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Bloom's emotional approach to the work is admirable, but his points are obscure. Can anyone tell me what he means by his assertion, stated twice in the first four chapters, that Falstaff "brushes time aside and bids it pass"?

After roughly 250 pages as a highly pleasant campus novel, the story is finally beginning to take the form of the Tam Lin myth. I'm not complaining, though it must be said that "I am become weary of that crew" is the most cringe-inducing line of dialogue I've encountered in a while.

Pamela Dean's old-fashioned corniness is both charming and discomfiting: men constantly calling women "my lady" and exclaiming "I cry you mercy," every nonwhite person immediately having their race pointed out, Molly wearing a dashiki. Just because she's a good-natured midwestern woman nearing middle age and fondly remembering her childhood, I don't hate it.

Very odd. Lots of new age and Wiccan tones. My copy smells strongly of incense.

Protos just said "The turkey that turneth on the spit beginneth to glow like the setting sun!... What do I see? A cut? Thou bleedest, my lad! Run, Dorino, to the barn and fetch a cobweb, a sovereign remedy for wounds..." Wow. Feels like home.

A cross between the gin-soaked boy's adventure of Urien's Voyage and the intertwining Balzacian social cross-sections of The Counterfeiters. There's a critical tradition attached to this novel that calls it the most humorous and picaresque of Gide's books-- that's probably true, but it also works as a reassessment and deconstruction of serialized adventure stories and penny dreadfuls.

My patience for reading is really terrible: dirty little leftist pamphlets like this should take a person one evening to read, but I'm taking a few days

I don't know if it's a fault of my inattentive reading or of this book's Woolfian shared-mind narration style, but it took me a while to figure out that those three memoir chapters at the center of the book are little sketches of Alice, Stella, and Jove. Now we're back in the moody love triangle plot.

This book is a little willfully obtuse sometimes, but it's still very good, with some passages of special beauty.

I don't know why a moody five-star novel about adultery turned into a adequate four-star memoir ostensibly about the young Winterson and her family, but I'm still with it.

For some reason this book feels very personal and specific to me, just as it did when I first tried to read it in late 2012.

The novel's almost over. So, so little has happened...

Lots and lots of vamping, supposedly leading up to an eventual destructive transgression-- why do I suspect that the transgression in question will be an anticlimax, considering that Michel is a man who counts growing his hair out and lecturing with more-then-usual vehemence on the "savagery" of the Visigoths as small transgressions in themselves?

Let the record show that I spent this evening reading Brecht's "A Man's a Man," and would have given it three stars out of five, if it was available to be rated on this website

Cons: We've really lost the plot at this point. How is it that we're three fourths through with the novel, and Sirius Black seems to have been totally forgotten? I think the impending threat of his arrival is a little more important than Crookshanks and Quidditch, but I guess I'm just stupid.

Pros: Harry's steely resolve to revenge himself on Sirius Black is a good bit of character development, and a sure sign of his becoming a teenager.

Hagrid's constantly shifting fortunes are a real rollercoaster of happy and sad. His teary admittance along the lines of "I never want to go back to Azakaban" is rather upsetting.