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This is one of the famous classics of English literature and part of the Western canon. Emily Brontë and her sisters lived at the beginning of the gothic story in the first part of the nineteenth century. So the moodiness, gloom, and melancholy atmosphere is of course abundant in this story, taking over the character development, plot, and setting depicted. The Yorkshire countryside takes on a role similar to the untamed frontier in early nineteenth century American literature. In at the center is a claustrophobic pair of landed families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, with a few servants and the one character who serves to propel the plot, that of Heathcliff. He is of some indeterminate though definitely lesser class origin according to everyone else. The book covers two generations, starting with the early life of Heathcliff and his great love Catherine Earnshaw, then jumping over eighteen years to focus mainly on the offspring of that generation. During this hiatus, Heathcliff goes off to become a self-made man of influence through unspecified means and returns with scores to settle.

Their emotions are portrayed as big and irresistible forces of nature. Heathcliff's unrequired love for the haughty Catherine is nearly too big to be contained, his ambition to own both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcroft Grange is calamitous to everyone else and too powerful to avoid. If Heathcliff didn't harbor these urges, there would be no story. You get the sense that if he were from a better pedigree, that would be the case; the characters see the darkness of Heathcliff as representin the bad blood in his veins. Twentieth-century adaptations of the novel reportedly focus closely on the love and the ambition working within Heathcliff, but things are more complicated than that in the novel. The other characters act according to their own unruly feelings, often contrary to their own best interest, to an extent that made me dislike them more or less. They have prejudices, an unwillingness to compromise, fallibilities, and infirmities galore.

Structurally the book has a frame story where the housekeeper Mrs. Dean is relating past events to the outsider tenant Mr. Lockwood. Really none of that matters, it's just bookkeeping to avoid having to invent an omniscient third-person point of view, which only came into vogue later. I had to consult a genealogical chart of the two families to keep track of the overlapping relationships and confusing names as I listened to the story in audiobook format. It's as though it would have been unthinkable in this book's universe to look for eligible matches just a few miles away from any other family. Nearly everything that occurs is reported as dialogue, aside from relatively small plot points such as unfastening a lock, going on a ride, hiding a letter. Everything is intimate, and everybody is miserable. By the end, the reader has seen everyone's flaws, and I'm thinking this was maybe a daring thing. I know so many other books with a spotless hero or heroine, but that was not the story the author wanted to tell. There is a slender hope at the very end that maybe with Heathcliff gone, the ones who remain can avoid the unhappiness.

I must admit that I didn't pay close attention to the first half of the book because things didn't capture my interest that much. The second part felt a little speedier even though it was playing out what was set up beforehand. In the end I felt as though Heathcliff successfully pulled off his scheme to own all the land, despite being an outside, yet he gained practically no satisfaction thereby. I never could be sure that any character was really capable of selfless love.

Reading about all these miserable people not the most fun experience for me, I have to admit. It wasn't like. It makes me think of Thomas Mann's book Buddenbrooks_ The Decline of a Family from a century later where things also come apart by the end, and yet that book had a little lift provided by Toni's character arc that led to self-awareness. There's just a tiny hint in this book that young Cathy might have learned to be less judgmental, but I'm not so sure this is realistic.

The audiobook format is what got me through this long story. If I were reading a hardcopy or electronic book I might well have set it aside by the first third. I'd say the narration by Billie Fulford-Brown gave it a little verve during the scenes with strong emotions, saving me the trouble of having to imagine them all myself.

I don't think I'll be revisiting this story soon, either the book or in adaptation. It's too bad the author didn't get the chance to take on other novels the way to see how her style might have changed.

This is a big scholarly work written in such a way that the reader can forget how much information is being transmitted. It was quite different from this author's other book, Caste_ The Origins of Our Discontents, which took a more impersonal approach to many of the same issues, more scholarly and less emotional in effect. The migration of millions of American Blacks over the middle decades of the twentieth century transformed both the Jim Crow states and the ones they moved to. It wasn't organized by any one person but came from the life choices of thousands of free Blacks facing lives often only a little better than under slavery when they heard about the opportunities available to them if only they could abandon the place of their birth. They took much of what they knew from the South to inform their new lives and those of their children. The racism of the North had rules they had to learn gradually because almost none of it was written down. They had to make new friends and avoid new enemies. And when they couldn't attain all they had dreamt about the disappointment could affect their personality the rest of their life. By learning about their struggles and the experience of many others, the reader gets to know them as well as any fictional character and feels what they felt over decades. By seeing how widely divergent their lives turned out to be one gets a sense of the variety in the millions of unique life journeys during the great migration.

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Robin Miles over twenty hours long. some of the passages about brutality were hard to hear and sounded as though they had come from centuries ago, not just decades. By the end I felt as though I gained a greater appreciation of my neighbors and their ancestors.

