Landlord

But if you only got one useful fact - then you're still on page one.

I manage apartments for a living. Replacing carpets & flooring is an expensive part of apartment turnover. No matter how many times I've done it, I still feel like flooring salespeople are like used-car dealers. They'll tell me whatever I want to hear for the product at whatever price I'm able to pay.

I wish I had a flooring expert by my side. Now, I do (in a way). This book is written in a very comfortable, casual style. It's almost as if the author is standing there tutoring you on all the aspects of flooring. He has a real understanding of the cost/benefit of different flooring materials and he understands the sensitivities of apartment management.

It's chock-full of tidbits of useful information, tips & tricks. I don't remember it all yet - but next time I have to buy flooring material, I'm going to re-read the important sections and go to my dealer a lot more prepared to understand what it is I'm buying - and to save money doing it!

It's not only useful - it's an easy read. Clearly the author knows his stuff and is able to present it without making me feel like I'm a dummy.

Highly Recommended.

As in most of his marvelous writing, there are twists and turns awaiting the reader -- revelations completely unforseen and unimagined. As always, he brings the Irish character -- both individual and en masse -- to life completely and gently. Meticulous details are made known to us quietly, so that by midway through the this absorbing work, we almost feel that we are living among these people. He has the ability to allow us to know them without feeling we've been told about any of them -- more like we've gained the knowledge over time.

We see Sarah Polexfen come to the Irish island estate of Carriglas to serve as governess to the children of her relations, the Rollestons. Life there seems peaceful and detached -- but she senses there is something troubling under the surface, something of which she is not told and is unaware. Years later, when she returns to the island -- the children are grown, their father dead, the grandmother an aged matriarch -- events from the past begin to come clearer, verifying her earlier intuitions. The story is played out over a period from the early part of the 20th century, seeing the beginning of the 'troubles' in Ireland, to the early 1980s -- and the family looks much different in hindsight than when she first arrived.

There is a sweet sadness present in this story -- as in much of Trevor's writing -- but it never becomes maudlin. The events and dialogue are intelligent and, in their own way, endearing -- for we find ourselves growing to care about these characters, even the ones who are less than admirable. For in the end, they are only human, and humans have frailties and warts, and commit transgressions, no matter how admirable they may seem from a distance.

Every single work of William Trevor's fiction that I have read has been a great experience -- if you've never sipped from his cup, start here...start anywhere. His novels and short stories are equally amazing and well-written -- I cannot recommend his work as a whole highly enough.

Most people can't remember when writers actually wrote good books -- this is one of them. This guy also wrote "The Pawnbroker", another great novel.

Wallant is tough to describe: urban, gritty, but with real imagination and passion and dark humor. He knows a lot about anguish, a lot about being broke and battered spiritually. He's really a modern-day naturalist, like Frank Norris or Stephen Crane (of the shorter works...) or even Dos Passos (of Manhattan Transfer).

Maybe people are really sick of reading crap? Richard Yates's books are coming back (he was buddies with Wallant in the early 60s), now Wallant's...All we need to do now is get Brian Moore's early novels back in print. After you read Wallant, find Moore's "Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" and "An Answer from Limbo."

You won't be disappointed.

As a beginning landlord, I cannot recommend this book highly enough!!

I own 3 properties so far and this book has made my success possible!

Pale and insipid it is not. Anne Bronte's prose is fully as energetic as the others', and she has a world-view that equally as rich, nuanced and fully realized (how /could/ they have thought so much, and about so much?).

The plot here, as any casual observer knows, revolves around the woman yoked to a loutish husband. Some have perceived this as more original or daring than her sisters' plots, and certainly in her own time, it received a special kind of disapprobation (even Charlotte appears to have thought it cut a bit close to the bone - apparently perceiving that the lout was patterned on their own dear brother). Maybe so, but in another sense, you could say that it is just the mirror image of the Jane Eyre plot. Mr. Rochester has a guilty or scandalous secret about his wife; Mrs. Huntington has the same about her husband - not the same secret, but equally eligible for secrecy. Each has an innocent lover; in each case the point is to disentangle from the guilty and join with the innocent.

