This month’s starting point is a crime novel with difference – Butter by Asako Yuzuki. Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, “The Konkatsu Killer,” Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan. —Goodreads This sounds like […]
6 Degrees of Separation: From “Butter” to “Babel” Read More »
Related Posts: All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda © 2016 Date read: 4/17/2017 Like Drowning Ruth, this novel demonstrates yet another way narrative structure can work to build suspense and meaning. Here the protagonist must come to terms with an event that happened earlier in her life. The only way she can unravel past
#10 “All the Missing Girls” by Megan Miranda Read More »
Related Posts: #9 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn © 2012 Date read: 7/10/2012 I read this book the year after I got my psychology degree focusing on life stories. Life story writing is nonfiction, but in Gone Girl I immediately realized that Flynn uses life story elements to build the characterization of her two main
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Related Posts: #8 The Drowning People by Richard Mason © 2000 Date read: 2/1/2001 Richard Mason showed me how imagery and atmosphere can carry a novel and contribute to its meaning while also building tension and suspense. The concept of drowning that appears in the title recurs frequently with imagery about the sea, crashing waves,
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‘I will defeat Richard Osman!’: Holly Jackson on being Britain’s top selling female crime author Lucy Knight interviews YA novelist Holly Jackson, whose book series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is currently being adapted into a BBC TV series. According to Knight, “Jackson’s books are some of the most recommended among the #BookTok community.”
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
#7 “Drowning Ruth” by Cristina Schwarz Read More »
If humans contain Whitman’s multitudes, novels also have the possibility to contain multitudes, and they should. —Gabrielle Zevin, “Cloud Atlas at 20: What makes a novel tattoo-worthy
Quotation: “Whitman’s Multitudes” Read More »
“A Nation of Lunatics.” What Oscar Wilde Thought About America “Rob Marland on the Irish Writer’s Grand Tour of the Gilded Age United States” This article caught my eye because I had just finished catching up on the second season of the HBO series The Gilded Age, which includes a trip to the opera by
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
#6 “The Short History of a Prince” by Jane Hamilton Read More »
Betty Smith enchanted a generation of readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ − even as she groused that she hoped Williamsburg would be flattened Rachel Gordan, assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida, discloses that Betty Smith herself had a different experience of life in Brooklyn than does the
