Rebecca Reads

Yesterday began Black History Month in the USA! The Harlem Renaissance-themed Classics Circuit began yesterday as well, and I hope you follow along as bloggers unite in reading classic works by African-Americans.
Although this post is not for the Circuit, in preparing for that Classics Circuit, I did a lot of preliminary reading about the era [...]

Maybe this is odd but I’m not crazy about adventure stories. Characters are stereotypes, the adventures they must go through are stereotypes, and all ends up well in the end. I guess I just hope for a little depth or humor or ambiguity when I read.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was, in many senses, [...]

Harold Bloom dedicates a section of How to Read and Why to poetry, because, he says, “Poetry is the crown of imaginative literature.” (How to Read and Why, page 69). I don’t feel Bloom’s insights actually are helping me read poetry, but I’ve decided to read the poets he suggests because it’s a broad introduction [...]

Aucassin et Nicolete was written in medieval France, but it’s not your typical roman d’amour.
I haven’t actually read any other medieval romances. My expectations of “typical” are all formed on stereotype. In many ways, Aucassin and Nicolette meets those fairy tale stereotypes. On the other hand, something goes quite “wrong” in this love story, for [...]

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 [...]

When I was about 75 pages into my slim, 98-page volume of John Donne’s poetry, I was bored. But then I read the last section of the book: the Divine Poems. After reading that section, I’m pretty sure I’ll be revisiting Donne’s poetry again.
I didn’t hate the beginning portion of the book; I just wasn’t [...]

I always love to pick up a slim volume of poetry, a volume that contains poems all by the same author, because it helps me to pick up on themes, it helps me get to know an author, and it lets me really feel the emotions the author celebrates.
Margaret Atwood’s The Door was published in [...]

Carl Sandburg was born in rural Galesburg, Illinois in 1878. He quit school after eighth grade, and did a variety of jobs throughout the Midwest, including traveling as a hobo, working as a fireman, and threshing wheat, eventually settling down as a journalist in the city of Chicago. Through his experiences, he observed the dichotomy [...]

Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins is a slim volume of poetry. I picked it up in honor of April being National Poetry Month. I limited myself to a few poems each week, and I’ve been enjoying it for the past few weeks.
I’ve mentioned before that I really enjoyed Billy Collins’ style, and [...]

Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare (edited by David Scott Kastan and Marina Kastan and illustrated by Glenn Harrington) goes beyond Shakespeare’s sonnets. In just 50 pages, the editors have also included some of the key speeches from Shakespeare’s repertoire.
As with other volumes in the series, each page has a bit of explanation about the [...]