An interesting first book for a renowned author. Crome Yellow is a wonderful introduction to Huxley's story-telling talents. The scenes were so meticulously laid out I felt I was watching a movie in my head. Crome was also a wonderful introduction to Huxley's knack for detailed characters. His writing style pulls you into the characters and the world of the book.

Crome was a fabulous exploration of human sexual desire. The yearning, the attempts, the exploits, even the destruction of a man. All who have ever desired another can certainly relate to this one.

The fact that this book is a superb read has already been established. Most notably the author and critic, Cyril CONNOLLY, rated this book as one of the 100 key books of the MODERN MOVEMENT.

Crome Yellow is perfectly suited to the e-book format. Great for reading on short trips, lunch breaks; in fact anytime you can grab a few minutes while on the go. The chapters are short and each stands alone as a complete and well-constructed scene.

Within the first few screens, you'll be captured by the story and wanting more - especially the bizarre instalments on the "History of Crome." Enough said - you'll have to find out for yourself.

This is an essential e-book for any well-stocked PDA e-library.

Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley's first book. His best books are his early books that he wrote before Brave New World. The young Aldous Huxley was evanescent, fluid, and limitless in his potential. However, as he grew older, especially in his last decades when he lived in California, he became more calcified, his vision narrowed and he became mired by his own mystic obscurisms. And when Huxley 'got' Buddhism, he stopped writing novels and wrote Buddhis tracts, so to speak. Written when he was 27, Crome Yellow centers around a house called Crome hence the title, (like Wuthering Heights centered around a house - Abbey Grange). The house was a gathering place of artists who were vacuous, though in a brilliantly significant way. The main character is Denis Stone, a naive neophyte, much like Huxley must have been at the time. Consequently as Huxley himself grew more sophisticated, so did his characters. Huxley attacks the ennui and malaise existential of life with a kind of righteous indignation that is refreshing. And he uproariously endorses the sentiments of misanthropy that all refined and culture cynics must feel. Huxley spent most of his life playing the expatriate game. In his own words from Crome, Huxley was "one of those distinguished people, who for some reason or other, find it impossible to live in England." Huxley spent most of the 1920's in Italy. It is difficult to believe that Aldous Huxley was just 27 when he wrote this book, for it is written like a 50 yr. old. Crome Yellow is a great introduction to Huxley, as well as a great way to know him better. There could scarcely be a more potent, intense vanguard for the psychedelic revolution, for which Huxley must have been a precursor of.

Masked by large quantities of frighteningly erudite British/cultural social satire. As an eager young American, I found myself entranced, and initially a little intimidated, by Huxley's god's eye view of Oxford-educated, limerick-composing, medieval-theologian-reference-making, pre-WWII upper-middle class Europeans. Imagine my incredulity at discovering at something like one fourth of the way through that the author was attempting to make some sort of serious and self-important point about the fate of humanity. Then, imagine my further incredulity at discovering about halfway through that this was one of those horrible 'instructive' works of literature where all literary merits are subordinated to a moral lesson. Finally, imagine my relief mingled with new-found disrespect for Aldous Huxley when I saw at the book's end that the aforementioned moral lesson involved nothing more than a cheap, pretentious, unimaginative leap-of-faith argument that has probably been around since the time of Plato himself. Oi. Now at last I can say with confidence: Huxley? Please. That is *so* passe...

Huxley was a man of many bizarre ideas as well as an uneven writer, but he could also be quite a deep and compelling thinker. This book is a particularly vivid example of this contradiction. I found parts of the novel almost painfully bad (one of the characters trying to communicate from the afterlife through an incompetent medium, or the epilogue that in effect abandons any pretense of being part of novel in order to become an unconfortable mix of essay and sermon). There is also the lingering problem of Huxley's uninformed and unfair attitude towards natural science. But in exchange for accepting these failures the reader gets two extraordinary character portraits: one of a monster (Mrs. Thwale) and one of a saint (Bruno the bookseller), both very convincing and immensely insightful. Add to that a penetrating study of the perils of self-absorption, a sound case for moral restraint, and the best diagnosis I have come across of why artists who express the most sublime insight about human nature can still behave like swine. It's sad and doubly ironic the Huxley himself should have been an impeachable character. Anyway, quite a worthwhile read.

