Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
Today is my first day to report on my ghost stories reading project. I’m tackling the Everyman’s Pocket Classics Ghost Stories volume, aiming to read one or two stories a week. My first ghost story was a rather tame one, even by my “I scare easily” standards. In “The Body-Snatcher” (first published 1884), an unnamed
How does a blind person understand the majesty of a cathedral? The narrator in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” tries to describe it. His underlying epiphany, however, is not about architecture but about his own prejudices and stereotypes. He discovers in the end that he has been the one blind. He has not understood the
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. Virginia Woolf’s short piece “The Mark on the Wall” captures a few moments of thought-wandering. I’ve been impressed in the past with Virginia Woolf’s ability to perfectly capture
I read both Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana and The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa more than a month ago, and they were both excellent. They deserve a little bit of book blog attention. Have you read them? What do you think of them?
This month’s Classics Circuit features Meiji-era Japanese literature! I chose to read some short stories by Higuchi Ichiyō , the most well-known woman writer in Meiji Japan. In the Shade of Spring Leaves, by Robert Lyons Danly, is part biography of Ms Ichiyō and part a collection of nine of her short stories. I decided
As I helped compile the listing of Imperial Russian Literature for the Classics Circuit a few months ago (found here), I found my TBR list growing exponentially: there are so many authors I want to read that I just don’t know when I’ll get to them all. Through my searches at the library and at
I adopted May as A Short Story a Day in May (which was also, apparently, made “official” by someone important I’d never heard of). I started off on a roll: I read a short story every day for almost three weeks. Then, by the last week of the month, I realized that I was honestly
Sometimes I just need something light. Something that makes me chuckle. I’ve been reading a lot of old classics (which I love) and nonfiction (which fascinates me). But when I went to start another portion of my painting project, I needed something light and funny. I couldn’t concentrate on serious when I was doing a
Pablo Neruda’s early poetry (specifically, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) does not have much to do with Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. Neruda was a Chilean who wrote love poetry (in Spanish) in the early 1900s at the age of 20. Hispanic-American Sandra Cisneros wrote in the 1980s a short
After I finished reading Husain Haddawy’s translation of The Arabian Nights (reviewed here), I still felt unfulfilled. I turned to The Arabian Nights II to get Haddawy’s translation of some of the traditional stories. In the end, I now have a better appreciation for the first volume of stories: those first stories were by far
I really like audiobooks sometimes because it gives a book a new edge. I absolutely loved listening to a selection of John Cheever’s stories via audiobook. The John Cheever Audio Collection was very well done. As I listened to the stories, I kept recalling my time reading the short stories of Chekhov and Maupassant last
It’s bawdy. It’s erotic. It may be inappropriate for young minds. It’s irreverent, especially considering a strict Islamic world such as the 1500s when they were written. And yet, The Arabian Nights has historically been an immensely popular collection of stories. As The New Lifetime Reading Plan reminds me, these were one of the first
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