Rebecca Reads

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is full of dark Victorian romance. Muddy roads on a dark night. A secluded house on a corner that echoes footsteps. Cemetaries at night. And, of course, Paris streets that run with wine and then blood because of La Guillotine.  It is a sinister world for the upper [...]

This is a “must read” book. There, I said it.
I am a suburban American stay-at-home mom. I have always been well fed and safe. I have 16+ years of education and I could get more if I felt like it. When I was 26, I delivered my first child naturally in a hospital with a [...]

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures a woman’s joys and frustrations in a single day by revealing her thought processes. Although some other character’s thoughts are captured as well, it was Clarissa Dalloway that I related to.

When I reviewed and analyzed Julius Caesar in depth back in June, I expected that I’d do the same with all the other Shakespeare plays I read while I have had this blog. And yet, I cannot “analyze” Macbeth. While I enjoyed reading Macbeth, it was not a “deep” reading experience for me. I’ve found [...]

At first, Baking Cakes in Kigali by Galie Parkin reminded me of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall-Smith.
In both novels, an independent woman in an African country runs a business and listens to the gossip of her neighbors, showing the reader a little bit about African locale, but also illustrating the pure [...]

Remember how just the other day I said I give books more of the benefit of the doubt lately?
The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean is a fine example of that. A year ago, I may have dismissed it entirely because it seems so superficial to me. (Actually, I probably would have dismissed it as [...]

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington attempts to define the post-Cold War world. His conclusion is that, instead of an “us” and “them” approach to world politics, we must view the world as that of many civilizations, including mainly the West (generally Christian), Sinic (Chinese), Islamic, Hindu [...]

I like history and I always want to know more about American History. But in all the nonfiction and fiction about the Revolutionary War, it’s rather limited to dead white guys who fought the battles and otherwise founded our nation.
Enter: Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts. In a conversational tone, Roberts shares some of the stories [...]

There is something to be said for close, careful reading.
I must have read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the rest of my tenth grade class, but I honestly didn’t remember any of it. I decided to read it this month as a part of the Martel-Harper Challenge, for which Yann Martel chooses “book[s] that ha[ve] been [...]

I let myself browse the library a few weeks ago, and I ended up coming home with a huge coffee table book of photography, Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs by Hal Buell. I thought I’d browse through the award-winning photographs and then return it.
To my delight, the short summaries on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs were [...]