Note: A Change in the Blog

The blog will still consist of quotes and ideas from a book, but the number of quotes will be fewer and I will use approximately a book a week. There will also be a brief summary of the book, including “Why read it?”  RayS.

The first book of the changed blog will be The Blithedale Romance, (novel) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, written in 1852. Why read it? It is an early example of feminist literature, in which a sweet, pretty, helpless, young thing captures men’s hearts and intelligent females scare men away. It is also about the obsessive nature of reformers, not unlike today’s “do-gooders,” the health police who proscribe sugar in sodas, smoking and smokers, and obesity. It takes place in Blithedale, a Utopian community, modeled on Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist experiment at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in which Hawthorne had participated ten years before he wrote the novel.

Published by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York,1983.

To be continued.