More years ago than I wish to confess, when a friend was leaving the country to work abroad, I gave her my copy of On the Road. I had just finished the book and enjoyed it enough that I wanted to share it with another avid reader. She asked, “Why this book?” I answered,...
On Mars a group of android-slaves rebelled against their owners, stole a space ship, and came to Earth. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard must hunt them down and “retire them,” an euphemism for killing them. No doubt, you recognize this as the plot for the 1982 movie Blade Runner, an adaptation of Do Androids Dream...
The conventional wisdom of scriptwriters, as I understand it, is that when you adopt a novel into a screenplay for a movie, you are creating something different from the novel. In this way, Hollywood justifies bastardizing the best novels ever written. Now I learned that they are planning to adopt one of my favorite...
“Laborious,” one Goodreads reviewed wrote. Another compared it to getting a “workout at a gym.” And a third called it “needlessly long.” I understand their feelings. I have to confess that I struggled with this novel. I struggled with it, even though this was my third reading and I knew what to expect. No...
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Hemingway tells us, but John Wallace says, “The reading aloud of Huck Finn in our classrooms is humiliating and insulting to black students.” From the moment it was published, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inspired both praise and condemnation. Despite...
“I like long novels,” I overheard a bookstore clerk say years ago. “I like long novels that span years and in which characters change and grow.” Though I don’t believe she was talking about Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, she could’ve been. This is a family saga that spans several generations, but it mostly...
Perhaps a novel written a hundred and fifty years ago about fictitious events that happened more than two hundred and fifty years earlier might seem irrelevant in our times. We have escaped our Puritan founding, haven’t we? But as I read The Scarlet Letter, I realized that it was not only still relevant,...
Power brings a man many luxuries, Robert Harris’ Tiro writes, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them. Tiro, who invented shorthand, was the slave-secretary to the Roman senator Cicero, and in Harris’ novel Imperium, he is the narrator. In this novel, the first of a series about Cicero, Tiro, an aging...
I arrived in Onion Creek in December 1981, the day a snowstorm dumped a foot-deep blanket across the landscape. My parents had purchased Onion Creek Square only a few months before, and this was my first time seeing it. I had just graduated from college, and I needed a place to stay as I...
I have a personal policy that everyone I tell about it resents. If I read the book, and especially if I loved it, I won’t see the movie. I’m not sure why people resent this, except that it becomes the grounds for rejecting their movie recommendations. But I have no doubt that it’s the...
