Rebecca Reads

Nobel laureate (1968) Yasunari Kawabata is obviously talented at describing scenes, and there was, in The Old Capital, something refreshing about a slow-paced story of a young woman coming into a realization of herself.
In her free time, Chieko would see the cherry blossoms and visit the cedar forests. It was a celebration of the world [...]

I listened to Mr. Feynman’s memoir, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, as I drove for the last few weeks. Although some aspects of the Nobel Prize winning physicist’s life were rather interesting, overall, I am surprised I stuck with his story for so long. It was not a favorite of mine.

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. [...]

While I still enjoyed In Chancery and To Let, the second two novels of The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy felt less developed, less powerful, and less important. In essence, to me they felt like merely sequels to a powerful novel. My thoughts on the first novel of the trilogy were complimentary; these thoughts are [...]

My LibraryThing group (called Group Reads – Literature) read The Forsyte Saga in March and April; I’m rather behind. I’m now midway through the second of the three novels.
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy tells the story of the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s: the cusp of modernity. The younger generation is [...]

I could not put down the 140-page novella The Stranger by Albert Camus after I picked it up, despite the fact that it is odd and rather disturbing. Camus’ Nobel Prize-winning writing style was absolutely beautiful: it reminded me of both John Steinbeck’s in The East of Eden (which I thought was a perfect combination [...]

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.

The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling contain much more than the story of the adopted wolf-boy, Mowgli, who is probably the most familiar of Kipling’s characters.
Kipling’s Jungle Books are collections of stories about animals and people from around the world. Each story seems to be rooted in traditional facts about [...]

I am not very familiar with the political situation before, during, and after World War II. But after reading the best speeches of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, I am impressed that his powerful, confident speeches were a deciding factor in the perseverance of the United Kingdom through the trying times of World War II. [...]

Booker Prize-winning Life and Time of Michael K by Nobel-prizing winning J.M. Coetzee was a challenging but rewarding read for me.