Rebecca Reads

I was about 16 or 17 before I “got” the point of poetry. My mother (an English grad student) had invited me to come to an English conference with her, and the poet Andrew Hudgins spoke. I don’t know what he said or which of his poems he shared, but I suddenly realized that poetry [...]

For the Try Something New Mini-Challenge as part of the Dewey’s Books Challenge, Jackie from Farm Lane Books and I teamed up to read something a little bit out of our comfort zone. We chose to read science fiction, a genre neither of us is completely comfortable with. Our choice was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.

In his stories, Vladimir Nabokov so perfectly captures a character, or a setting, or an emotion, that I feel that the character is real, the setting surrounds me, and the emotion is my own.
His writing in these stories is so well done that I, a very amateur writer, feel the urge to try my hand [...]

In the best-seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, Daniel Goleman explores emotions and the cause of emotions from the perspective of physiology, psychology, and human and child development. While Emotional Intelligence helped me reconsider my default reactions and emotions in various situations, I can’t really say I enjoyed listening to this [...]

I really like the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It is an inspiration for all of us to be mature. It’s especially timely for me right now because I’m currently listening to the nonfiction audiobook Emotional Intelligence (by Daniel Goleman). More about that later…

Anton Chekhov’s “The Student” is the perfect story.
Decide for yourself by reading it at Project Gutenberg (1,500 words) or listening to it at LibriVox (10 minutes). Note that I read a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Here are some elements that make it perfect for me.

Dune by Frank Herbert is a story of a boy searching for himself, and what Paul Atreides discovers about himself is beyond his expectations. Dune is a story of realization. Paul must face his fear, and Jessica, his mother, must face hers as well.
For me, Dune was a reminder that it is better not to [...]