Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
I’m giving away a copy of How to Read and Why to someone joining my personal challenge. Read my discussion of the preface for more information. This is a very long post; I’m breaking my own rules of length because I spent a long time reading and pondering Bloom’s prologue, and I have a lot
Booker Prize-winning Life and Time of Michael K by Nobel-prizing winning J.M. Coetzee was a challenging but rewarding read for me. In the midst of a futuristic South African civil war, Michael K lives to survive, and that is all. He has no wants and needs other than to be left alone. I spent the
In his introduction to a 1912 translation by V.S. Vernon Jones of Aesop’s Fables (available online here via Project Gutenberg), G.K. Chesterton claimed that Aesop’s fame “was all the more deserved because he never deserved it.” Chesterton continued: “The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables,
Edith Wharton’s 1921 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, carefully illustrates the social stigmas prevalent in 1870s New York. I loved Wharton’s ability to draw me in to the internal battles the main characters faced, and I empathized with their desires to find belonging. While today’s social stigmas differ, the emotions remain the same.
My library had a dozen reserves on Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I didn’t feel like waiting yet longer to read it, so I bought the audiobook from audible.com. (I can’t explain why in this case I got the audio instead of the physical book, but I did.) I hadn’t read many reviews of this
There are hundreds of book blogs reviewing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I didn’t really read any of them before I began this book. What I did read was my cousin’s suggestion that I read it, along with some comments she had. She wrote: It addresses orphans and hunger and family separation and Jewishness
I read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories because I wanted to read this Nobel-prize winning author and also because I remembered the imaginative premise of his magical world and wanted to experience his world as an adult. I very much enjoyed reading them again, although there are some “politically incorrect” stereotypes in them I hadn’t
I’ve been in a short story mood lately. I picked up G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (a collection of 18 of the 49 stories about Father Brown) when I saw it on a display at the library. I’d read somewhere, maybe on a book blog, that one should read Father Brown because it’s the definitive
I read a review of Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri on The Pulitzer Project. The next day, I saw it on display at the library. I hope reading a review of it prompts you to pick it up, too. It is an incredible collection of short stories. Amazingly, this collection is the author’s first
Ignored Characters As I mentioned, to my surprise, I loved rereading Little Women. I think I liked it more now than when I first read it as a teenager, simply because the goody-goody characters were refreshing to me after the novels and the nonfiction books I’ve been reading. I related to the girls. Author Geraldine
Favorite AuthorsWhen I was a child, I would go to the library on my bike with a backpack full of already-consumed books, return them, and get another full backpack full of to-be-read books. Sometimes I’d go through a series, reading every single one as they were available at the library. Other times I went through
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden has been banned before. I’m not surprised. It deals with attempted fratricide, prostitution, and murder. One character, Cathy, is described as a monster. But as I read it and recognized the obvious references and echoes of Genesis, I was overcome and enlightened. Combining the plot with the incredibly well-written descriptions
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