Rebecca Reads

Last May 1, I officially started Rebecca Reads. I had been tinkering with a site for a few days and I post-dated some pseudo-reviews that I’d written for a personal site, but it wasn’t until May 1 that I opened the site to Google and started linking to it when I commented on your sites.  [...]

I don’t often read modern fiction, but when I heard Bridget Jones’ Diary was a “modern day retelling” of Pride and Prejudice, I thought I’d give it a try. I was lucky enough to find a fairly new, nice-looking copy on a library cart for (probably) a quarter a few months ago, so I thought [...]

In Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dogs: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, Kitty Burns Florey sets out to tell why diagramming sentences is so much fun and the brief history of the art of diagramming sentences. To some extent, I felt Florey’s book was more memoir and humor than it was history. Yet, [...]

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I loved reading Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories a few months ago because his control of language is so powerful, although I did feel that some of his stories were rather odd. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire is similar in that it is both odd and powerfully written. It is a masterwork of creation: who [...]

A number of people got some Really Old Classics read by the end of February. I’m sending a lucky winner a book of your choice. But first, here’s who participated in the first half of the Really Old Classics Challenge. I’ve formed it like a mini-blog carnival so you might get an idea for your [...]

It’s the new year! New challenges are beckoning us, as are new books. But let’s not forget the really old ones!
How about a mini-challenge (with a giveaway) to remind you?

To my surprise, I greatly enjoyed reading The Book that Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannesson.
The Book that Changed My Life is a collection of essays by writers, and since I don’t often read modern fiction, I didn’t expect to recognize many of the authors highlighted, much less did I [...]

Equality 7-2521 lives in a dark futurist dystopia in Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. He has no words for love or self, and being alone is a crime. Yet, as do characters in countless other dystopian novels, he still finds moments to write his story of discovery.
By itself, Anthem is slim – just 100 pages – [...]

In The Planets by Dava Sobel, one learns of the trivia and facts associated with each planet, as well as the moon and sun, in poetic terms. Scientist Dava Sobel, a New York Times bestselling author, shows that science can be beautiful and lyrical, not technical. Among other things, she tells of the mythology of [...]

Does anyone host a “Holiday Favorites” challenge? I haven’t seen any information about any such challenge floating around the blogosphere, but correct me if I’m wrong.