Rebecca Reads

Although To the Lighthouse is told in a similar stream-of-consciousness manner as was Mrs. Dalloway (reviewed two weeks ago), it struck me as different, and I’m not sure why. Was there more plot? Maybe. Was it the setting (the Hebrides versus London)? Maybe. I do know that as I read, I was less emotionally drawn [...]

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures a woman’s joys and frustrations in a single day by revealing her thought processes. Although some other character’s thoughts are captured as well, it was Clarissa Dalloway that I related to.

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 [...]

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 mentioned at the beginning of the month that I first “got” poetry when I heard a presentation by the poet Andrew Hudgins, so I thought I’d take National Poetry Month to revisit some of his poetry.
Now, I’m a beginner at poetry. I don’t know how to write about it clearly and I don’t know [...]

While I didn’t like Hemingway’s short stories when I read them, I did enjoy Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. While it has an element of sadness, there is also a beauty and majesty around its short plot.

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 [...]

After reading Edgar Allan Poe last week, I thought I’d stay in the same era and read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories. To my delight, many of Hawthorne’s stories perfectly fit the “gothic” theme of Halloween in a style that I loved. Even though I dislike of being “scared,” these stories were again the perfect amount of [...]

When I heard the concept of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz (monologues given by  medieval children), I thought it would be horribly boring. Monologues? I thought. What is fun about monologues? I thought children would be bored by these “Voices from a Medieval Village.”
To my delight, I found Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! [...]

To understand Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is understand the rural South that she was familiar with in the pre-1970s. Her stories focus on aspects character in human, every-day situations all revolving around her South, dealing with race relations, Christianity, rural versus city living, parent-child relationships, etc. She brings the reader into the settings by capturing [...]