Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
This is the new Lydia Davis translation, and is superb. I listened to the book (via audible).It's always perilous to comment on a book without reading it in the original. There are places where Bovary seems a bit melodramatic and where it shows its age. Yet Flaubert was undoubtedly a master of psychology and an early harbinger of the modern condition..., the deepening awareness and analysis of the Self..., of longing, loneliness, and alienation.... Moreover, this book is in many ways, more than just a story; for it is, in fact, a manifesto of the reaction against Romanticism known as Realism which Flaubert spearheaded. Viewed thus, it was far more interesting than it had seemed to me when I first read it as a youth, when I knew nothing about such issues.
The choice between four and five stars is a choice between rating this book as a contemporary read and rating it as a historical document. I choose the latter.