Here we go, another set of mini-reviews that couldn’t possibly fit in review posts of their own xD Once again this batch of mini-reviews features mainly classics (especially from the Little Black Classics series–after oggling over them for a good chunk of the year, I finally got my hands on some of them! 🙂 ). Included in this batch of reviews are:
- Michel de Montaigne’s How We Weep and Laught at the Same Thing
- Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Old Nurse’s Story
- Edith Wharton’s The Reckoning
- Anton Chekhov’s Big Volodya and Little Volodya
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Well, they are gone, and here must I remain
So without further ado…
How We Weep and Laught at the Same Thing
By: Michel de Montaigne
Format/Source: Paperback; my copy
‘No one characteristic clasps us purely and universally in its embrace.’
A selection of charming essays from a master of the genre exploring the contradictions inherent to human thought, words and actions.
I first encountered Michel de Montaigne in my first year of undergrad. We had to read a selection of essays for World Literature class and absolutely fell in love with his stuff; he wrote about things that I often thought about, and I could totally emphasise where he was coming from with certain topics. I wish I had picked up his complete works when I was in undergrad instead of the required selected text, but whatever, every now and then I’d pick up a slim volume from Penguin Classics featuring a few of his essays. This is one of them, in which he contemplates on the nature of human thought, how we define ourselves, life, death, etc. I don’t know what else I could really say about it except that it’s worth checking out; a lot of his observations are still applicable today and to the human condition.
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