Start here: Ok so there’s a whole sub-genre of American lit we could call the “Rough South” a name which one of my all time favorite college professors use to describe works by Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Lee Smith, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay and various others in this cohort. These books breathe life into the bull**** factors abound in Hillbilly Elegy. These are the books that actually show life, perceived through eyes that know how to find the humanity but also the horror in […]
Her face was white and strained, but whether from fear or anger, it was hard to tell.
Rebecca will ruin Daphne du Maurier for you. Because it’s so good and so perfect of a novel that if you read it first, you will be chasing that particular dragon for ages in her writing. So if you can avoid it, read a few of her other books along the way first. Here, read “The Birds” right now, I’ll wait: http://hhs.helenaschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2016/08/the_birds_by_daphne_du_maurier.pdf So My Cousin Rachel is about the to be a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin, which is more or less perfectly well cast. […]
In a way this novel has the same plot as Secret of My Success
So basically this is about a youngish wife of an older and vulgar husband seducing his young nephew and not only cuckolding him, but attempting to dislodge him/murder him. See, basically the same thing. It’s not really, especially since this novel predates the movies about 60 years and also because that’s an absurdly stupid comparison. Sigh, oh well. It’s kind of easy to tell that this is an early novel of his. It’s not that it feel incomplete or undone in any way, but it […]
Just a nice meandering trip through America, until we get to the South
In his late middle-age, John Steinbeck decides that after 25 years living in France, but writing about America, that he needs to return to take a trek through the landscape in a souped-up truck and a French poodle named Charley. Throughout the trip, he takes wandering notes, discusses the landscape, make-up and character of Americans. He is never maligned or chagrined by what he finds, just fascinated, and where it feels like he should weigh in he doesn’t. He discusses America’s throw-away culture, our tendency […]
A Baker’s Dozen
Nabokov wrote a ton. He lost the Nobel Prize in a weird year where two judges essentially gave it to each other, but he is easily one of if not the most important and impressive writers of the 20th century, if not ever. He’s mostly known for Lolita of course, which you should read immediately, and like a lot of author’s whose most (in)famous book overshadows a lot of his career, his other great books and stories get overlooked. He wrote supremely in two very different […]
War and War
There’s a long section (about 100 pages) at the end of War and Peace that serves as a treatise on the nature of small events building to create large events, about the incrementalism of history and historiography. This section serves as an epilogue to the remaining 1000 or so pages, and by the time you’ve gotten that far, if you haven’t already picked up your pace too meet the length of the novel, well, what’s another 100 at the conclusion of all the different stories. Both […]
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