At first glance, James: A Novel by Percival Everett (Doubleday, March 2024) is a clever retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but quickly proves to be much more. Huck Finn joins runaway slave Jim on an adventure down the Mississippi River, to be joined by con men and more. But that is only the

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Democracy by John Dunne (Atlantic, 2005) is book that gives deep political consideration of the concept of democratic government throughout the written history of the world. Although the subtitle is “A History,” I found it to be much more a philosophical text about what democracy has meant throughout time rather than a straight-forward history book.

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In The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow Books, March 2024), Michael is a lonely celebrating his 12th birthday in the summer of 1999 when his life is changed by the appearance of strange kid in his apartment complex. Michael is an awkward kid obsessed with Y2K (yes, that moment when computers

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Voltaire’s Candide (originally published 17581) is alternatively titled Optimism. A rosy outlook on life is the main target of Voltaire’s satire. Rather than embracing a truly pessimistic approach to the world, however, Voltaire seems to me to be arguing for a realistic and reasonable approach to life. The humorous look at both optimism and pessimism

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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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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. So, as I thought about my Classics Circuit visit to some Aristotle, I decided to find the VSI on the

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If you follow my twitter stream, you may have noticed that in the last few days a few complaint tweets about the never-ending nature of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Well, it ended. This morning I finished the last fifteen pages. My book club discusses it tomorrow night, but I wanted to record my initial impressions

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In The Girl Who Owned a City (first published 1975, reissued 1995), O.T. Nelson creates an entirely unbelievable post-apocalyptic scenario for middle-grade readers. In the story, the world population of adults has died of a rapidly spreading plague within the last month. All that remains in ten-year-old Lisa’s immediate world are other children, all under

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