Everyone is reading The Great Gatsby now! Kobo had announced that sales of this novel has increased by 250% worldwide. Amazon has been selling its Kindle edition for $4.99, and at that price, it has been their best seller for over a hundred days. Though Barnes and Noble has not met that price for...
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,...
“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...
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,...
We read Thomas Hardy today because he’s still relevant, but perhaps the issues that made him relevant in his time, due to the changing nature of the world, are different than the things that make him relevant in our time. The relevancy of The Well-Beloved, dealing with the superficial nature of romantic love, makes...
There is a philosophy in this novel, but I fear I’m not smart enough to grasp it. So I come back to it every few years, read it again, and puzzle over what it is that I’m reading. What I find in its pages is a emotional pot simmering on the stove. It looks...
