Rebecca Reads

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 [...]

I’ve been in a short story mood lately. I picked up G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (a collection of 18 of the 49 stories about Father Brown) when I saw it on a display at the library. I’d read somewhere, maybe on a book blog, that one should read Father Brown because it’s the definitive [...]

I don’t usually reread children’s fantasy, but as I read one of Madeleine L’Engle’s memoirs, I decided to reread her most well-known novel, A Wrinkle in Time.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden has been banned before. I’m not surprised. It deals with attempted fratricide, prostitution, and murder. One character, Cathy, is described as a monster. But as I read it and recognized the obvious references and echoes of Genesis, I was overcome and enlightened. Combining the plot with the incredibly well written [...]