Rebecca Reads

At first, I didn’t love Sense and Sensibility. The characters felt like flat stereotypes. The elder sister, Elinor Dashwood, was full of sense and Marianne (and her mother) was flighty and emotional (the “sensibility” of the title). These two acted in the extremes of their stereotypes, and I didn’t feel drawn in to the story. [...]

The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (music) and Emanuel Schikaneder (libretto) holds a special place in my life: it was an opera my husband took me to when he was courting me. It’s been four years now, but I still feel giddy when I think about that special time when we were [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post, I loved Holden Caulfield when I first read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I was probably about 16 years old, which is Holden’s age. I read it again in college (20 years old) and I likewise enjoyed Holden’s story.
I didn’t love Holden on this third [...]

Although I do not like reading violent stories, one of my favorite books has such a poignant message that I love it regardless, or maybe because of, the brutal facts is illustrates.
In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the ghosts of slavery live on, even though it is the year 1873. In one sense, Beloved is literally [...]

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 have an unfair bias against memoirs. This may stem from the fact that many memoirs are written by people who are complete strangers, and I find myself wondering why their life should be of interest to me. With this book, at least, that unfair stereotype was certainly proved wrong!
Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life is [...]

In my reading journal a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I may want to reread The Good Earth many times. I may need to amend that.
The writing was beautiful. I loved Pearl Buck’s almost Biblical prose that just flowed like poetry. And yet, probably a dozen times, I almost stopped listening to the audiobook. [...]

When I was in eighth grade, I had a reading class in school each day. My teacher often assigned the entire class the same book to read, and we read during each class period. Then we’d discuss it.
One particular time, I think we were reading a children’s novel, like My Brother Sam is Dead (which [...]

The Once Upon a Time III Challenge has a “Short Story Weekend” mini-challenge, so I thought I’d visit some fairy tales. To my surprise, the copy of Charles Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales that I found was less than 200 pages and written for children, so I breezed through all of them very quickly. Many of [...]

I thought that The Odyssey by Homer (trans. by Robert Fagles) was much more readable than The Iliad (also trans. by Fagles) was. It was driven by far more action, and the ending was happy.  I found it a delight to read, as I did The Iliad. And yet, I was surprised by how [...]