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 book was not what I expected, though if I had seen the movie that came out several years ago, I wouldn’t have been surprised. To be frank, War Horse sounds like a book I would not enjoy, but it was on the required reading list for the middle schoolers I teach this year, so…
Normally, I would have read this book as part of the trilogy that it belongs in, but since this is my book-a-day challenge and this is the only one (inexplicably) on our bookshelves, I read it. The books, Night, Dawn, and Day, can stand alone. When I was in college, Elie Wiesel was all the rage. Okay,…
Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford. First published as a series of books, Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, and The Last Post, in the 1920s. I read the Vintage edition of all four stories together, published in 1950/1978. All authors have their overused words. For Rowling in the Potter…
The Sound and the Fury, written by William Faulkner, the corrected text published by Vintage International in 1984, but originally published in 1928 and (the Appendix) 1946. It is shocking how long it took me to get into this book. I don’t really like to know too much about a book before I read it,…
the starving artist 