This might be the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Well, the weirdest book I’ve read that I actually ended up enjoying. I might have to think a while before officially giving it that award. My instinct is to put this review away and not think about it for weeks. I just want to sit with the story, let it brew and fester in my mind a little bit. But I know if I do that, I will forget everything and end up floundering around when […]
A genre made just for me, I think.
Two years ago, I converted to Catholicism. I was raised Lutheran, identified as kinda Lutheran-by-default for most of my life, dabbled in Unitarianism, and settled into an indifferent agnosticism that seems pretty common in my generation – a kind of “how am I supposed to know if God exists, but I can vouch for the fact that a whole lot of Christians are real assholes” thing. Then I got engaged to a lapsed Catholic, and we both started having some God-related restlessness and feeling some […]
I will not submit.
I started writing this review about the academic epiphany I had while reading this book: the character mentions many writers, thinkers, philosophers, in quotations that made no sense to me. I felt incapable of what I chose as a career. But in the course of writing it, I realized that I got more upset about the book because of another characteristic of mine: that I am a woman. Submission carries such a heavy burden for real events that its pages fail to meet the expectations […]
Not-so Perfectly Matched
Let’s just start off by saying that Jodi Picoult isn’t my favorite author, but sometimes she makes you think, and sometimes, she can put both sides of an argument on the table in a narrative form that can be somewhat entertaining. Picoult is sort of a guilty pleasure for me, except I rarely enjoy it, and Perfect Match was no exception. While it is meant to be a gripping and tense narrative about the explosion of lives after the molestation of a small boy […]
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
The Screwtape Letters consists of 31 letters ‘found’ by C. S. Lewis that are from the demon Screwtape to his rookie nephew Wormwood. Wormwood has been tasked with the corruption of a human soul, referred to only as “The Patient.” God is referred to as “The Enemy” while the Devil is “Our Father Below.” The whole thing is a satirical and ironic. I first experienced The Screwtape Letters about 7 years ago as an off-Broadway play, and I loved it. It was funny, and […]
Gus the Fisherman
The River Why, by David James Duncan, is one of those books that I love to re-read. I’ve read it probably ten times over the last 20 years, and it always makes me happy. Sure, I basically know the story by heart, but it does my heart good to re-read it. So, what’s it about? Well, it’s about a lot of things. And if you asked me the last time I read it what it was about, I’d probably say something different than I’m going […]
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