Rebecca Reads

Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan was one of the first modern novels when it was published in 1679 and 1685 because it uses dialogue as a main tool to drive the story. As an allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress plainly tells the story of each Christian’s lifelong quest from a sinful life to eternal life using the [...]

I was looking for something else light to read before Christmas when I found, via the Book Review Blog Carnival on Maw Books, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, reviewed at The Movieholic and Bibliophile’s Blog. Best of all, because it is in the public domain, I could jump over [...]

Most people have heard of A Christmas Carol, but few are familiar with Charles Dickens’ other Christmas novellas. I read his other four this season. Some were more interesting than others. The superiority of A Christmas Carol makes it clear to me why it has lasted as a “classic” through the years, and while most [...]

If you like Harry Potter’s world, you’ll like J.K. Rowling’s latest edition to the cannon: The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
After each tale, which has been carefully “translated” from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger, we read Dumbledore’s commentary/critical analysis of the tale, with Rowling’s special notes for Muggle audiences. The Tales of Beedle the [...]

I reread A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens just about every Christmas. I love the story of personal redemption as Ebenezer Scrooge learns from his past, recognizes the facts of the present, and learns to hope for the best in the future. For me, the appeal of this ghostly tale is the recognition that I [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As I mentioned, Maupassant was a best-seller in his day. What makes his stories resonate with the modern reader is the attention to our own natural wants.

If Guy de Maupassant lived and wrote stories or novels today, his name would appear on The New York Times best-seller lists many weeks out of a year.
As it was, in the late 1800s, his stories were best-sellers from the time the first one, “Boule de Suif,” appeared in a collection with five other previously [...]

There are hundreds of book blogs reviewing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I didn’t really read any of them before I began this book. What I did read was my cousin’s suggestion that I read it, along with some comments she had. She wrote:
It addresses orphans and hunger and family separation and Jewishness during [...]