Although it has spent a solid couple of years languishing on my bedside table, I finally picked up Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot a few days ago. If I’ve done anything else the last few days, it has only been reluctantly, since this is a book I have despaired putting down and parting with, even […]
Category Archives: Novels
What are you reading this summer?
posted by Laura
I have started so many posts for this blog in my head over the past few months. A post about My Age of Anxiety, which I actually finished ages ago and would probably have to reread at this point to properly write about. A post about Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine and another about Leslie Jamison’s The […]
April
09
Reader Empathy
posted by Stacy
We’re reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist in my World Literature class right now. Included in the brief Q&A at the back of our book is a comment from author Mohsin Hamid about why he writes: “I believe that the core skill of a novelist is empathy: the ability to imagine what someone else might feel.” After […]
March
24
Spring Break Reading
posted by Stacy
I’ve noted before how excited I get when I have a break from teaching and can tackle the stack of “fun” and/or “mindless” books underneath my coffee table. Spring Break is no exception; I love this week of relief between meetings and grading and comforting stressed-out seniors, and my rest and recovery usually includes some […]
February
19
Endings
posted by Stacy
I realized last week something that I probably always knew – my favorite part of a book (or poem or story or movie) is the ending. In two different courses with two wildly different texts in front of me (a collection of contemporary Chinese short stories and a poem from 1633), I gushed in front […]
January
12
(Un)sympathetic Characters
posted by Stacy
I tell my students that my favorite characters are the messy, complicated ones – the ones who do horrible things and are mean and rude and unlikeable, but still tug at our heart and push us to question our own values and choices. They are completely unsympathetic…yet at the same time completely sympathetic, too. Take […]
October
09
The Delights of Poison and Bicycles
posted by Kate Krueger
Reading a Flavia de Luce mystery by Alan Bradley is like sneaking into a room you’re not supposed to enter and discovering a strangely carved chest of drawers with secrets inside. It is thrilling, delectable in the possiblities it offers, slightly dark and dangerous, and unabashedly fun. Flavia is the kind of eleven-year-old girl I […]
September
30
Rewards
posted by Stacy
I’ve been teaching college freshmen for more than ten years now – first as a graduate instructor in Rhetoric and General Education Literature and now as an English professor at a small liberal arts school. There have been countless sections of “required” writing and literature classes, and at the beginning of each one I asked […]
August
27
On Homesickness and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic
posted by Kate Krueger
Most of the time, there is a veritable ocean of territory between where I am now and my childhood home. I am often struck by homesickness, a tilt in my gut. I strain to see snow and evergreen but come up against moss and magnolia instead. Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic was the last book I picked […]
August
22
What Laura is Reading Now
posted by Laura
Years ago, I was listening to an episode of This American Life when I heard a segment — and a voice — that I will never forget. It was my first encounter with David Rakoff. Part of an episode on “Frenemies,” the segment — a fictional wedding toast-in-verse given by the bride’s ex-boyfriend — was […]
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