Huxley is the master of complex philosophical writing. This is not "Brave New World" at all. It is much more complex, and it's theme is different.

In the early 1920s, Theodore Gumbril Jr, disenchanted with his teaching job in a boys' school, leaves for London determined to pursue his idea for "pneumatic trousers". After his arrival, Theodore enters the strange world of London's well-to-do dilettantes.

This satirical novel reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's early novels and of some of Anthony Powell's work (perhaps Huxley influenced those authors). "Antic Hay" is not a novel with strong plot development, rather Huxley concentrates on the attitudes of his characters. Theodore Gumbril soon ceases to be the main character of the novel, his importance being no more and no less than several others. This was a bit surprising given his prominence at the start.

Huxley satirises the opinions, actions and mores of the well-heeled young artistic "society" animals of the time. His style is at times very sharp and witty, and I felt that he was trying to scratch beneath the facade of their lifestyle, where lies a bitter meaningless to their existence, and a despair with the society they live in. "Antic Hay" is not, therefore, a novel for people who enjoy fiction based on a strong pplot, but it is an interesting period piece, reflecting the uncertainties and disaffection of one particular part of British society shortly after World War One.

G Rodgers

Huxley I can usually take or leave, but not Antic Hay: there are just too many farces to decipher for me to put it down. Huxley's women are beautiful and easy; his men are amoral and excrutiatingly clever.

But underlying their antics is a novel of incredible complexity. Huxley makes his attentive readers squirm as we recognize our own pretensions and idiocies in his archetypal characters. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

The other gift in this novel is that it has helped me appreciate and understand the work of other writers such as Waugh and Mitford: i.e., in order to enjoy them, you have to suspend your own understanding of life and realize that there actually was a thriving class of people in England who didn't have jobs, relied on servants, and had no lives to speak of. And were bored to tears by their sumptuous privilege, believe it or no.

For modern readers, I'd say this is a pretty tough read. I know a respectable amount of both French and Latin, and I had to look up at least part of most of those passages. But if you're prepping for the vocabulary section of the GRE or the SAT...this book will provide you with myriad words to look up and learn, including the wonderful "callipygous".

Maybe I should give the rest of Huxley's work another reading...

Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley's first book written when he was 27. The early Huxley was the best: when Huxley was young, he was fluid, enthusiastic, and his potential was limitless. As he grew older, he became more calcified, limited, and he spent the last years of his life in California, mired by his own mystic obscurisms. Crome Yellow centers around a house called Crome (like Wuthering Heights centered around a house -Abbey Grange) Crome was a gathering place of artists. The hero of the story is Denis Stone, a naive neophyte like Huxley was at the time. When Huxley grew more sophisticated, so did his characters. This book attacks the ennui, and existential malaise of life with a righteous indignation that is refreshing. He also uproariously endorses the common feeling of misanthropy that all refined cynics must feel. Huxley played the expatriate game, most of his life, to draw on his own words from Crome, he was "one of those distinguished people who for some reason or other, find it impossible to live in England." He spent most of the 1920's in Italy. Crome Yellow is a great introduction to Huxley, as well as a great way to know him better. It is difficult to believe that Huxley was so young when he wrote this. He writes like a 50 yr. old in this book.

A strange, amusing, and perplexing little book, told mostly through dialogue, about a weirdly cheerful menage a quatre between a handsome middle-aged couple, their dashing widower friend, and a beautiful 18 year old girl, with only the husband and wife ever winding up in bed with one another.

