This is probably the hardest book review I’m going to write all year, because it’s complicated by several factors. The first is that I recognize that I am not Kyle’s demographic that he’s writing to. I mean, a proud Texan who likes chewing tobacco, guns, and the military? Yeah, this white Yankee liberal feminist is not exactly gung-ho about guns. So that complicates my response. And then there’s the fact that Chris Kyle killed a lot of people over in Iraq–was he right to kill […]
It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
My English graduate student association chose Louise Erdrich’s The Round House for our latest book club, and it was the first time we all came to a consensus on a book: we really, really liked it. The Round House begins with a violent attack on Geraldine Coutts, a character from The Plague of Doves. [In fact, The Round House is a companion or sequel of sorts to Plague of Doves–therefore, my reading Plague first gave me some insight into the older characters.] The novel opens […]
A fantastic, biting play, with just the right amount of comic relief.
Two years ago, my friend C invited me to come see Good People at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago with her. I was really glad I did for several reasons. First, it’s a really, really good play. Second, before it started, we were talking about where we were in the doctoral work (we started out together and are the only two in our year), and she helped me sort out some of the self-defeat and pessimism I’d been experiencing. Seriously, I could not have done […]
Grief is indeed a rabbit hole.
A few years ago, a couple I became friends with in my MA program lost their daughter in the second trimester. It was highly traumatic, and they struggled with the fallout for a long time, even after they got pregnant with their first son. In the midst of this process, they went to see the film adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play Rabbit Hole and said they found it cathartic. I still haven’t seen the film with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, but I’ve been meaning […]
A lost empire is still lost.
In my quest to read more international Anglophone works, I sort of got sidetracked by other books from the library. So reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai is a way for me to get back on track a bit. It’s also the 2006 Man Booker Prize Winner, so hooray for checking another Booker title off my list! I really appreciated the themes in this novel, even if it was sometimes a bit dense or unfamiliar (but that’s a good thing, I believe). The […]
Fun comics and cute animals: instant recipe for success.
I’m not a huge Tumblr user, but I’ve occasionally run into Liz Climo’s comics and thought they were adorable/hilarious. So when I saw her book at the library, I decided it was time to take a break from the long and heavy books I’ve been reading lately and do some laughing. Because this is a series of comics, often unrelated, there’s not necessarily a narrative thread driving the comics together. But there is a running joke about a surprise party gone awry, a dinosaur baby […]
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