Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
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
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.
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
At the risk of sounding ridiculously naive, I now turn to the transcendental context for Hawthorne’s novel, since I read it as a part of Jillian’s Transcendental Month. As I read The Scarlet Letter, I struggled to place the novel within the transcendental framework, and I’ve come to the conclusion that The Scarlet Letter is
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose style in The Scarlet Letter (first published 1850) is not for everyone. I admit, I don’t recall being impressed with the novel when I was 15 or 16 and I read it for the first time. Further, this summer I began a reread (via audio) only to stall a few chapters from
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
As I mentioned when I reread The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson last year, I grew up with fond memories of the plot, characters, setting, and the entire premise of the story. My older brother and I would imagine ourselves conquering the world, pouring over maps and phone books to determine where
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
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
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
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
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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