Have you ever had a conversation where everything you said turned out to be the wrong thing? You think you are following the rules of polite conversation, but the other person keeps changing the rules. Now imagine that you are having that conversation with someone who can ruin your life. This is Mikhail Bulgakov’s seditious satirical masterpiece The Master and Margarita. I have a tremendously difficult time writing an even somewhat satisfying review for The Master and Margarita. It is such a layered novel, and […]
The True American Horror Story
Stephen King is considered to be the master of modern American horror, but with all due respect, that’s not true. Haunted hotels, telekinetic prom queens and evil clowns (or just, you know clowns) got nothing on human depravity. Pet Semetary may have freaked me out, but it’s Toni Morrison’s story of the dead child coming back to life that’s going to keep me up at night. Sethe was born a slave but escaped to the free state of Ohio before the Civil War. Haunted for 18 years […]
Oh, just grow up, Marianne!
4.5 stars After their father dies and leaves pretty much everything to their older half-brother, the three Misses Dashwood and their widowed mother have to find a new place to live, which isn’t exactly easy with the meagre income they have. After some searching, a cousin of Mrs. Dashwood’s offer them lodging in a little cottage on his estate in Devon. The eldest daughter, Elinor, admonishes them to make the best of it, but the middle sister, Marianne, is determined to be miserable. Then she […]
When your husband tells you he killed someone, you might want to be a little nervous
Rebecca is one of those books I was always assumed I had read. I knew the basics of the plot, and of course the famous opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” When I realized I’d somehow missed reading it, I picked it up. It’s the perfect book to curl up with on a rainy Sunday with a cup of tea. While I didn’t love it as much as everyone else seems to, I certainly enjoyed it. While working as the […]
Religion Is Hard to Kill
This was another MFA required read, and sadly, I wasn’t really impressed by it. I’ve noticed a trend in books of this time period (Graham Greene was writing in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s) disappointing me, and I have a feeling it’s partially because I don’t understand the social temperature of that time, nor the social issues being tackled in books of that era. So this low star-rating is quite possibly not the book’s fault. I know several people, (including my professor, who did […]
Subtlety at its finest
This is my first Kazuo Ishiguro and I’m still mulling it over, always the sign of a book that is going to stick with me. There’s a light plot in The Remains of the Day, but most of it is a character study and an examination of what it means to give your life totally to a vocation. The narrator, Stevens, is a great English butler still recovering from his old employer’s death and trying to come to terms with moving into the last phase […]
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