I give this book an A- because I was so amazed at how all-encompassing it was. I had previously only read Silas Marner - taught it, actually, to many 10th grade English classes.
Middlemarch deals with the lives and loves of a typical English shire of her time. Dorothea has an idealistic attitude towards marriage - which she is disabused of by her hapless and too old husband. The banker is seen to have stolen money from his first wife and cheated her from a reunion with her lost daughter. Class differences are clearly delineated including the effects of the 'entail' system.
Grade: A-
I give this book an A- because it is only a part of his major war cycle, The Red Wheel. And not one of the works for which he earned the Nobel Prize.
Solzhenitsyn used real German and Russian generals, dukes, czars, etc., but make up a colonel to tie various people and actions together.
The Russian army was so dysfunctional that it could not possibly have defeated the organized Germans. They telegraphed their plans without encrypting the messages, being sure the Germans would never stay up at night to interpret them: they were wrong.
They planned to strike to the north then the west, etc. and sent their troops marching back and forth to no avail. They claimed victory when they had only retreated to a previously held town. They lied incessantly and tried to appear heroic in cowardly retreat. It is no wonder the author was up a big creek without a paddle. I heartily recommend.
Grade: A-
MERTON OF THE MOVIES by Harry Leon Wilson is a satire of Hollywood in the 1920s, with our hero a gullible small-town boy who thinks that everything he sees on the screen is done with no doubles or tricks, that everything he reads in the fan magazines is true, and that everyone feels the corny emotions that so many of the films portrayed. Much of what is in the book is based on real people and events, and it is thoroughly enjoyable.
Grade: A-
THE VINLAND SAGAS, translated by Keneva Kunz, with an introduction by Gisli Sigurdsson, are about the Vikings' attempts to settle North America. (The Penguin edition I read was translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, with the introduction by them as well, so it was almost an entirely different book!) Both editions include "Graenlendinga Saga" and "Eirik's Saga", as well as a long introduction on history, literature, etc., a glossary of proper names, and several maps. I have not seen the new edition; one suspects that there have been many discoveries affecting the belief in the accuracy or translation of various parts.
For example, Chapter 5 of "Eirik's Saga" mentions Thjodhild's Church, but the 1932 excavations of Eirik's farmstead at Brattahlid/Kagssiarssuk found no such building. So people used this as an example of the inaccuracy/unreliability of the saga. Then in 1961 a workman digging in Kagssiarssuk found remains and when that area was excavated, a very small medieval church was found which is now believed to be Thjodhild's Church.
There is definitely some humor in the sagas: "They stayed there [Straumfjord] that winter, which turned out to be a very severe one; they had made no provision for it during the summer, and now they ran short of food and the hunting failed. They moved out to the island in the hope of finding game, or stranded whales, but there was little food to be found there, although their livestock throve. Then they prayed to God to send them something to eat, but the response was not as prompt as they would have liked." ["Eirik's Saga", Chapter 8] Perhaps the best-known, though, is "[Eirik] named the country he had discovered Greenland, for he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name." ["Graenlendinga Saga", Chapter 1]
Grade: A-
