Rebecca Reads

When I joined the 2009 Science Book Challenge, I didn’t intend to focus on neuroscience, but it turns out that that branch of science is absolutely fascinating to me. These two books I read really have convinced me that science and art are inextricably related each other, for art is perceived and appreciated by the [...]

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 year. [...]

I like history and I always want to know more about American History. But in all the nonfiction and fiction about the Revolutionary War, it’s rather limited to dead white guys who fought the battles and otherwise founded our nation.
Enter: Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts. In a conversational tone, Roberts shares some of the stories [...]

There is something to be said for close, careful reading.
I must have read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the rest of my tenth grade class, but I honestly didn’t remember any of it. I decided to read it this month as a part of the Martel-Harper Challenge, for which Yann Martel chooses “book[s] that ha[ve] been [...]

I enjoyed The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman, a Newbery-winning novel. Cushman believably created a 1300s scene, and I liked learning about midwifery and superstition in the middle ages. While modern girls won’t face trials as extreme as the girl’s in the novel, they still must develop self-confidence and determine what their own dreams are. [...]

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley on the 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers list, and I know I’ve seen it on many other “must-read” lists. I never read it in high school when many people apparently did, so I thought I should give it a go now. But I just cannot.
I’ve listened to [...]

Green Knowe is a medieval castle in the English countryside, and it is full of enchantment and ghosts. L.M. Boston’s chronicles about the manor house are full of child-like delight.
And yet, describing the series as a whole is challenging. They all, but one, involved magic of some kind. They all, but one, focus on a [...]

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis sets out to share what he believes the core of Christianity is. He makes it clear in the introduction that he is not sharing doctrines of a specific faith, but rather Christianity in general.
I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to [...]

Often, I consider superior writing to be more important than a superior story: if it is written well, I don’t care so much about the story because the powerful writing can carry my interest in the book.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding, however, failed that test. I loved the writing: Golding’s prose is magical [...]

Much of the life of William Shakespeare is a mystery. He carefully did not keep a diary nor send love letters to his wife. Shakespeare, the prolific writer who, in just over 50 years wrote an almost unbelievable number of remarkable poems and plays, did not leave many personal details of his life beyond public [...]