My literary walk of shame, i.e., the list of books I should have read a long time ago, seems to involve a lot of youth lit. I’ve never read any Nancy Drew books despite the fact that we had a stack of them in the closet when I was a kid. I didn’t read Little Women until I was 40. I just read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn last month. And now, at long last, I have read Madeleine L’Engle’s classic time travel novel A […]
When Graphic Novels Meet Modern History
At the beginning of CBR8, I reviewed two graphic novels that deal with contemporary history: Marzi, about Poland under martial law and the Solidarity movement, and War Brothers about civil war and child soldiers in Uganda. Both were excellent and demonstrated for me that the graphic novel is a great way to introduce readers to events that might have either passed notice or seemed too far away to really matter. In particular, I think the graphic novel lends itself to drawing in young readers, educating […]
Unlikeable Characters Make for a Very Good Novel
The House at the Edge of the World is a daring novel in that it dares you to care about a group of characters who are selfish, self-absorbed and angry, and who essentially stay that way throughout the story. Julia Rochester’s clever novel is the story of a family mystery and its slow unraveling. Our narrator Morwenna Venton tells us about the death of her father John, the strange map that her grandfather Matthew has spend a lifetime drawing, and her dysfunctional relationships with her […]
Big Brother is Watching
Author Basma Abdel Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times piece about Middle Eastern authors who are writing dystopian fiction. Aziz is a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, and it seems that both her profession and her experience of the Arab Spring have informed her storytelling. Aziz has been compared to both Orwell and Kafka for reasons that will be obvious to readers of The Queue. This novel features an unnamed Middle Eastern city that has experienced political turmoil and rioting and is now ruled […]
Recommended Reading
I think a lot of the books I choose to read I choose because they look important and/or like they’re going to be good for me and/or because I ought to. Books by Doris Lessing and Gloria Steinem come to mind by way of example of this. And I usually end up enjoying these books and feeling glad that I read them. Still, they might not be the kind of books that I would recommend to everybody I know. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a […]
Passion, Obsession and Napoleon
Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion is a novel about passions, obsessions, and madness. Using her characters, history, and geography, Winterson examines how passion develops among “lukewarm people” and how it can bleed over into debilitating obsession and the loss of self. Some can find their way back from it, […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- …
- 109
- Next Page »