I love books, obviously. I also happen to love movies. I don’t love movies as much as books, I suppose, but I really enjoy a great movie and have some real favorites. I will also often watch related movies (or series) after reading a book. Thus, when I found an article from Harper’s Bazaar, I…
I purposely went from Zadie Smith’s NW to A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. I find Smith to be—while beautiful and noteworthy—depressing and challenging, so I took a brain-break with one of my very favorites, Pooh Bear. And while Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh series (Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young (poetry, actually written first),…
So, the title of this book is written “NW,” but it is said “Northwest.” That’s not that confusing, but just making it clear. And by “Northwest,” we mean an area of London, which is definitely what this book is about (and during a certain time period: it was published in 2012, and if you look…
A few months ago, I was looking to join a book club. I shouldn’t have been. It’s not really for me. If anything, I should host book clubs because I know exactly what I want to read for the year (all mapped out in my dot journal) not to mention the rest of my life,…
After reading In Cold Blood, I felt interested in reading Truman Capote’s other most-famous work, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. For one thing, I was intrigued by his strange career of seemingly never landing on the same genre twice. For another, this is my experience with Breakfast at Tiffany’s: In the nineties, the song “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”…
This was one of the books that I read in my modern literature class in college in the late nineties. I hadn’t read much literary fiction before then, and I loved many of the books in that class. This one, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, was new and was soaring in popularity, especially since the…
And yet another book that I have been meaning to read for ages: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I never understood what on earth a lauded and supposedly literary type like Truman Capote was doing with a true crime book topping his very short list. I mean, where did this author fit in my…
For all the amazing-ness of All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr made some nontraditional choices: he went with present tense (mostly?), chopped his behemoth up into hundreds of few-page chapters (often even one page), told the story from two different perspectives (which was doubled in strangeness by being omniscient while being, as I…
This hardly counts as a book review, but if you are anything like me, you will thrill at the revelation that The Antiquarian Sticker Book exists. Actually, these books, but we’ll get to that in a second. I was wandering a bookstore, actually looking for a souvenir. In this interesting area near the journals, I…
I mean, when you’re going to write a book about books and book people, you’re asking for trouble. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the majority of book people aren’t that discerning, and writing a book about book people is an obvious sell. Well, I’m a book person, and I approached Book Lovers by Emily Henry with…
I read it in a day, partly because my son had broken his arm and I had to take him to the urgent care and then bring him home and receive visitors and get him all straightened out (and let him watch movies instead of do school for the day). I also read it in…
Put out by Dover Thrift Editions and edited by Bob Blaisdell in 2014, this is a slim volume of fourteen short stories. Too slim, probably, considering what it is trying to accomplish: an introduction to “contemporary” (till 2014) Native American (or indigenous) literature (as opposed to mythology. Boy, are there a lot of books on…
So the reading plan for the end of home school co-op English 1 was a choose-your-own scenario. However, despite knowing all along how many weeks I had, my plan failed me and we did not have time for that whole thing. Instead, I chose for them a short book that would work well with the…
I first read this Christian book by the former Franciscan priest Brennan Manning in college. It was written in 1990 and I caught wind of it like ten years later. His life trajectory went something like: Depression-era-New Yorker; soldier; priest; uncloistered missionary to the poor; alcoholic; writer. The book came highly recommended to me (by…
Another month, another book that I am reviewing because I taught it to my ninth grade(ish) co-op students. I can’t remember how I found this poetry anthology last summer, but I am sure glad that I did. Rather than have to pull poems from the whole world of poetry or require the students to purchase…
When I was in high school (maybe on my way to college) I received one of those memorable gifts. I have received many memorable gifts. (Gifts is one of my love languages after all (along with service and then, I suppose, quality time.) For me, a memorable gift is often more than you expected and…
I chose Little Worlds by Peter Guthrie and Mary Page over the summer to use in my English 1 classroom (early high school/late middle school) during our winter short story unit. I ended up adding a little: some Latin-American literature, Native American contemporary literature (see future review on Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American…
I read this play by Edmond Rostand at this moment in time (after having to read it way back in high school) because the movie was coming out and it looked so good. Unfortunately, the movie has come out and Amazon wants $20 for me to rent it. Ah, well. It will come down some…
I read this book last month because it was the first book on the Valentine’s Day List. It was also a book I already owned, so… free. It is also a book that I have already read, though judging from the Border’s receipt inside, I read it in 2002, some time before I began writing…
I think that A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin took me so long to read because it is a book of short stories. In a way, there are no cliffhangers to keep the pages turning between the stories. But how about that title? I love it. Is it a manual for cleaning women…
the starving artist 