The device of the loutish husband is not necessarily all that promising. In the hands of an amateur it is no more than a setup for a tedious account of outraged virtue. Indeed if this were all, we would do well to leave it for the Jerry Springer show. The reason this book works is that it is not just a tale of outraged virtue: Mrs. Huntington makes it clear just how much she was attracted by Mr. Huntington: how she walked into this bog on her own, and against all the entreaties of her nearest and dearest. As if to cap it all, we are treated to the spectacle of an older, more chastened Mrs. Huntington trying to warn a younger companion off from making the same kind of mistake. We readers can make up our own mind as to what the young companion is likely to do.

Unfortunately, after a bit of this, the modality of outraged virtue takes over. Huntington wallows in vice; Mrs. Huntington remains a saint. Even here, the author does not lose us: she is a remarkable dialectician, and I am not sure the case of the woman wronged has ever been put better. What is missing is an important human truth: vice (to use the Victorian term) is catching, and suffering does not purify. Indeed, that is one of the things so dreadful about suffering. You cannot put up with someone like Huntington indefinitely before some of it wears off on you. It beggars all expectation to suppose that Mrs. Huntington could have come through all this without meanness, without spite, without the slightest hint of schadenfreude. Indeed on this point (dare one say it), Jerry Springer just might be a better guide. But life is too short for that. Instead, thank heavens for the Brontes, and what a pleasure to learn that Anne is just as absorbing as the rest.

Narrated in part by Mr. Markham, the gentleman farmer who falls in love with her, and partly by herself in diary form, the Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a sad portrayal of the miseries Helen Huntingdon endures at the hands of an immature self-centered husband.

The story starts out with Helen, an intriguing beautiful "widow" who comes to live in a deserted moorland mansion called Wildfell Hall with no one but her maid and young son as companions. She excites the gossip of the local townspeople by her refusal to mingle in the town's social life, her strong opinions on the upbringing of her 5 year old son, and by working to support herself as a landscape painter. Mr. Markham, the gentleman farmer, rather than being repelled by her fiercely guarded independence is intrigued by her and determines to learn more about her, falling in love with her in the process. Helen becomes the butt of sinister gossip when it is discovered that she and Mr. Lawrence, her landlord, are not the strangers to each other that they pretend to be in public, and it is rumored that something is going on between them romantically.

It is in response to this falsehood that she turns over her diary to Mr. Markham, who at last learns within its contents her true identity, why she is at Wildfell, and why she can not marry him. He also learns the astonishing identity of Mr. Lawrence. Helen's diary traces her life from a naive girl of 18 to a courageous woman of 26, and the sorrow and trials she endures in her marriage to a wretch of a husband, the womanizing, alcoholic Arthur Huntingdon.

Anne Bronte creates a world in which the drunken, immoral behaviour of men becomes the norm and this may have been startling to contemporary readers - perhaps a reason for the book's panning at the critics. The narrative is built up delicately; first Gilbert; and then the racier, more gripping diary of Helen as she guides us through her married life; before returning again to Gilbert, whose tale by this time has become far more exciting as we know of Helen's past. Helen's realisation of the awful truth and her desperate attempts to escape her husband, are forever imprinted in the mind of the reader as passages of perfect prose.

One of the earliest feminist novels, the underrated Anne Bronte writes in this a classic, and - defying the views of her early (male) critics - a claim to the position of one of England's finest ever female writers.

Hannah is the narrator and central figure of this story. She is the daughter of a farmer and lives in a mostly male household. She has a chance to show her mettle when she sounds the horn and helps the farmers, who fight at night in disguise to secure the land that is rightfully theirs.

At the end of the story, Hannah is rewarded with a beautiful blue calico dress.

Hannah is absolutely adorable and has a lot of savvy. She's a very appealing character and her bravery has helped girls to feel better about themselves and their abilities. She is truly a literary gem. Thomas Locker's illustrations are masterpieces in and of themselves. This book should be back in print because it is such a gem.