Review: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving

Title: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

Author: Washington Irving

Pages: 190

Source: Personal library

Rating: 8/10

Summary:

Washington Irving is one of the most read and the most unread of authors. In his own day, of course, he was very widely read both in America and England. His writings caught the current fancy for romanticism, for local color, for sentiment, for nostalgia, for humor. In spite of this past popularity, it is doubtful how much of Irving's writing is still read today. Dust-covered sets of Irving's complete works probably appear in the second-hand bookstores as often as do those of Longfellow of Lowell, or any of the other traditional classics of American literature whose reputations have been revised downwards in recent years. Yet a few of Irving's writings, above all "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," are still very widely read. It is a rare general anthology of the short story that does not contain one or both of these stories, but it is an even rarer one that has anything more by Irving. A collection such as this one, which ranges more generously over Irving's whole work, may not only teach us why Irving was once so popular but may suggest that Irving has more to offer a modern reader than just his two most famous stories.

My Two Cents:

I've grown up hearing "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," but never read them in their entirety. It's very obvious that, in the telling and re-telling, things get a little twisted from the originals.

I liked the two most popular stories well enough, but there are several great stories in this short anthology. Irving wove many different types of tales, from suspenseful thrillers to stories of early American life.

My favorite probably was "The Specter Bridegroom," which tells the story of a young woman's plans to marry a soldier who is engaged in battle on his wedding night. I won't give anything away, but, even though the ending is somewhat expected, it is still a suspenseful and well-written story.

I can see why Irving isn't as widely read as he used to be. His language and writing style certainly are archaic and don't appeal to a very broad modern audience. But, once you're able to get past the fact that he wrote nearly 200 years ago, you will find some enjoyable, original stories from one of the first masters of American literature.

Review: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Title: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Author: Wells Tower

Pages: 238

Source: From Picador, through the Goodreads First Reads program

Challenges: Read 'n' Review challenge

First Sentence: "Bob Munroe woke up on his face."

Summary (From the back of the book):

Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his car's windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. Wells Tower's version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons.

My Two Cents:

I read about this book in Bookmarks a few months ago, and it intrigued me. I've read plenty of contemporary short story collections written about contemporary subjects, but the fact that Tower wrote a story about Vikings caught my eye. So, when it showed up on the Goodreads list, I had to have it. Luckily, I won it!

Overall, this was a really well-written collection with a lot of humor. Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of Updike lately, but I found myself laughing out loud several times, most notably at "Door in Your Eye," where an old man waves to his daughter from a suspected prostitute's apartment.

Tower's characters are exactly what the back of the book says they are: They're misfits and failures, but they don't really hold illusions about their lives. As a result, we get to see these characters in all their failed glory. There are no heroes here, which I liked. Tower's characters are just your average people plodding along in their lives, but he spotlights them in such a way to make them interesting.

I was disappointed, however, with the title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." Maybe I just built up my hopes a little too much, looking for a great story about Vikings. I was, overall, underwhelmed by this story. I did, however, like that the Viking characters spoke and acted as if they were in the modern world, but they were living their Viking lives. For example:

So Djarf, whose wife was a sour, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he, too, was giving it some thought. ... His wife had passed years ago, dead from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of Gnut that felt peaceful in a place that didn't move beneath him had sickened and died as well.

In other words, I liked that, just because he was writing characters that existed in a different historical time, Tower didn't feel the need to change his writing style and language to suit that change in history. He made the Vikings a little more real, in my opinion, than if he were to write in language that "seems more Viking," whatever that may be.

My rating: 9/10