Dissing Gissing: An Angry Review of "New Grub Street"

"It happened to catch my eye in the paper yesterday that someone was to be hanged at Newgate this morning. There’s a certain satisfaction in reflecting that it is not oneself."

This is how Jasper Milvain is introduced in New Grub Street, making pleasant conversation over breakfast with his sisters and mother. One-third through the book, I wished that Jasper was hanged at Newgate. Two-thirds through the book, the I wished I was hanged at Newgate.

There are books (few though they may be) that I actually dislike. And among that handful, New Grub Street ranks high as one I truly despise on myriad levels. I’m reviewing it for two reasons: to warn anyone who is reading this to avoid this book at all costs, and to be able to delete it from my e-reader with the satisfaction of first venting my grievances against it.

In essence, this is a story about writer’s block. Not that this is Gissing’s intended theme--which is something to do with the corruption of writing as an art by publishers and critics into something commercial and petty--but because the majority of the page count is devoted to people having writer’s block, that’s what it really is about.

Good Steampunk is Hard to Find

The obligatory introductory definition of Steampunk: Victorian Science Fiction. This is oversimplified, has many arguable diverging theories, and has many variations (alternate realities, possible futures, not to mention the many related or offshoot genres of Clockpunk, Gaslamp Fantasy, Dieselpunk, etc.), but when one has to explain Steampunk to someone in three words, “Victorian Science Fiction” is what I opt for.

Theoretically, Steampunk is one of my favorite genres. It combines my favorite TV genre (Sci Fi) with my favorite period of literature (roughly 1830-1915). Often Steampunk attempts to “recreate” the brand of sci fi that the original sci fi authors wrote, such as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or H.G. Well’s The Time Machine. Other genres tend to get spliced in: Horror, akin to H.P Lovecraft, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; mystery (particularly Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories); and high adventure (such as the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs or H. Rider Haggard). Historical figures (whose true lives were larger than life) like Nikola Tesla are often fictionalized or at least used as guidelines for the technological wizards that often populate Steampunk stories.

What Do Mother's Day and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Have in Common?

As I continue in my brilliantly brilliant plan to overhaul this blog, I seem to have accidentally deleted my original review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are probably plenty of reviews of this classic and much-beloved story swirling around the internet, so many that my paltry offering may not be missed. However, it’s important to me to have it mentioned on my blog.

You see, this was one of the first chapter books I read to myself, and it came about in a rather devious parental way:

As long as I can remember I have either loved reading or have longed to know how to read. My preliterate years were spent pretending to read out of my favorite picture books (which I had memorized), and clearly recall that I would stare at the words—strange symbols of black on white, curls and lines and dots that I knew translated into language—and will myself to understand.

Reading was literally a magic skill.

Just as it’s hard to tell the exact moment a stack of kindling becomes fire, it’s hard to tell when I learned to read. But in any case, I did. Finally I was there! I, too, had this magic power!

Thoughts on “The Man Against the Sky” by Edwin Arlington Robinson

While it’s no longer April, I realized that I had only one more poem on my “list” of pieces from The Oxford Book of American Verse, so might as well finish up with one more poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Man Against the Sky.

Mostly alone he goes

This poem is centered on the idea that there are several outlooks on life—perceptions, worldviews, philosophies—and that each individual has the freedom to choose which outlook they’re going to use as they live.

Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
Down to the perils of a depth not known,
From death defended though by men forsaken,
The bread that every man must eat alone;
He may have walked while others hardly dared
Look on to see him stand where many fell

The first perspective is that of a one who lives courageously, yet isolated. It brings to mind the proverbial problem that “it’s lonely at the top,” because the deeds of great leaders are often admired without a full comprehension of the sacrifices that were a part of those deeds.