The Vulgar Eclectic

Category: books

  • Mozart and Salieri by Alexander Pushkin

    I also read a short play by Alexander Pushkin called Mozart and Salieri (1832), translated by A. F. B. Clark.  Despite being a very, very short play it has been influential, and was an inspiration for the play Amadeus (by Peter Schaffer), which in turn was adapted for film.  The play has only two speaking…

  • The Trojan Women by Seneca

    I finished reading The Trojan Women by Seneca (translated by E. F. Watling), a tragedy written in the first century AD. This might be my favorite of Seneca’s plays thus far. It tells the fate of Polyxena and Astyanax after the fall of Troy at the hands of the conquering Greeks. This is a familiar…

  • Eugénie Grandet by Balzac

    I just finished reading Eugénie Grandet; by Honoré de Balzac, a short novel published in 1833 and translated by Marion Ayton Crawford. This is only the second novel I’ve read by Balzac, and I wasn’t feeling deeply enmeshed in the story at first. Thankfully, I stuck with it and ended up loving the book. By…

  • Art and Fiction

    I love these old paperback collections of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian barbarian. Frazetta’s paintings are to Conan in my mind as Larry Elmore’s paintings are to the Dragonlance characters. Artwork seems particularly important to fantasy and science fiction books, perhaps because the worlds within these works are often meant to be substantially different than the…

  • A is for awesome cover

    I recently had access to a small number of books from my personal library that is now mostly in storage. Thought I would share a few photos. Here is a great collection of short stories by one of the masters in the field! I’ve also got a copy of R is for Rocket, as well…

  • Phaedra by Seneca

    I read Thyestes by Seneca a couple weeks ago and then decided to try another of his plays, this time reading Phaedra. I’m very pleased I decided to read another one, as I enjoyed Phaedra a great deal. Here is the little reaction to it I wrote: I finished reading Phaedra, a play written around…

  • We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly

    I just finished reading We Dream of Space (2020) by Erin Entrada Kelly, a young adult novel that follows the lives of three siblings over the course of a month in early 1986. The siblings have a teacher who is closely watching the unfolding of the Challenger mission, and weaves the event into her classroom…

  • Thyestes by Seneca

    I read Thyestes by Seneca (translated by E. F. Watling), a tragedy written in the first century AD. This is the first play by Seneca I’ve read, having only read his letters to Lucilius Junior in the past. Euripides, one of my favorite writers, wrote a play with the same title some 500 years earlier.…

  • Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

    I finished reading Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë. This is the first book she published and the only one I have read by her.  The novel carried me away to Agnes’s world and I could often relate to her inner thoughts. The fictive world that Brontë builds is simple and clean, and feels bright…

  • Pharsalia by Lucan, video

    I just posted the first video I’ve made for The Vulgar Eclectic. Here it is: