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 […]
Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature Read More »
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
#4 “The Church of Dead Girls” by Stephen Dobyns Read More »
Too Enjoyable to Be Literature What a wonderful short piece! It’s only four paragraphs long (one of which is a block quotation), but it so aptly expresses a reader’s joy of recognizing and appreciating a literary work. That literary work is Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And Helen Garner has the same
You May Be Surprised by What Scares You “Fear may be a linchpin of horror, but as a recent anthology attests, the true bedrock of the genre is mood.” Stephen Kearse writes, “even in my favorite works of the genre, horror scenarios generally intrigue rather than scare me; I’m more likely to ponder than to
Related Post: This week I offer two selections because there’s not much I can say about #3 without giving away the whole point. #2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce © 1916 Date read: ca. 1966 or 1967 While I now credit Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl with opening
Why is March 2024 the Best Month in Years For Books? “In Her Debut Column, Maris Kreizman Considers This Spring’s Flood of Great Books” Maris Kreizman describes the kinds of books she, as a critic, likes to cover: The books that move me aren’t the kinds that are written by celebrities; they’re often labors of
Shane’s Lot: How a 1949 Gun-Toting Loner Still Rides Through American Literature Writer Maria Hummel examines how Shane, the gunslinger introduced in Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Rider from Nowhere, has lived on in American popular culture. Although Shane’s worldview is dated, the novel projects the timeless quest of innocence in our bloody world. Shane altered
Mychal Threets Wants Everyone to Experience ‘Library Joy’ “The 33-year-old librarian from California has become popular on TikTok and Instagram with his upbeat take on libraries.” When a librarian friend of mine recently mentioned Mychal Threets on Facebook, I had no idea who he is or why she was waxing enthusiastic about him. Now I
Instead of laying out an elaborate reading and blogging plan for 2024, I’m going to tell you what I’ll be focusing on. It seems that, at the end of every year, I look back on whatever reading and writing goals I had set at the beginning of the year and document, in excruciating detail, how
What Notes in the Margin Will Be Up to This Year Read More »
Introducing the 2024 Reading Log! I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read since May 1, 1991, when we got our first computer. I started with a database program, but, over that many years, software has changed multiple times. Every time a program would bite the dust, I’d export my data, then import it
