House Made of Dawn is considered to be N. Scott Momaday’s best work (and it was granted a Pulitzer), so I thought that after my interesting experience with The Ancient Child, it might be best to go to his most acclaimed work. This is a hard novel to recap, because it relies so heavily on images and ideas than on narrative, plot, and character. But I’ll do the best I can: the story loosely revolves around an elderly Kiowa man, Francisco, and his grandson, Abel. […]
As a sidenote, I am now a Time Lord!
First things first: a little shameless self-promotion. I’m a doctor now!!!!!! I passed my dissertation defense on Wednesday. It was a rigorous experience, but I am incredibly glad to have gone through it. I’m excited about getting my work ready for publication, and even more excited that I never have to defend my dissertation again. And apparently, my institution secretly makes you a Time Lord when you earn a PhD–the elevators by the conference room I was in would begin to randomly open after I […]
The first ugly cry of 2015
Kwame Alexander won the Newbery Award the same week that Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was announced for publication. Of course, Lee’s news totally trumped Alexander’s achievement, so to show some solidarity, I requested his novel from the library. And I was blown away. The Crossover is a verse novel (that is, a novel told in poems) about Josh Bell, a tween boy who is a star basketball player on his middle-school team. His twin brother Jordan, or JB, is on the team with […]
“War is too strange to process alone.”
I was intrigued by Redeployment when I heard that it was about the Iraq War. And then, when it won the National Book Award in 2014, my curiosity reached a fever pitch. How could a collection of short stories trump the magnificent Station Eleven or All the Light We Cannot See, both of which I read and LOVED before this book? As it turns out, the committee knew what it was about. To put it simply, Redeployment is haunting. It is gritty, hard-eyed, and unflinching […]
Losing your mind or your Cadillac?
I’ve been reading a lot of twentieth-century drama. But none has come quite so close to my current dissertation topic as Glengarry Glen Ross. Back when I was first doing my research, my dissertation director referenced it a few times, which meant that it needed to go on my list. It’s definitely an intriguing idea, and I liked the overlapping nature of the dialogue, though I bet so much of the play’s richness occurs in the delivery of the lines and the interactions of the […]
The boys of history
I’ve heard about The History Boys as a film, and I *believe* the film is on Netflix. The Chancellor saw it and liked it pretty well. So when I realized it had been a play first (thanks to my National Theatre sampler) and that it starred Dominic Cooper (I really, really like him as an actor), I decided that it was time to read it and see if it would be something I could add to my burgeoning teaching syllabus. The History Boys takes places […]
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