Related Posts: Babel by R.F. Kuang © 2022 Date read: 1/22/2023 Other than Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series, I don’t read much fantasy. I picked this book up because its underlying premise is brilliant: bars of silver, when imprinted with pairs of words with similar meanings that demonstrate what is lost […]
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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
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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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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
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For most of my life, my mother and I could safely talk about two subjects: the weather and baseball. Thanks to my mother’s influence, I grew up a baseball fan. We lived in Connecticut, just about half way between Boston and New York, so the fierce rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees runs
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
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Happy Pi Day! Plus pie recipes, of course. Source: Celebrate Pi Day with These Mathematical Tales – Atlas Obscura
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Related Posts: #5 The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester © 1996 Date read: 7/12/1998 I don’t recall ever feeling the need to like fictional characters, yet this topic recurs periodically when readers condemn a book they’ve just finished because “I didn’t like any of the characters.” But if I ever did feel such a
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Related Posts: #4 The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns © 1997 Date read: 9/23/1997 I used to think that the most important consideration in any work of fiction is, hands down, point of view. But this novel made me realize that context is just as important. A first-person narrator tells this story, about
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