irina_sky's reviews
229 reviews

An enchanting love story which stirred my imagination...The most sensitive love story I've read in years. Alzheimer’s disease made the story dramatic as hell.

A perfectly written novel which took me away completely while I was reading it. It was the first and the only novel by Emily Brontë which brought her world-wide fame. It is considered a classic of English literature and being read all over the world. The complex but captivating plot and a wide variety of characters make the story so appealing to readers. Moreover, the book tells about the most unusual all-encompassing and passionate love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, the love that brings rather sorrows than happiness.

Read it for outside reading. A complex and rather grave story which shows the degradation of a beautiful and promising young man who is gradually falling into the dirty arms of vice and sins. There is a lot of philosophy in the book.

The famous quotes:

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."
"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play."
"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mid, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals." (It's not a secret that Wilde was a homosexualist, so he wrote lots of anti-feminist stuff like that)
"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

A Wonderful piece of English literature. A captivating and thought provoking read about a poor orphan Oliver who faces a lot of hardships. However, his kind heart and faith in people helps him overcome the hideous reality of the harsh world where adults rule. The book proves that despite of all the dark sides of our life, kindness and virtue always prevail.
Omg, the description of London of that time really knocked me out. Charles Dickens must have hated the city too much since he pictured it as the most disgusting, hideous, dirty and criminal place on earth. But it's the city itself that makes the atmosphere of the book: gloom, danger, hopelessness pierce the book throughout.

reread it in 2011. My top favorite. A great Soviet book by a profound writer.

The damned poet, as Baudelaire called himself. The poetry is gloomy, it shows the life and the society at their worse. Murders, rapes, sex, death as the inevitable end make Baudelaire's poetry, yet it's got its charm.

Черная-пречерная книжка. Вся насквозь пропитана убийствами, насилием, расизмом. Автор явно отрывался, когда ее писал... Несмотря на весь мерзопакостный сюжет, очень легко читается и воспринимается.