I am working on a different project today, but I came across this amazing poem by E.A. Robinson (1869-1935), who won more than one Pulitzer Prize in poetry. It’s called “Zola,” and it so perfectly captures why I disliked Germinal at the same time I absolutely loved it. If you’ve read any Zola before, you
Mem Fox is a successful children’s book author and literacy expert. Her expertise in Reading Magic (Harcourt 2001) comes across as personal and passionate, mostly because she writes foremost from her position as a mother. Her main point in writing this book is to read aloud to our children, making it a fun time and
Somehow, my thoughts on A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929) were never recorded! I finished it quite a few weeks ago. As a novel to enjoy in my free time, A Farewell to Arms fell short. However, as a novel that perfectly captures the era in which it was written and the subtlety
A few weeks ago, I overheard my kindergartner talking to his baby sister. “Are you an i, u, v, or j?” he was saying in his sweetest voice. “Because if you are, you cannot come at the end of an English word!” This he repeated a few times over the next few minutes as he
The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare felt a lot like Love’s Labour’s Lost when I read it because there was misdirected love. But The Comedy of Errors takes humor to another level by adding in mistaken identity because of a double set of identical twins! In The Comedy of Errors, there are two sets
I don’t often read Graphic Novels, but I do enjoy the ones I pick up! Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller by Joseph Lambert (Disney Hyperion, 2012) is a finalist for the Cybils 2012 awards in the graphic novels category. I love Helen Keller’s story, so I was interested to pick this one
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (David Fickling Books, 2006) is not a “fun” or amusing book, but it is just as highly improbable, and I think that is something every reader of it should realize: this is not a historically accurate book. The subtitle is “A Fable,” altho ugh more accurately
The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brockett by John Boyne (January 2013) is a highly improbable book about a child who is born with the amazing quirk of floating. Barnaby Brockett cannot help it: it is just the way he is. He and his family find solutions (a heavy bag of rocks to keep
I had hoped that by waiting a week or two I’d know what I want to say about Love’s Labour’s Lost, but after all this time I still have very little to say. I worry that I feel this way because I read a free Project Gutenberg version of it, and as I read in
Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd (Random House, January 2013) is a volume about what makes nonfiction great. Using their own experiences as a writer of nonfiction (Tracy Kidder, bestselling author) and an editor of creative nonfiction (Richard Todd, Atlantic editor), the two friends provide a compelling tale of
Henrietta Lacks died at age 31, her body racked with cancerous tumors growing out of control. She was a poor black woman in the public ward of Johns Hopkins hospital in 1951, a person who hid her intense pain from her family and friends as long as she could. Her story is one that could
Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal (Icon Books, September 2012) purports to be a book for young adults, providing a look at Shakespeare as “as easy to handle as beans on toast”. That must be a British thing because beans on toast sounds pretty gross to me. (I don’t like beans.) At any rate, Shakespeare
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