Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
I am not as familiar with nineteenth-century American literature as I feel I am with British nineteenth-century literature, especially Victorian fiction. In fact, I don’t recall studying many American classics from the era since my junior year of high school, and I struggle to name classic authors from various decades in American literature. Walden was
I was four years old when he passed away, but Spencer W. Kimball’s role as prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon Church) has always been the predominant role of his life in my mind. President Kimball’s biography, which was written by two of his sons, Edward and
Although I file this post as a review, I cannot really review The Well-Trained Mind: The Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and her mother Jessie Wise (third edition, 2009). I only read the Elementary chapters (Part I) in full and bits and pieces of Part IV since my son is
Just months before Molly Birnbaum was to enter the Culinary Institute of America to fulfill her dream to become a chef, she met with a violent accident. Although she escaped with her life, in addition to other physical wounds she had lost her sense of smell. Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of
William Blake has always fascinated me as a poet and also as a man. He was quite strange, but his writing is incredible: it’s powerful, it has a message, and yet it sounds so good. That said, I haven’t read much Blake poetry since my years in college and I’m certainly out of practice in
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua is a personal memoir of one woman’s raising her children in the “Chinese way.” My initial takeaway of the “Chinese Way” is that it is to insult and torment your children, to be self-centered and project yourself on your children, and to be more than overbearing
I was probably ten when I first began experimenting with WordPerfect’s fonts on our family’s personal computer. I typed the name of each font, highlighted it and selected the font from the list (because, of course, this was before you could see the font on the menu) and then I’d print out the list of
This is the kind of book that I don’t like to review (because I didn’t really like it and many others in the blogosphere do), so I’ll keep this post short. I liked bits of Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier (1999), and then the author started really irritating me. My main issue was
At one point in my life, I thought I was destined to be a writer: a writer of fiction, that is. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that writing fiction was not my forte. I still love to write, but it took the direction of literary criticism (in college) and now, blogging
When I was young, I wrote. When we were about 6, my friend and I would sit at my blue Smurf picnic table in the family room of my house, armed with crayons. One of us would write the story and the other would illustrate it. When I was in first grade, my class had
In her memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls tells the story of her neglected childhood, from her father (who is usually drunk) to her mother who is (I believe) mentally ill. With her obvious inner strength and intelligence, Ms Walls rises above poverty and discrimination to become a successful writer. Lily Casey Smith, the protagonist
William Kamkwamba is a bright young man in Malawi. Despite a difficult life helping to run a farm and not having the opportunity to continue his schooling, he determined to figure out how to create electricity for his rural neighborhood. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer) is his memoir of his
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