As a kid, I grew up with C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, but I missed out on The Lord of the Rings until much later. Several of my classmates in high school were huge Tolkien fans, and I was curious enough to give him a try once I graduated. I read The Hobbit between high school and college, and with the last film coming out, I spent the first semester of my freshman year in college reading The Lord of the Rings books in […]
A fascinating biography about a colorful cook
My aunt gets me an eclectic variety of books for birthday and Christmas presents. Traditionally, an Alexander McCall Smith book works its way into the rotation, and thankfully, he writes enough to make for an annual present, but for some reason there was an off year. My aunt is a huge Julia Child fan, and so I found in my Christmas package one year the Bob Spitz biography Dearie. I knew who Child was growing up, and I’d enjoyed her boozy banter and casual ease […]
A family drama that left me a little cold
Family drama is a hit-or-miss genre for me, same with mystery. When I picked up Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You at my community college’s book sale, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But I *was* happy to support the English department for a dollar. I have seen a few reviews around Cannonball Read, and I was interested to see for myself what the book would entail. Lydia Lee disappears in the middle of the night in her 1970s suburban Ohio town, and is […]
As I Lay Dying…in a pub? On the seaside?
I’d never read any Graham Swift before, but I picked up Last Orders in a thrift sale, not realizing that it had won a Man Booker Prize. I am trying to work my way through the Booker winners and nominees, and I’m just under half at my latest count. Swift is a contemporary British author, and I’ve heard his name mentioned many times in the academic work I referenced for my doctoral comps and beyond. I thought it was high time I gave him a […]
An interesting book about books that move us.
My dear friend M had read Edward Mendelsohn’s The Things That Matter some years ago and got me a copy for a birthday, saying she thought I would appreciate the discussion of classic literary texts from a professor’s point-of-view. I’m a bit of an English nerd (you know, being a lifelong reader, English major in college, and PhD in English), so books about books hold a certain appeal for me. Mendelsohn is a professor of Comparative Literature, so I was further curious to see how […]
The ugliness of beauty
It’s no secret that as an academic, I enjoy reading academic sendups. I also enjoy literary remakes, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty includes BOTH. Lucky me! I’ve read three of her five novels—White Teeth, The Autograph Man, and Swing Time—and I’m trying to work my way through her other two novels. I think she’s an amazing author, and I’ve long hoped that the kind of lightning in a bottle she captured in White Teeth could somehow find its way onto her pages again. And while […]
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