Rebecca Reads

At first, I didn’t love Sense and Sensibility. The characters felt like flat stereotypes. The elder sister, Elinor Dashwood, was full of sense and Marianne (and her mother) was flighty and emotional (the “sensibility” of the title). These two acted in the extremes of their stereotypes, and I didn’t feel drawn in to the story. [...]

The narrator of Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, is dead.
Meet Susie. Susie Salmon was 14 when she was brutally raped and murdered in a cornfield near her home. Now, as her family recovers and learns to live again, she watches them from her gazebo in her heaven and begins to come to terms [...]

I love a book about books, so I thought I’d pick up the slim 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and the sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Between reading the two books, I also watched the movie, staring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as part of Chance #10 (Book/Movie Comparison) for the Take [...]

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi is almost a fairy tale. There is a magical fairy, there are talking animals, and of course, there is talking marionette who wants to be a real boy. And yet, Collodi’s tale fell just a little short of fairy tale status because of the obvious moralizing lessons: the [...]

Is there a movie from your childhood that you recall watching over and over and over again? One that you think of, still, with fondness?
For me, that movie was Mary Poppins.
In 2007, I read A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and loved it along with the movie; they both have their merits.
So this year, I thought that I [...]

I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a teenager – and I loved it. Since then, I watched the A&E movie multiple times, and then last year I watched the newer movie, which was OK. I felt it was certainly time to revisit the novel itself.
I was not disappointed. I loved it even better [...]

Making a movie of To Kill a Mockingbird (reviewed here) was like killing a mockingbird: a sin.
In the beginning, I thought “Wow, this is bad; they should do a remake.” By the end, I decided that no remake could capture the beauty of the novel: any film is bound to fail. A picture is [...]

I’ve been reading The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne to my infant son. I can’t determine what he thinks of them — I read while he kicks and rolls around the floor — but I truly enjoy reading them.
The Complete Tales includes the story books, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House on Pooh [...]