This was the third of the Melendy books, in the same country setting of the second one, during World War II. It is a period piece to us today, with the family doing their weekly chores by horse-drawn carriage and grocery purchases subject to rationing. The kids are 90% of the story with a new addition alluded to in the title. This wasn't a baby, which would have been difficult without a mother in the cast, but a local neighbor boy they take in when in one of the two episodes described he finds himself unhoused. The mood of gratitude the boy has for his new home reinforces the cozy, orderly feeling of the books. The rest of the world is far away, intruding only by radio broadcasts and rare long distance telephone calls to Father who spends most of the book away doing Pentagon work. For a week, the other adult supervisor, the housekeeper Cuffy, is away to tend to a family matter, so the children are able to live out fantasies of a summer on their own.

The edition I have has an introduction by the author written just after the war about how she came to write about the Melendys. She has a style that borders on sentimentality mixed with gentle humor. The characters spend a lot of time making cute conversation illustrating their various personalities. I wanted to read this book coming off of some harrowing adult fiction, as a light palate cleanser. It would have been easy to re-read it all in one sitting but I don't think it would be as pleasant, like taking too much wartime sugar ration all at once.

These fictional children would be the ones growing up to be the Silent Generation. Raised during trouble times and loyal to an ideal of ordered homogeneous society, accustomed to pinching pennies, I imagine them as being largely skeptical of the changes in the second half of the century. There are no Blacks or immigrants and while there are villains, these are easily identified by the children, and neutralized without much trouble.

This short book is having its moment with the dismantling of government institutions in the United States as a backdrop. The pattern of takeover by authoritarian forces happens like the way Mike Campbell describes how his ruin happened in The Sun Also Rises "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." There is first an erosion of norms, a bad actor gets a foothold in a place where they can exert influence, then there is a pivotal event like the fire at Germany's Reichstag and then the machinery of free government is taken away. The author organized this book in twenty chapters with titles that encapsulate the whole message. A person alarmed by the threat of state capture can read more context and a justification in the body of each chapter.

At the present time I think the United States hasn't yet blown through the entire process of takeover so I think the book might still be of good use. There are multiple countries where citizens' rights are also under attack so it could be a good resource there as well.

In the third volume of this series the long friendship between the characters of Lenù and Lila is changed as they lead divergent lives in different parts of Italy. There are significantly long sessions where one or the other does not appear but then they reconnect after the tumultuous events, usually by telephone, and it is as though these sections convey the real significance of what just happened. Each manages to reach a certain kind of success but has to navigate stresses in their other relationships and from the larger society. Politics plays a pretty big role in this book, larger than I would expect to see in one by an English speaking writer concentrating on the lives of women in the West. The story is complex with many characters and events from the previous two books impinging on the characters' lives, and I had to work hard more than once to recall just who they were talking about. The writing in English translation is beautiful with long passages here and there with the viewpoint character working out her feelings and coming to surprising insights. There are villains in the course of the plot but even more than that there are ambiguous characters, frequently but not always men, whose actions twist the plot in surprising ways. It is kind of a slow read I took mostly in ten or twenty minute chunks rather than speeding through it all. The settings are more generic than the intense descriptions I remember of Ischia in book two. Really, the only thing distinguishing the new settings was the distance between them which serves to isolate them at critical times. The author is masterful in foreshadowing the hardships that may come to her characters because of their actions and simmering conflicts.

I m going to take a break to ruminate before hitting book four, the last one in the series.

It took a long time to get through this audiobook, not because of any fault with the writing but because of the harrowing facts dug out of private archives and nationally televised hearings which describe how the bulk of American society has been made irrelevant by organized crime and its friends. The Trumps are in it, of course, but they were covered in the author's previous book so here they just sit on the sidelines, chummy with the likes of Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy. There is no hypothesis advanced for why this country is such fertile ground for these conspirators and the ones who advance conspiracy theories, maybe because we don't currently have a good perspective on the immunity other places have had (though not all). The tone of the audiobook is a little breathless as though the burden of telling horrible truths that get ignored, Cassandra-style, is forcing her to lay it all out there. It is disturbing as hell, and unsettling as it declines to specify a way out of the predicament the country is in. Of course this came out before the 2024 elections but these developments seem of a piece.

Is it an important book? I don't know in the short run, but I wouldn't be surprised if it earns a place in the history of the second Gilded Age when future generations try to piece together why and how this country got to where it is now. Calling out this unhealthy strain as it shows in the past several decades is a public service even if there is no takeaway on what to do about it. I wish there were a champion who had the toughness to take this message out there for people to rally around despite the threats that would almost certainly threaten their safety.