I’m toying around with a New Orleans/hurricane themed course, whether in first-year writing or an upper-division humanities course. I’ve been trying to think about books that would be relevant, both fiction and nonfiction. Several people had already recommended Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones to me before, and with her new book garnering National Book Award buzz, I thought it might be time to give it a try. Esch is our protagonist. She’s fifteen, motherless, and pregnant. She is jockeying for family position amongst wild and […]
A too-soon farewell to a fun comic series.
My love for Catsy Walker, as she’s known in my house, is well-documented. I was surprised and a little disappointed to hear that Volume 3 (“Careless Whiskers,” and now I’m singing George Michael, thanks, you guys) was the final entry in this comic. Are you kidding me? Where am I going to get my fun and darling comics kick now??? Sigh. I was hoping that this would be a solid send-off for Patsy and her band, and this volume did not disappoint overall. Patsy has […]
Arabella’s second foray is not as successful as the first.
Last year (JUST KIDDING, CBR informed me it was actually February; OMG we have lived ten years since the election, you guys), I enjoyed David D. Levine’s Arabella of Mars, which was billed to me as Jane Austen meets Jules Verne. It’s an accurate comparison. I was excited to see a new adventure come out a mere year later. I immediately grabbed it from the library and read it on top of my unread-stack. Because this is a direct continuation of the first novel, I’ll […]
A book that has since passed its time
I worked for the linguistics professor and department chair at my undergraduate institution, so I heard a fair bit about Deborah Tannen. She also did her doctoral work with Tannen, which meant I and my fellow English majors heard a LOT about Tannen. J That’s how these things tend to go in academia. She’s done a lot for the subfield of sociolinguistics, and I’ve long wanted to read her work firsthand for myself. I bought You Just Don’t Understand! from a thrift store years ago […]
A timely and relevant essay collection
I’ve recently read two essays by Laurie Penny: “Most Women You Know Are Angry—And That’s All Right” and “On the Milo Bus with the Lost Boys of America’s New Right.” Both are engaging and provocative in their different approaches to an interlinked topic: the clash between right and left in the United States, as well as the way men and women see each other in Trump’s America. I heard that Penny’s new book, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, and I was intrigued enough to […]
An interesting, if uneven, story collection
I took a Women’s Literature class about ten years ago (oof, that’s so painful to admit), and Carol Shields was one of the discoveries for me. We read Swann, which was a revelation. Sometime later, I was in a discount bookstore, and I stumbled upon a copy of her collected short stories, which was comprised of her three collections, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish, and Dressing Up for the Carnival. It also includes a previously unpublished short story, “Segue,” which would prove to be her […]
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