Dept. Of Speculation is 46 pithy chapters that take up only 180 pages, composed entirely of short, aphoristic paragraphs and quotes that vaguely tell the story of a woman’s journey through adulthood. The characters are nameless: the wife, the husband, the daughter. The narrator, the Wife, starts as an aspiring Art Monster, and changes as she falls in love, gets married, has a daughter. The wife waxes poetic (or, aphoristic) about life’s catastrophes, from having a colicky baby, to a cheating husband, to a battle with bedbugs, […]
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Benoîte-Marie (Berie) is our narrator. We start with her in Paris, where she’s traveling with her husband, who is lecturing on Tay-Sachs disease. Berie is vaguely dissatisfied, filled with ennui about her marriage. She muses about her teenage-hood in Horsehearts, upstate NY, and her deep friendship with Silsby Chaussée. It’s a story told in wonderfully crafted, evocative prose, that captures not so much a story arc, but rather the feeling of being almost grown up, wandering, being consumed by a friendship, finding an identity while losing your innocence, feeling lost […]
A Remarkable Journey through Fairyland
This book made me wish I had children to read it aloud to. I made up for it by reading particularly wonderful passages aloud to my husband. September, a normal 12-year-old girl from Omaha, is visited one blustery day by the Green Wind. Being a clever, if somewhat heartless, girl, she of course says yes when the Green Wind asks her if she’d like to come to Fairyland. She’s not entirely sure why she’s in Fairyland, or what her quest might be, or how Fairyland even works, so she […]
A Classic – Happy Halloween!
In honor of All Hallow’s Eve, I read a classic monster story. The fact that Frankenstein is a household name 200 years later is a testament to Shelley’s work–which she began writing at only 19 years old! The story is told in a series of letters that Walton, a captain of a ship trying to find a Northeast passage, writes to his sister in England. He comes across a bedraggled man with a dogsled in the middle of the ice, takes him on the ship, […]
A Gem of a Fable
Paama can cook. I mean, she can cook. She’s also married to Ansige, a man so gluttonous that he takes eight mules laden with food and two hunters (just in case) on a three-day journey, a man who can eat corn for 20 men and still feel dissatisfied. Ansige is, obviously, a clown–so Paama leaves him. Ansige searches for her and finds her…but embarrasses himself so thoroughly in the process that he leaves her alone afterwards. Now effectively a single woman, Paama attracts the attention […]
These Shipmates Were a Tad Too Wordy
The Wordy Shipmates is pretty true to Sarah Vowell form: chatty historical memoir. Her style in this book reminds me of the particularly engaging 10th grade American history teacher I had in 1998: lots of enthusiasm, lots of primary texts, a few personal anecdotes and musings thrown in for good measure. She focuses on one historical point in this book, telling us all about the first American Puritans and how they got this great experiment started. Winthrop, Williams, and Cotton are well-developed characters and Vowell […]
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