“Charlotte Temple” was not what I was expecting. At best I was hoping for a Jane Austen-type read, seeing as how the author’s overlapped. I was also looking for early American novel to potentially teach to my students. Unfortunately, I neither enjoyed reading this book, nor will I teach it to my students. The main problem with this book is that it’s very problematic for a modern reader. I don’t see how anyone could sit down and read and enjoy this. I think this work […]
The Contrast
“The Contrast,” according to my “Norton Anthology” was the first American bestselling drama. We’ve come along ways since, but for a play at the turn of the 18th century it’s not bad. I read it to see if I could teach this in my American literature course to supplement a lot of the non-fiction that usually comes in most high school anthologies. This is basically a comedy of errors mixed with some irony. Leititia, Charlotte, and Maria are the three female protagonists. Charlotte is the […]
Make Your Home Among Strangers
Jennine Capo Crucet’s “Make Your Home Among Strangers,” is a novel set during the Elian Gonzalez conflict of the late 90’s. A young woman, Lizet, finds herself coming home for Thanksgiving from her first year at college at the same time as Elian arrives into Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. The main conflict in the novel is Lizet coming to terms with being the first in her family to attend college. She’s struggling not just with homesickness, but with culture shock, academic rigor, implicit bias, and […]
When God Gets Lost in Translation
“The Grammar of God” by Aviya Kushner is Ms. Kushner’s experience reading the Bible in English for the first time. Ms. Kushner isn’t an immigrant, in face she’s from New York, but until she began graduate school she had never read the Bible in a language other than Hebrew. When she begins her class on the English Bible, she learns, from the very first verse in Genesis, that the experience of reading the Bible in English is not the same as she has experienced the […]
A for Method, D for Conclusions
Have you ever respected someone for their method but disagreed with their conclusions? That’s how I felt toward Rob Bell in this book. As a practicing Christian, and one who’s interested in the Bible as a book and a source of inspiration, I’m interested to learn more about it. Too many times the Bible has been hijacked by fundamentalists who ignore literary, historical, and social contexts in order to prove a point. Personally, I don’t believe this is how it should be used, nor was […]
The Least Thriller, Thriller
I had a conflicted reading of this book. Part of it was that the book was billed as a mystery/thriller and that’s not what was delivered. The book starts with some New York elites preparing to leave their summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard on their private jet. We quickly meet the characters who will become the crux of the story: the media mogul and his family, banking scheister and his wife, the pilot, co-pilot, flight attendant, and the struggling artist. The plane crashes (not a […]
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