Author Archives: Marian

About Marian

Blogger, YouTuber, reader, and scribbler. I love classic literature, tea, and rain, preferably all at once.

Reading Goals for 2022

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Yet another brief and troubled year comes to end. I will reflect on my 2021 reading soon, but first, goals for the next. (Because no matter what happens, the reading must go on!)

  • Read lighter books on purpose. – I read too many serious books this year, in part because I am a mood reader and that was my mood. Still, I will try to break out of that box next year. Wodehouse will likely make an appearance.
  • Find a good RSS reader and update my blog list. I’ve had such trouble this year following people’s blogs with my current reader (Akregator). That, along with people’s links changing, has meant I’ve missed out on a lot of posts. Must fix this!
  • Read more books recommended to me by others. I often come across good books on others’ blogs or which people actively recommend to me. I want to do better at reading them.
  • Read more books I own. Well, of course. Now why wouldn’t I do that. 😉
  • Continue Reading the World. More Africa, Asia, and South America to come!
  • Read Dune with my brother. Should be fun!
  • Make no other goals. I have a hunch next year is going to be quite busy and stressful, so ideally I need to take it easy and not over-commit myself.

My Poetry Book + Writing Plans

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Hey everyone! I’m very happy to share the release of my poetry book Third Life and the commencement of Serious Writing Endeavors. 😀

It’s been a long time getting to this point—about 15 years. Like many young readers, in high school I really wanted to write books for a living. But life happened… and alongside it I grew disenchanted with my writing, both its actual quality and trying to fit it into the landscape of genre fiction. Not to mention, I was pretty shy back then and had few skills needed to actually make it work.

Maybe it was a necessary break. I became interested in poetry thanks to Tolkien, which started a decade’s love of writing in verse. Getting over my initial skepticism, I competed in NaNoWriMo several years, which turned out to be a joyful experience and extremely valuable for this recovering perfectionist. I read new authors and kinds of literature I’d never encountered before. And then, just living life—which, ironically enough, happens to be the thing that finally gets me back into writing.

So Third Life contains some of that poetry (60 poems total). And next year, I’ll be back to revising the novels, such as Geronium’s Window which some of you were kind enough to alpha-read a few years ago!

I won’t be posting about my writing on this blog much in the future—mixing self-promotion with classic books feels extremely precarious and uncomfortable. 😆 But for anyone interested, the website is MarianHRowe.com. There’s a blog and a YouTube channel now, a bit sparse at the moment but much more to come…

Sherlock Holmes and Korngold’s Violin Concerto – A Classical Cousin

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Warning: Contains Sherlock Holmes series spoilers and extreme geekery

I am feeling nostalgic this evening, so I thought I would write a post about something dear to me, and exceedingly trivial, that I don’t think I’ve told anyone before. 😆 Simply this—the connection between the Korngold violin concerto and the Sherlock Holmes series. Yes, these are the deep, dark secrets of Classics Considered.

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What I’m Reading, Mini Edition

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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My brother and I are still making our way through Crime and Punishment, with the hope of finishing it by the end of the year. I have got past the “crime” now and at the point where Raskolnikov is (once again) losing his mind. It’s a really excellent read this time around, but not exactly holiday cheer, so that’s one reason I haven’t been reading it as much as I ought to be.

The Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard

Yet another “second attempt book”… guess I was in the mood for those! I am determined to finish it this time. The Sickness unto Death is about despair and how the Christian faith both acknowledges and solves this universal problem. Well… that’s my idea of what the book’s about, anyway. 😆 On a scale of Fear and Trembling to The Concept of Anxiety, this book falls towards the latter end of difficulty, so I cannot recommend it as an starting point. I can’t pretend to understand everything dear old K. is talking about, but there are some gems here for the patient excavator.

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

Picked this up yesterday to read for Brazil in the Reading the World Challenge (I really ought to create a page for this!). The religious-sounding title instilled in me some uncertainty, but the concept—a kind of variation on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—was definitely intriguing.

I’m at 10% now and I really don’t know how I’m going to feel about it. I can’t decide whether I love it or hate it. 😆 The opening (and the whole book, as I gather), is one long internal monologue, vaguely reminiscent of Steppenwolf. She speaks very obscurely and through metaphors, and at times you don’t really know if she’s in her right mind, but I could empathize with what she was talking about regarding personal identity, so that’s something. Here’s a few quotes that already arrested my attention:

Maybe disappointment is the fear of no longer belonging to a system . . . What I used to be, was no good for me. But it was from that not-good that I’d organized the best thing of all: hope.

Holding someone’s hand was always my idea of joy.

Will speaking to you scare you and make me lose you? but if I don’t speak I’ll be lost, and in losing myself lose you.

I’ll have much more to say about this book, that’s for sure.