A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor is bleak and difficult stuff. I was just drooling over it for its clarity, cleanness, style, innovation and trend-setting… but was dying inside due to its content. Satirical down to the word, nothing and no one in the world of the South in the early…
It’s not that I can’t see what others would see in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. But I’m not a teenager and I don’t live in the mid-century past. I can also understand that his writing was something fresh and special and that his insistence that it stay the way it was…
If you’re new here, then you alone are not sick of hearing this: I was reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in order to write a curriculum for ninth grade homeschoolers in a class I am teaching this year. I was really hoping this one would stick, even though it’s a touch longer…
Can anyone actually enjoy reading this book? I mean, appreciate it, dissect it, talk about it, parse it, give it a good rating, praise it, but enjoy it? The thing is, most books that I read while a teenager or even young adult, when I reread them I find waiting for me a completely different…
I have been out of commission since October, which is a little extreme. I attended that wonderful writing residency and finished a novel, but within weeks of returning I came down with something like the flu and destroyed my Thanksgiving season. I struggled with recovery until I decided that I had a secondary sinus infection.…
I used to have a story for why I picked The Scarlet Letter up at the point in time I read it (2017). I am still reviewing from my backlog, however (though I have also been reviewing as I read: double-timing it) so I don’t remember all of the circumstances. I remember buying The Scarlet…
the starving artist 