This is it! THIS IS IT!!! I’m writing my last chapter, you guys!!!! The end is in sight!!!!!!!! Ahem. The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the main texts in this chapter, so I re-read it (new for CBR, though) in order to help focus my argument and cement the novel’s place in this chapter of the dissertation (I won’t articulate my argument here, but basically, the novel of manners isn’t dead. Because though we don’t live in Regency England, we still practice manners). It’s […]
The Power of Unbroken
My book club is big into nonfiction. I’m not myself, but I *did* really like Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. So I was definitely willing to give Unbroken a try. Hillenbrand is an excellent writer, and she really ups her game with this book. This is the true story of Louis Zamperini’s experience in World War II as a bomber, when his plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean. He and two other men survive at sea, where they endure panic, sickness, starvation, and attacks from all sorts […]
Amy Poehler makes it a Double Cannonball
First things first: 2014 has been a crazy year. Amidst writing my dissertation, teaching, facing health issues that (thankfully) have been resolved, and unexpectedly having to buy a new car, it’s been hard to believe that I could fit in 52 books this year. And yet I have managed to double that number. I credit pretending that Netflix does not exist in order to spend more time reading in bed, as well as discovering that I *do* like audiobooks on my 90-mile drive to work/school. […]
George Eliot is a Ravenclaw. For Realz.
It took me two months to listen to Middlemarch via audiobook, but I did it! It’s one of my all-time favorite novels, and it’s been years since I read it. Spoiler: it did not disappoint. Since it’s a classic novel and probably read widely, I thought it might be fun to do something kind of different. So, without further ado: what if the Middlemarchers went to Hogwarts? Here is how the Sorting Hat would sort some of the major characters: Tertius Lydgate: Tertius is a […]
For some reason, I never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Maybe it was the reports of bathos, hand-wringing, and tear-filled emotions, or maybe it was when I convinced myself that I didn’t like nineteenth-century American fiction (spoiler: I do. I just don’t like Emerson all that much), but somehow, that part of my education got skipped. I’ve read several nonfiction accounts of slavery as experienced by the enslaved, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs (who initially published as Linda Brent), and Solomon Northup. My students and […]
The Circle is trying to be your friend. Don’t let it.
It was my friend A’s turn to pick our month’s Book Club selection, and she went with The Circle. I’d never read Dave Eggers before (though A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has been languishing on my shelf for a few years now), but I was highly curious about the premise. After reading it, I can only say: WOW. Our digital world is scary. Mae is naive, impressionable, and eager to please. She gets a job at The Circle, a social media networking corporation, through […]
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