When I was 8 or 9, I remember finding an old movie playing on television one afternoon, about an old man and what looked to me like a swordfish. I came in only near the end and my goodness it left an impression, though I retained no clear memory of how the story ended. I … Continue reading The Old Man and the Sea
My 10-year-old daughter and I recently read Carlo Collodi's 1883 story, "The Adventures of Pinocchio." Now, it turns out that the story is fairly dark, much more than the famous Disney movie of 1940. Parents may wish to be careful with this one, and a full plot description of Collodi's story can be found on … Continue reading Pinocchio and Moby Dickens
In my last post I reviewed a book by William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, that read God's speeches in the Book of Job as a creation story. This was a very new perspective for me. It made me take a look back at my little journey through Job in recent months. I've … Continue reading William P. Brown podcast about Job
"Makoons" is the last book written, thus far, in "The Birchbark House" series. (Spoilers ahead.) It's a deceptively simple story, which you think is just about the details of ordinary life, but then you realize how many deaths have taken place in the course of the story. Nokomis. Angeline and Fishtail. Two Strike's pet lamb … Continue reading Makoons
Finishing "Huckleberry Finn," it struck me that there's no romance in the story, not even a steady female character. So in this respect the novel is somewhat similar to “Moby-Dick”, its main historical contender for the “title” of Great American Novel. But Huck doesn't quite go as far as Moby in casting off the ladies. … Continue reading Huck and the ladies
I picked up “Pilgrim’s Progress” only because I was reading “Little Women,” which I found made constant reference to Bunyan’s earlier novel. So I put down Alcott and started “Pilgrim,” and it was a mixed experience – riveting in many places, but often hard-going. As often happens when I pick up a new author, the … Continue reading Pilgrim’s Progress
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
I recently read a book that was a delight for me, a lifelong fan of a certain bit of punctuation. It covers a lot of territory, efficiently: the origins of the semicolon; historical debates about the "rules" of grammar and whether such rules even make sense; snobbery in punctuation, and snobbery in general; the critical … Continue reading Semicolon
October 1, 2020 Dorotea’s unspooling of her story – while we, along with the anguished Cardenio, guess who she might be – is the most gripping thing in the book yet. (I read this rather than watch the first Trump/Biden debate, and I’m so glad.) Her speech when Fernando enters her room is stirring (“I … Continue reading 41 chapters into Don Quixote
August 22, 2020 I saw the BBC's "War and Peace" on a Saturday and a Sunday. I spent the following week getting other books “out of the way,” so to speak. On Monday I did my Zoom reading on a “Moby-Dick” marathon, which finished the next day (in the middle of a tropical storm left … Continue reading My quarantine addiction