Mr. Middleton dotes on Ann. Mrs. Middleton dotes on Charles. Charles dotes on Ann and Mrs. Middleton. And Ann dotes on being doted on. Author Henry Green presents these people as a gang of befuddled masochists, unwittingly causing themselves great anguish and just as unconsciously enjoying it. The "doting" that they mistake for love is a form of self-torture. Green doesn't treat this doting as perverse. He portrays it as very human and therefore lovable mistake. Needing to feel loved, to feel young and desirable, the Middletons and their friends/would-be lovers try to force love out of others by showering love (or at least professions of it along with clumsy physical demonstrations) on them. None of the characters behaves very well. The best of them, Mrs. Middleton, the good wife and mother, is actually the most adulterously minded, but neither of the men or Ann act with much virtue or good will. And yet Green makes them all likable and all forgivable. He doesn't make us laugh at the characters' foibles but at their predicament. Green isn't as mean as Evelyn Waugh or as angry as Kingsley Amis, fellow Brits who also specialized in comedies of manners. He's not as funny as they are either, but he is a whole lot more humane and more forgiving of his characters' weaknesses.

Henry Green, I have read, would only be photographed from the back. So I thought I should read his novels backwards-- no! not starting at the end of each book, but beginning with his last book, _Doting_. I could only dream that prose would be so powerful. Henry Green is part tape recorder, part poet. He records language as people actually speak. Yet with an artist's careful touch he elevates everything just a bit. In fact, one might argue his style is not plain or straight-forward, but weird. He takes great chances with the English language, but as he makes it across the tight-wire each time, the effect is exhilerating. This is not strangeness for the sake of strangeness, but an approach to novel-writing that takes nothing for granted. Characters reveal themselves through what they say-- and don't say-- and aren't described out of existence. And who are these characters? People who dote on one another but never really love. The Middletons face middle-age by sinking into their own separate worlds of fear and appetite. Henry Green's view of humanity is not reassuring, but it is not unkind either. If anything, this novel can make us wiser as we listen in on these conversations that move in beautiful, life transforming rhythms. This is a book that is too good to be true.

"And then you must remember that most readers don't really read...We all read too much nowadays to be able to read properly. We read with the eyes alone, not with the imagination." Thus speaks Mr. Cardan, a character in Aldous Huxley's "Those Barren Leaves," and all I can say in reply is, "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Wanting to rush into the plot, I found myself annoyed with Huxley's slow, careful unfolding of the characters--the upper-class English guests at the Tuscan castle of the pretentious, amorous Mrs. Aldwinkle--and their long-winded conversations about Balzac and Diderot. I started to agree with Elizabeth Bowen's comment that Huxley was "the stupid person's idea of the clever person." After I had slowed down, however, and started to really read Huxley's painstaking dialogue and careful descriptions of the Italian countryside, I began to appreciate his brilliant evisceration of the motley crew around the impossible Mrs. Aldwinkle: Mr. Cardan, the Epicurean philosopher; Calamy, the amorist who is beginning to wonder if there is more to life than bedding women; Mary Thriplow, the novelist who never stops writing, even when making love; Chelifer, the disillusioned poet; and the hapless Grace Elver, a sort of female Forrest Gump without Forrest's lucky star. This wickedly funny yet meditative book repays the work of thoughtful readers, it has much to say about what is really important in life, and how expert people are at self-delusion. People who liked "My Dinner with Andre" or Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy should like "Those Barren Leaves."

A hard-to-find book--I came across it as a yellowed old paperback at a rummage sale, and I'm glad I did. Full of characters you're ready to hate, you end up loving nearly every one. Extraordinarily beautiful language, the writing is the cream of the crop. Not much of a plot, to be sure, as it is filled mostly with conversation that asks all of life's profoundest questions. He doesn't answer all the questions--no one can!--but gives you ample food for thought. The book is set in Italy after WWI, and abounds in beautiful scenery. Read it when you're relaxed and have time to chew on it.