Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
I’ve been blogging on this page for eight years now. It’s kind of hard to believe that my oldest child was five months old when I began. Here I am, two more children later (and the youngest is 5 months old), and I struggle to find time to read the books I love let alone
So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan (Little, Brown and Company, September 2014) is a tribute and examination of the often-named Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby. Ms. Corrigan is a true fan of Fitzgerald’s slim novel, and in her tribute to the work, she reviews not just the content of the book and the
In Terry Eagleton’s slim volume How to Read Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), the author approaches literature like an old friend. His volume is easily readable and quite fun. Rather than didactically explaining how to read literature, he writes with familiarity about different ways one could look at literature. There is no lecture in this
Many years ago, I read and reviewed Foster’s guide to reading literature. When I saw How to Read Literature like a Professor for Kids also by Thomas Foster (HarperCollins Children’s, 2013), I decided to read it to get a little idea of how he adapts his ideas for kids. Once again, Foster’s conversational tone takes the
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
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
This post is a part of the Ancient Greeks Classics Circuit. See the other stops on the tour here. I really enjoyed the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction I read a few months ago. As I thought about my Classics Circuit visit to some Aristotle, I decided to find the VSI on the man
I loved to read The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel because what could be better than essays by Victorians about Victorian novels?!1 I really enjoyed the essays I read, but I should begin this post by clarifying that unfortunately, my Interlibrary Loan expired before I finished the book. I only got
In preparation for the upcoming (February) Harlem Renaissance Classics Circuit, I’ve been reading a lot of introductory material to prepare for the introductory information we need to write for the sign up post. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t feel like an expert in anything, so I love having The Classics Circuit to get me
I loved reading Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories a few months ago because his control of language is so powerful, although I did feel that some of his stories were rather odd. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire is similar in that it is both odd and powerfully written. It is a masterwork of creation: who but Nabokov
Much of the life of William Shakespeare is a mystery. He carefully did not keep a diary nor send love letters to his wife. Shakespeare, the prolific writer who, in just over 50 years wrote an almost unbelievable number of remarkable poems and plays, did not leave many personal details of his life beyond public
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