Category Archives: Novels

August 05

Eleanor and Park

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I originally hail from outside of Omaha, Nebraska, so when I recently read about a YA novel by one-time columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, Rainbow Rowell, my curiosity was piqued.  And when I learned that it was also set in Omaha, my intentions to read it were sealed.  Omaha does not often play the backdrop […]

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August 02

I Capture the Castle

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Despite considering myself an Anglophile, I was somehow unaware of Dodie Smith’s 1949 novel I Capture the Castle until recently, when Jen W., a member of my book group, told the rest of us in the most strenuous terms that we must read it immediately. I quickly learned why it is capable of generating such […]

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July 31

What We Can Learn about HBO’s Girls by Reading Great Expectations

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As I was recently re-reading Great Expectations for my summer class, I realized that Pip’s narration and the directorial point-of-view of HBO’s Girls bear some striking similarities. Because I can only ethically blather on about such a connection for so long in class before feeling guilty and academics as the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals are not […]

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July 19

China Miéville’s Mental Calisthenics

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Miéville stretches me. Reading his fiction is like doing yoga of the imagination. With each twinge and contortion, I discover mental muscles I didn’t know I had. His fiction defies categorization: it is fantasy and horror and science fiction and biting sociopolitical critique, all in one heady jumble. Miéville has won several Arthur C. Clarke […]

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July 08

Take My Advice…

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When an award-winning novelist gives you a book recommendation, you should take it. Fellow University Iowa alum and General Education Literature instructor — and honorary “lettered lady” — V. V. Ganeshananthan is my go-to source for teaching ideas as I plan my World Literature syllabi.  (Incidentally, she’s also the author of one of my favorite […]

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June 29

The Comps List of Life

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In my graduate program in English, there was this daunting hurdle called comps and this rather lovely associated artifact called the comps list. To be successfully “comped,” you were expected to know a hundred-year period of literature thoroughly and demonstrate that knowledge in an oral exam in front of a committee of your professors. The […]

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June 11

This is Not a Cancer Book

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There have been a lot of YA cancer books–I mean a lot: Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, Lurlene McDaniel’s If I Should Die Before I Wake, Jenny Downham’s Before I Die, and Lois Lowry’s A Summer to Die (that is just to name a few). These books depict teenagers who battle valiantly, sometimes fighting the odds but other times enduring […]

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June 04

What Stacy is Reading Now: Girls I Know by Douglas Trevor

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It’s been a long time since I was so engrossed in a book that I read it until I fell asleep…and then got up and read with PJs and coffee as soon as I woke up. Girls I Know was one of those books.  I started it on a rainy Memorial Day weekend (while the […]

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