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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Organized pressure groups have used their power—and long lists of titles—to wage an aggressive campaign to empty library shelves of all books they deem inappropriate instead of allowing people to decide for themselves what they and their children read. These groups have redirected their aim from schools to public libraries, which saw a 92% increase
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“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
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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
‘God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad “I’m a professional critic, and an author of a literary novel. I’m a snob. I care about my book, and the authors I feel are my competitors,” writes Lauren Oyler. In this piece, another chapter in the continuous Goodreads controversy, she states that
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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When Consciousness Itself is the Protagonist: A Reading List I’ll let River Halen themselves describe the origin of this list of “books that bend reality and the self”: As I was writing my book Dream Rooms, a book about the years that led up to my coming out as trans, I found myself fascinated by
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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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