Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
Big Ideas in Literature (The School of Life; March 2024) is a book all about one of my favorite subjects: literature. It introduces what makes literature literature, the history of literature and books, and what big topics literature can address, even through amusing situations and language. Throughout the book, the authors highlight literature from history
Mr. Darcy: the swoon-worthy hero we all are waiting for. But maybe not? In The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us To Love (Quirk Books, November 2023), literature scholar Rachel Feder retells this narrative in a more accurate way. With an abundance of humor and with plenty of modern
Stanley Wells is one of the world’s premier Shakespearean scholars, with, as he discusses in his epilogue, more than 80 years of experience of studying, teaching, reading, and watching Shakespeare. His newest book is an exploration of the man: What Was Shakespeare Really Like? (Cambridge University Press, September 2023). He writes about Shakespeare by considering
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
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
What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Mullan (Bloomsbury, 2012) is a literary theory light book for the masses of Austenites around the globe. But I hope that does not scare casual readers away from it, because What Matters in Jane Austen? is full of observations about the novels to help even the most casual
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. Aristotle’s own Poetics was a nice introduction to my self-imposed classics unit on Ancient Greek theater. I choose to read Poetics was my chosen text to read by the man himself, mostly because it’s the shortest but also because I am
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