Related Posts: #7 Drowning Ruth by Cristina Schwarz © 2000 Date read: 2/1/2001 Many of the themes that I’d been reading about since Portrait of the Artist come together in this novel: how childhood informs the adults we become, how people who share the same experience react to and remember it differently, how time and context […]
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Related Posts: #6 The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton © 1998 Date read: 2/24/2000 This book would not have the same effect on me if I read it now for the first time as it did when I read it more than 20 years ago. Some issues that we now take for
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Related Posts: #5 The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester © 1996 Date read: 7/12/1998 I don’t recall ever feeling the need to like fictional characters, yet this topic recurs periodically when readers condemn a book they’ve just finished because “I didn’t like any of the characters.” But if I ever did feel such a
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Related Posts: #4 The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns © 1997 Date read: 9/23/1997 I used to think that the most important consideration in any work of fiction is, hands down, point of view. But this novel made me realize that context is just as important. A first-person narrator tells this story, about
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Related Post: This week I offer two selections because there’s not much I can say about #3 without giving away the whole point. #2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce © 1916 Date read: ca. 1966 or 1967 While I now credit Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl with opening
Introduction Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which was the starting point for this month’s 6 Degrees of Separation post, was My Most Surprising Read of 2022. I can’t remember the last time a novel made me cry, but this one did. Thinking about why Zevin’s book hit me so powerfully made me consciously
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6 Mid-Life Memoirs of Transformative Years “6 Life-Changing Memoirs” “What would it take for you to transform your life? Could you do it in the span of a year or two? Spurred on by loss, career changes, new hobbies — or even a global pandemic — what if your life could become something new? In
Reviewer Jeana Jorgensen Interviews Thomas Cirotteau, Coauthor of Lady Sapiens: Breaking Stereotypes about Prehistoric Women The book Lady Sapiens “corrects mistaken stereotypes about prehistory, asserting the primacy of women in past societies and honoring the foremothers who advanced civilization with their art, knowledge, and power,” writes reviewer Jeana Jorgensen. “In reality,” she notes, “early women
Roald Dahl’s books are nasty by nature – editing a word or two won’t make them nice A bit different aspect of censorship has been in the news lately: “An investigation by the Telegraph has revealed that hundreds of changes have been made to the most recent editions of Dahl’s books, published by Puffin (the
Prince Harry’s Book Is Just Good Literature “I don’t give a fig about the royals, but much of Spare reads like a good novel.” After admitting that she doesn’t care about the British royal family and doesn’t follow what they’re doing, Laura Miller writes, “To my surprise, the first half of Spare turns out to
