Annotated Classics

I'm not trying to be contrarian, but with all the fanfare surrounding Netflix's recent adaptation of Frankenstein , I can't help but think of the book's far more readable cousin, Dracula . In the A-list annals of Halloween costumes, the two are often paired together, but the reading experience of each is vastly different. Frankenstein is slow and cerebral. You zone out, and 20 pages later, the protagonist is still describing the landscape. Dracula , on the other hand, is a p

There’s something so delightful about the unrestrained drama of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . As I wrote in the foreword to my annotated edition-- on sale now! --very few of the characters act with anything resembling common sense. It’s all, “This is how I feel ! Hang the consequences!” Most of us have probably been tempted to act that way, but we subsume* those instincts so we don’t die of our own stupidity.  Romeo and Juliet  is under no such obligation, giving

It's no secret that some summer reading books are better than others. Over the years, I've developed a few hard-and-fast rules to sort...

This book has been in the making for 10+ years, if not 3,000. In a way, you could say The Iliad is my odyssey!