Customer Reviews

The Portrait of a Lady Volume 1 (Large Print Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved reading this book! The way James developed his characters was fascinating, and there was always the right amount of suspense. It takes a while to get in sync with his writing style (verbose and circuitous), but well worth the effort! I'm off to Volume II... and I hope there is more resolution in this one.

As an ebook this one did not allow one to navigate by advancing by chapter with the five-way controller. The table of contents was not interactive. If you leave your place in the book to look at another location in the book you will not easily be able to find the place you left off unless you remember the location. The sync to furthest page read did not work either. I don't know if that is a gliche with this book or a kindle 2 problem. I read this for a book club so it was very annoying not to be able to easily jump from chapter to chapter as we were discussing it. One would have to use the search facility to find the chapters which are in Roman numerals.

As a work of fiction, Henry James goes into great depth to describe his characters. Approximately the first third of the book was used for this purpose. The plot was slow moving at this point. If you have patience to stick it out it will become a little more interesting and complex. The story was sad. The ending was depressing. I found James writing style tedious.

Thanks to volunteer efforts, this classic is now available on the Kindle for free. I did not have any formatting issues with this book, and I enjoyed reading an old classic on a new electronic device.

Buyers beware- for e-readers, this may be a good option.

But, if you're going for the paperback, be warned: it is NOT a normal paperback.

It is a chintzy, strangely typeset, incomplete version of Henry James's book. It is the size (height by width) of a school textbook or workbook, which makes it very inconvenient for reading in any other position than sitting at a table.

For those who want a paperback, I'd recommend another edition (maybe the Penguin one, for instance) which will: 1. Contain the entire book; 2. Be of higher quality; 3. Fit in your hand; 4. Cost less (for the entire book than for this single volume of it).

I'm not sure what the target audience is for this kind of paperback volume, besides people like me who just got confused on Amazon.