Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
Chloe in India by Kate Darnton is about an American preteen trying to find her place while living in a foreign country. Chloe is a preteen American girl who has moved to India, but she dislikes living there because she is the outsider. She has blonde hair, she doesn’t know Hindi, and she doesn’t quite
In A Little Princess (1905), Francis Hodgson Burnett creates a turn-of-the-century London-based Cinderella story. The protagonist, Sara Crewe, is a truly remarkable heroine. Although raised with extravagant wealth and spoiled with whatever servants, toys, clothes, and so forth she could desire, she remained kind, pleasant, sensitive, and polite. But reading of a perfectly spoiled child,
Miss Buncle is an aging old maid in a boring town in the suburbia of London, 1930s. When she finds herself in need of funds, she decides to earn some money by writing a novel. Miss Buncle’s book causes waves in the careful social fabric of the small town because she has written about the
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson (to be published October 2012 by Basic Books) captures not just culinary history but cultural history, describing the foods eaten throughout history based on the tools available to prepare them.
I really enjoyed reading Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 1 in January, mostly because it include Joan of Arc and mentioned Margaret of Anjou, who married Henry VI. Joan of Arc has fascinated me since I dressed up as Joan for my sixth grade Medieval feast, and Margaret of Anjou is an ancestor of mine. Shakespeare’s
In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (published 1814), Fanny Price was the oldest daughter of a poor family, sent at age 10 to live with her generous and wealthy Bertram cousins. Yet, in the lovely Mansfield Park, Fanny was constantly reminded of her lesser status and spent her days for the most part assisting the lazy
Bleak House (published serially 1852-1853) is a sweeping saga of epic proportions. Charles Dickens obviously planned the plot carefully, especially by providing introduction and characters for the bulk of the first third of the novel, so that the last third of the novel would swiftly move to a satisfying conclusion that ties all the previously
At first, The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar reminded me of The Help. Obviously, given the very different settings, the book was very different as a whole from The Help. But I loved reading about the friendship and lives of two very different women. The book was beautifully written, and although the realistic issues
In 1955, a mother of five took a vacation to the beach. For two weeks, she had no husband or children seeking her, no hot water, no telephone, and no obligations, other than to reach inside for much needed rejuvenation as she wrote, searched for pretty shells, and pondered life. In Gift from the Sea,
Yesterday evening I returned home from my classics book club meeting very sad. We read Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and when I last read it, I remember wishing I could read and discuss with other classics readers. My classics reading group (last year, a total of four of us) agreed to give it a
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a story of two children’s growing understanding of the double standards of the world. It’s also the story of a small community struggling to come together during the economic era of the Great Depression and the political upheaval of a mixed racial pre-Civil Rights southern town. It is
After I finished reading The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (first published serially in 1836-7), I began to read the introduction to my edition1. Almost immediately, it confirmed what I’d thought as I’d read it: that Mr. Pickwick is a Don Quixote and Bertie Wooster character. So I stopped reading the introduction; I’ll tell you
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