In The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, the Queen discovers the joys of reading. As I read about the Queen’s reading journey, I found many similarities to my own reading journey. The Queen voiced my own thoughts about reading, and I loved relating to her. But while The Uncommon Reader was a funny, easy read,
I spent two months in Jerusalem in 2000 as part of a religious study abroad experience. While our focus was on Old and New Testament Biblical studies, I also got a healthy dose of Jewish and Palestinian history and religious information. I loved my time there and I loved the people I met – Jew,
What am I looking for when I read the Iliad this month? I’ve been wondering that, especially now that I have four translations before me. As I mentioned when I wrote about Aesop’s writers last week, a translation can make a big difference in how a story is portrayed. I’m not against a literal translation,
When I heard the concept of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz (monologues given by  medieval children), I thought it would be horribly boring. Monologues? I thought. What is fun about monologues? I thought children would be bored by these “Voices from a Medieval Village.” To my delight, I found Good Masters! Sweet
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood creates a powerful futuristic dystopia in which a quasi-religious political organization has taken control of the United States, creating a men-centered universe determine to procreate, even if via “handmaids.” In the attitude of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and I’m sure many others,
I disliked Three Cups of Tea; my mother loved it. Read our counterpoints. Hated It By Rebecca Reid of Rebecca Reads I heartily disliked listening to the 800+ minute audiobook of Three Cups of Tea by David Oliver Relin. To begin with, I disliked the horrible writing, which was full of extraneous details and parenthetical
In my mind, Edgar Allan Poe is the most well-known Halloween-ish short story writer. To keep up with the season, I reread some of Poe’s short stories. I enjoyed his stories when I was younger – I even rewrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a play for my high school’s Halloween “one-act
What would a young man say or do if he learned that his step-mother had fallen in love with him? In the play Hippolytus by Euripides, Hippolytus finds out that his step-mother has fallen for him. But what he doesn’t know is that the goddess Aphrodite has had her hand in these matters.
A few months ago, I read a version of Aesop’s Fables that I found online at Project Gutenberg, written and published in the early 1900s. I thought I’d read Aesop’s Fables. I was interested, then, to read in chapter two (“Ingenuity and Authority”) of Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry
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
To understand Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is understand the rural South that she was familiar with in the pre-1970s. Her stories focus on aspects character in human, every-day situations all revolving around her South, dealing with race relations, Christianity, rural versus city living, parent-child relationships, etc. She brings the reader into the settings by capturing
The colorful illustrations, the rhythmic words, and the familiar animals make Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle a favorite picture book. On each page, the reader asks an animal what he sees; the animal responds with another animal. In the end, the students in a classroom
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