Three summers ago, I devoured Persepolis, an amazing graphic memoir about Marjane Satrapi’s education and coming-of-age during and after the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Satrapi’s candid recounting of events and biting humor made the book memorable, so I instantly thought of it when developing my sophomore-level survey for this fall. I haven’t read it since that summer, so it was a great joy to revisit and revel in all over again. Marjane Satrapi was an elementary-age schoolchild when the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979. She […]
We’re all just animals in the end.
I read Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club several years ago and really liked it a lot, but I hadn’t thought to look up anything else by her. Several people had talked up We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and I saw the audiobook at my local library. Why not? I thought. So I let it unfold on me slowly, but I found it was a book that quickly gained my interest while I commuted to and from work. Rosemary Cooke is our […]
“I am Beloved and she is mine.”
True story: I’ve never read Toni Morrison’s Beloved until now. I started it the first year of my MA program, but I just never finished it. I’ve always felt a little ashamed, but I managed to push it aside. Enter my “read ALL the books on my shelf!” project and some good, old-fashioned public shaming from one of my students. Yes, one of my students shamed me in class when I admitted I hadn’t read it. It was good-natured. She just really loved Toni Morrison. […]
The Actually-Very-Loud American
I took a graduate seminar in Graham Greene when I was getting my MA, and so I’ve read a LOT of Graham Greene. My project for that class was examining Greene’s relationship with film and cinema. One of the books I was interested in reading (but ultimately lacked the time to explore) was The Quiet American, which was made into a film in the mid-to-late 1990s. I finally got around to reading it, thanks to an audiobook request I put in through my library. Thomas […]
Cranford: Come for tea, stay for gossip.
Every so often, I hanker something a bit…gentler. Less gritty. Not so violent or macabre. And from everything I’d heard about the popular BBC mini-series Cranford, the original book by Elizabeth Gaskell seemed to fit the bill. I decided that it would be fun to listen to on my long commute to work. And it certainly was a rather enjoyable way to pass the time. Our narrator is Miss Mary Smith, a young woman who makes frequent visits to the quaint village of Cranford, a […]
Moar Lying Cat!!!
The problem with getting addicted to an ongoing series like Saga is that you wait for MONTHS for the next volume to come out, and once it does…you wait for the library to get it, you wait your turn with ferocious impatience, you place TWO different holds, because the library codes it weird in the system, and then you finally get it and read it in an hour. And are seriously depressed afterwards. This may or may not be based on true incidents. Saga’s fifth […]
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