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 [...]

The introduction to my volume of Zora Neale Hurston’s retelling of the Biblical Exodus calls this a “badly flawed novel” and I’m sure it is. Hurston is basing her novel on a Biblical tale that lacks strong women characters, and she’s trying to make it feel modern. The introduction also criticizes the stereotyped way in [...]

Aucassin et Nicolete was written in medieval France, but it’s not your typical roman d’amour.
I haven’t actually read any other medieval romances. My expectations of “typical” are all formed on stereotype. In many ways, Aucassin and Nicolette meets those fairy tale stereotypes. On the other hand, something goes quite “wrong” in this love story, for [...]

In the end, I sighed with satisfaction. Yes, everything would be alright in Miss Matty Jenkyn’s town of Cranford.
I wasn’t sure I liked Elizabeth’s Gaskell’s Cranford for most of my reading, and to be honest, the snippets of life in the town of Cranford irritated me at first. But in the end, it all comes [...]

I am fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, and last month’s reread of Newbery-winner Lincoln: A Photobiography (reviewed here) only reinforced that.
Anthologist and “historian of ideas” Joe Wheeler has also been fascinated by Lincoln, and he spent seventeen years studying the fascinating man and collecting stories about him. Abraham Lincoln: A Man of Faith and Courage is [...]

It’s bawdy. It’s erotic. It may be inappropriate for young minds. It’s irreverent, especially considering a strict Islamic world such as the 1500s when they were written. And yet, The Arabian Nights has historically been an immensely popular collection of stories.
As The New Lifetime Reading Plan reminds me, these were one of the first “best-sellers,” [...]

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 [...]

Simms Taback has an illustration style all his own. His children’s picture book illustrations are often a blend of watercolor, gouache (an opaque watercolor painting), pencil, ink, collage, and I even observed some crayon illustrations. His colors are bright and his books have subtle jokes in the illustrations (for the parents to find). So far, [...]

Much of the life of William Shakespeare is a mystery. He carefully did not keep a diary nor send love letters to his wife. Shakespeare, the prolific writer who, in just over 50 years wrote an almost unbelievable number of remarkable poems and plays, did not leave many personal details of his life beyond public [...]