The fact that I'm squeezing this post in on the last day of the year is quite representative of the year I've had! 2022 was busy, but I managed to read 30 books from my last end-of-year post to today. This range seems to be the...
My final read for my Summer of Faulkner is one a panel of
judges in 2009 called the best Southern novel of all time (one scholar called
it “the only serious rival to Melville’s Moby-Dick as the great American
novel”—and...
Light in August begins like this:
“Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill
toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama : a fur piece. All the way
from Alabama a-walking.’"
and it ends like this:
“’My,...
I often think there’s no better place to read a book than on
an airplane. Suspended between places with few distractions (especially if you
have earplugs), it’s a prime opportunity for a fictional world to take over. And
maybe...
I just finished watching the third season of My Brilliant
Friend, the HBO series adapted from the Elena Ferrante novels. In this season, the main character—also an author named Elena—has written
about how women are fashioned...
For many years, I’d look forward to summer as a time to
catch up with some reading I wasn’t able to tackle during the cooler, busier
months. I’d choose a series—such as Hilary Mantel’s first two books in the Wolf
Hall trilogy...
Films and books have long held two neighboring places in my
heart. As forms of storytelling, they have shaped and influenced me, each
informing the other. I warn students of any class I teach that I will be
referring, indiscriminately,...
"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka
