The Delicious Vice
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy book talk and book-collecting essays and want relaxed, leisurely writing about books
- Literature lovers interested in the late nineteenth-century American essay style
- People who want short English essays for fragmented time and a bit of reading practice
- Digital readers who collect public-domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting a systematic grounding in bibliography or publishing history
- Readers who prefer plot-driven narrative and need a story to keep them reading
- Beginners who find English reading difficult and are unwilling to look up words with tools
Reading tips
- Treat it as a short bedside or commute read, taking one or two sections at a time without worrying about progress.
- Mark unfamiliar nineteenth-century words first, then look them up together after finishing a section.
- If book talk interests you, read one or two Chinese book essays alongside it to compare the different pleasures.
- After reading, write a few sentences of brief comment, noting reading views you agree with or find puzzling.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Young Ewing Allison (1853–1932) was an American journalist, writer, and poet known for his narrative poetry and essays, and he edited several newspapers. Two of his works survive, both centering on reading habits and personal reflection. The Delicious Vice deals with the pleasures of reading and the passion for book collecting in a light, self-deprecating, literary tone; On the Vice of Novel Reading discusses novel reading as a "vice" in the same conversational essay style. Both are written as first-person rambles, friendly in manner and apt to draw observations about reading habits from ordinary topics, offering some insight into the reading tastes of late nineteenth-century American literary circles. Public information is limited, and details of his life and the full scope of his work await further study.
