I’m literally years late to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, as I’ve avoided this book on principle for a long time. Not because of its content, but more to its hype and the fact that I’m usually not a huge fan of capital “L” literature. But it was selected by the members of the book club I’m proctoring, and after finishing it, I’m of two minds. On one hand I loved it and can totally get behind the hype. On the other, it left me wanting, and […]
“Love Is A Verb”
So the director from my MFA program wandered into my office last week and asked if I’d like to introduce an author for our university’s monthly book talks. H*ll yes, I would! Cue reading The Rending and the Nest so I don’t sound like an idiot when I go up to make the introductions. Since I’d never heard of Kaethe Schwehn before, I was worried that there was a very distinct possibility I might hate the book and then have to lie from a podium to an […]
Patent Wars
I really wanted to like this book, and there were definitely some great moments in it with visceral setting and interesting factoids, but it all fell a bit flat for me. “The Last Days of Night” is a fictional retelling of the patent wars between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse during the hey-day of America’s invention period. Moore chooses to tell this story from the Point of View of Westinghouse’s lawyer, Paul Cravath. It’s an ingenious way to tell a story riddled with scientific specifics and […]
Rereads Both Ruin Books and Heighten Them
This post will be full of SPOILERS, so please stop here if you’d like to read the book. I’m teaching a fiction course this semester and to make life easy on my first leap into the forays of academia, I’m having my students read a few books I already know. This has proven to be both a good and bad idea (for me, not my students). On the good, revisiting “Forever” on an academic level has brought out so much of Hamill’s craft that I […]
I Was the Wrong Audience for this Book
One of my colleagues asked me to read this book along with him to help him prepare a presentation for his religions and sociology course, and I wanted to like it, for his sake and my own, but I was hands-down the absolute worst audience for this book. This is a volume for someone who’s coming in with no prior knowledge, or knows a little bit about a lot of different religions. I unfortunately know an iceberg’s worth of information on my own religion, and […]
“The House of Fiction Has Many Windows, But Only Two or Three Doors.”
It keeps surprising me that whenever I go looking for a book on writing, it’s much less a ‘how-to’ and much more a literary criticism of the Greats. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not what one expects when selecting a book called “How Fiction Works.” But Wood isn’t interested in telling his reader to go find a pen, write some words down and assess if they’re any good based on certain literary principles. Instead he presents us with what’s out there in the literary […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- …
- 38
- Next Page »