Rebecca Reads

Last week I reread Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public as a part of the Martel-Harper Challenge.
While I was well aware that Jonathan Swift’s short essay is classic satire, I [...]

I disliked Three Cups of Tea; my mother loved it. Read our counterpoints.

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.
Jeannette Walls lives comfortably. She’s a married woman, a successful gossip reporter, and a strong individual. She knows what she wants out of life. And yet she has a [...]

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After reading, in the past months, the short stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce, and Hemingway, I found O. Henry’s stories to be remarkably different. They were refreshingly delightful, poignant, and easy to read, and yet, I was struck by the inferiority of O. Henry’s actual writing in comparison to the [...]