Amateur Reader (Tom)
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amateurreader.bsky.social
Amateur Reader (Tom)
@amateurreader.bsky.social
190 followers 94 following 320 posts
A Distinguished Crankologist

WutheringExpectations.blogspot.com
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amateurreader.bsky.social
Good advice.
December 17, 2025 at 5:17 AM
amateurreader.bsky.social
Next up is Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," one of the greats. Please join me if interested.
November 26, 2025 at 10:20 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
On the surprisingly "Fargo"-like early true-crime play "Arden of Faversham":

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/11/arde...
<i>Arden of Faversham</i>, an early true-crime murder farce - Oaths are words, and words is wind, / And wind is mutable.
Arden of Faversham (c. 1591, pub. 1592) is a true-crime play, a dramatization of a famous forty-year-old murder case.  An adulterous wife, ...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:20 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
On Christopher Marlowe's hilarious farce "THe Jew of Malta":

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/11/marl...
Marlowe's hilarious farce <i>The Jew of Malta</i> - How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead
A conceptual innovator himself, Christopher Marlowe responded to other innovations.  In The Jew of Malta (1589, maybe), he wrote, following...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:20 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
On Stephen Greenblatt's quite good new biography of Christopher Marlowe:

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/11/this...
This may all be a fantasy - Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Chrsitopher Marlowe
Potted bio of Christopher Marlowe: Son of a semi-literate Canterbury cobbler.  He impressed someone and became a scholarship student first a...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:20 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
Poking at Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Pts 2 & 3"

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/11/henr...

and

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/11/more...
More <i>Henry VI</i> - I am myself alone
More rambling around Henry VI , Parts 2 and 3, Shakespeare’s first big playwriting project. 3.   As easily as I accept that large parts ...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:20 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
With various light annotations on the blog:

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/11/what...
What I Read in October 2025 – What a simple daily pleasure.
October was so long ago.  It is almost December.  Why do I write these. MARLOWE AND SO ON The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?), ???...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:15 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Primeiro Livro de Poesia (First Book of Poetry, 1991)
Le coffre (The Cartopper, 2019), Jacky Schwartmann & Lucian-Dragos Bogdan
Retour à Birkenau (Return to Birkenau, 2019), Ginette Kolinka avec Marion Ruggieri
Avec les fées (With the Fairies, 2024), Sylvain Tesson
November 26, 2025 at 10:15 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
OTHER BOOKS IN ENGLISH

Platero and I (1914), Juan Ramón Jiménez
The Plague (1947), Albert Camus
Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass (2025), Dave Barry
November 26, 2025 at 10:15 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
POETRY

Brides of Reason (1955) &
A Winter Talent and Other Poems (1957) &
A Sequence for Francis Parkman (1961), Donald Davie
Night Watch (2025), Kevin Young
November 26, 2025 at 10:15 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
This is all a good idea and I might join you for some of my neighbor Sarton's books. But I will also say that you seemed thoughtful with what you were doing before.
November 9, 2025 at 2:22 AM
amateurreader.bsky.social
Heartening!
October 30, 2025 at 1:12 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
And another:

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2025/10/milk...

"The Spanish Tragedy" next week. "The Jew of Malta" a couple weeks after that.
milk-white harts, fiery dragons, the ugly monster Death - some more <i>Tamburlaine</i>
The first character we see in Tamburlaine the Great is the king of Persia, but he lacks “a great and thundering speech,” so he is soon crush...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
October 15, 2025 at 8:16 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
Oh nice. Good photos.
October 12, 2025 at 12:31 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
In English we got it all in retrospect, but for Hungarian readers the turn to East Asian subjects must have been an interesting surprise.
October 9, 2025 at 9:14 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
I wrote about "Seiobo There Below," which I think is K's most interesting book, in two parts:

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2013/11/who-...

&

wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2013/03/art-...

But "The Melancholy of Resistance" likely gives a better sense of why he won the big prize.
who can say what is essential and what isn’t - <i>Seiobo There Below</i> - Krasznahorkai's defense of the picturesque
If it took me so long to read the latest László Krasznahorkai book, Seiobo There Below (2008), it was because the novel has, based on the n...
wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com
October 9, 2025 at 8:35 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
I haven't read "Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming" or the short story New Directions published in a nuisance format. You can see "Animalinside," also a nuisance, squeezed in beside the essential "Music & Literature" #2.

Maybe someone will now publish the scattered collectorama in a sensible format.
October 9, 2025 at 8:35 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
Oh thanks. Definitely a trip worth doing.
October 9, 2025 at 6:58 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
Oh yes read those Gormenghast books!
October 9, 2025 at 5:34 PM
amateurreader.bsky.social
It's a genuinely difficult book.
October 9, 2025 at 5:34 PM