Gregory Blake Smith, The Maze at Windermere (2018) As regular readers of this blog know, I have the joy and honor of being a graduate of Carleton College (model for Blackstock College in the novel Tam Lin – click on the link for a tour). So when I learned one of my favorite professors in […]
Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) When I read Penelope Lively’s Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger, I was underwhelmed. Unfortunately, I can’t remember quite why. I think it was because I could not connect emotionally with the main character, and found the novel ultimately empty and dull in spite of the literary skill of […]
Paul K. Chappell, The Art of Waging Peace (2013) After reading seven books to understand Trump’s win, I knew there still remained much to understand, but I was also hankering for some ways to enact positive change. I turned to a book that was recommended by a friend soon after the 2016 elections: The Art of […]
John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952) East of Eden is one of those books that I’ve seen mentioned by many readers as an all-time favorite (though there are a few haters as well). When the Folio Society did a poll to gather suggestions for publication, it was at the top of the list … and […]
Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952) As I read Excellent Women, the best-known work by the once-neglected, now widely praised English novelist Barbara Pym, I was reminded of another acclaimed comic novel that I read not long ago: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. On the surface, Amis’s hard-drinking, buffoonish misogynist Jim Dixon may seem to have […]
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1874) This was one of the first nineteenth-century classics I ever encountered in school — in my high school freshman class on British lit, along with Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (a rather odd assortment, now that I come to think of it). […]
Melissa Pimentel, The One That Got Away (2017) Since I’ve been trying to read more contemporary fiction, this new release looked like it had some potential, as well as being the perfect tie-in for Austen in August. Described as a modern take on Persuasion, it concerns Ruby Atlas, a successful New York advertising executive, who […]
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) This is part 3 in an ongoing series exploring books that address the current political, social, and economic situation in the US. Part 1: The Unwinding Part 2: Dark Money When sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild set out to explore what she calls the Great Paradox — […]
Elizabeth Goudge, Towers in the Mist (1937) This book is offered in a giveaway open through April 26. Click the link to enter! Oxford has changed much in the eighty years since Elizabeth Goudge lived there, and even more since the sixteenth century. Yet it still bears within it the weight of its long history, […]
Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (1951) The 1951 Club is the latest in a series of events put together by Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, which encourages us to read books published in a particular year. Please visit Simon’s blog for links to other 1951 books — […]