A blog about books, the publishing world, and maintaining ultimate litness.
All the time reading Stoner by John Williams, I was wondering why my generation of readers had decided to revive this particular novel. It seemed remarkable only in how sad a constantly thwarted life could be. And then I finished the book, everything suddenly clicked, and I set the book down with an audible “wow.” […]
I love Charlotte Brontë’s writing. I love her protagonists. She does moralize, but it doesn’t bother me; I feel I could read her writing all of the time. There are a lot of similarities between Jane Eyre and Villette. The moral, high-valued, independent woman makes her living as a teacher and tries to keep her […]
I mainly wanted to read this novel because I was seeing everyone else read it and because of the title. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. That’s so intriguing. Turns out that comes directly out of a line of William Blake’s poem “Proverbs of Hell,” and that’s the most intriguing thing about […]
I’ve learned I really love the writing of both Charlotte and Anne Brontë. It just slides through my mind like silk threads. Though I was a bit caught up by the questionable comma usage throughout The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I’m not sure if that’s a Brontë issue or a Wordsworth edition issue), the language […]
Entwined by Heather Dixon (now Wallwork), a retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” fairy tale, was one of my favorite books I read in my youth. So when I learned that she had written another fairy tale retelling, this time after “The Nutcracker” and “The Pied Piper,” called Enchanted Sonata, I wanted to read it. […]
The ghost of Sylvia Plath is intrinsically linked with any discussion surrounding her novel The Bell Jar. In the literary space, there always seemed to be some mysterious aura surrounding it, leaden with heavy context even if you don’t strictly remember the story behind the weight the bare mention of the book carries. The book […]
After reading The Painted Veil by Maugham, in which cholera is prominently featured, I thought it was an ideal time to brave reading Love in the Time of Cholera, thinking it might be a nice segue even though I absolutely hated Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cholera has very […]
I first read Machiavelli’s The Prince as assigned reading for a sophomore history class in high school. I remember being surprised at enjoying it. It’s basically a pamphlet how-to for princes and rulers, and often values cold pragmatism over morality. I don’t remember if I found it particularly shocking the first time around, but I […]
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom is a very wholesome, sweet book, in the same realm of A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman. It’s written in a refreshingly straight-forward prose, and is a very short, easy read. It follows a man who dies, goes to Heaven, and encounters five people […]
After hearing so many people rave about her, I finally read a Clarice Lispector novel. And I hated it. I wanted to DNF The Passion According to G.H. so many times; I again got through it out of sheer obstinacy. Though I’m not sure I can say I “read” it since often I just literally […]