A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All in The Classics
One of José Saramago’s famous novels, Blindness (1995, English translation in 1997), explores the brutal fall-out of a world beset by a pandemic of blindness.
Reading The Call of the Wild, originally published in 1903, is fast. The novella is only 164 (in the edition I read), and yet, its brevity is part of its magic. Jack London follows the life of Buck, his canine protagonist, from a life of luxury in sunny California, to one of toil in the harsh world of the Alaskan Klondike.
ristin Lavransdatter is Sigrid Undset’s three-part epic chronicling the life of the titular character from early childhood to medieval old age. Originally published in 1920-1922 as The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross, Undset’s trilogy follows the life of its fourteenth-century Norwegian heroine. From maidenhood to death, Kristin’s life weaves together details from northern Europe’s medieval history, politics, religion, and family life.
Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is at once beautiful and base, philosophical and depraved, epiphanic and mundane; in a word, it is quintessentially postmodern.
Last week I listened to the audiobook of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman narrated by Reese Witherspoon (HarperAudio, 2015) as I finished a baby quilt. As I stitched and cut and ironed, Witherspoon’s lovely reading brought Jean Louise Finch to life. And some of Lee’s passages were so moving, I paused in quilting to listen to them over and over again, writing them out for use here.
In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).
While my husband scours the Lonely Planet and Moon guidebooks for the islands and my first grade daughter eagerly listens to geographical and historical information set out in the Hawaii: The Aloha State book (one of a set of the fifty states) she found in the children’s section of our library, I opt for more literary preparation: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, The Story of Hawaii by Hawaii’s Queen, Jack London’s Hawaii stories and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii.
