and lost their lives so meaninglessly.
What really shines about this collection is the informative introductions to each and every one of the stories.
This book may have been published just last year, but the writer, Robert Wynne-Simmons, is actually the screenwriter for the 1971 British horror film of the same name. So this book is a novelization of a movie that is over fifty years old.
This novel is really an intersection of two goliaths of classic film and classic literature, and therefore I decided to both read it and to review it, despite it being a bit more recent.
