My ten most memorable reads of 2022, fiction and nonfiction, out of my 42 first-time reads: 1. The Book of Job -- Robert Alter's translation “Oh, let that night be barren, let it have no song of joy.Let the day-cursers hex it, those ready to rouse Leviathan.Let its twilight stars go dark.Let it hope for … Continue reading Favorite reads of 2022
I cannot say anything about Homer's "Odyssey" that hasn't been said before, so I'm going to take a personal angle on this one. I'm going to try to describe why I loved "The Iliad" even in high school but have never gotten around to its sequel until now. To sum up, I think I loved … Continue reading The Old Beggar and the Sea
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
Lionel Trilling famously stated, ''All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of 'Don Quixote'." Therefore I try, in the most literal way possible, to find our famous knight and squire in the pages of every novel I read. Well, I recently finished all 1,304 pages of "Les Misérables," and I couldn't find them. … Continue reading Don Quixote – Les Misérables edition
I've been reading the Birchbark House series to my kids, before bedtime. I read the series myself a year ago but reading it to them I've experienced these stories through their eyes, and they have been enthralled. We've read to my son practically since he was born and he's always loved it. Even now at … Continue reading Reading to my kids
In honor of a sad sapling, and his Christmas tree. Hark! the herald angels sing,"Glory to the newborn King:peace on earth, and mercy mild,God and sinners reconciled!"Joyful, all ye nations, rise,join the triumph of the skies;with th'angelic hosts proclaim,"Christ is born in Bethlehem!" Refrain:Hark! the herald angels sing,"Glory to the newborn King" Christ, by highest … Continue reading Charlie Brown Christmas
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
January 14, 2021 I’ve just finished “Madame Bovary.” Some of it was slow going, specifically the passages of excessive detail about physical objects and surroundings. But after finishing the novel, I read in Soledad Fox’s “Flaubert and Don Quijote” that Flaubert used all this detail to satirize the “realist” genre: that’s why he describes the … Continue reading Madame Bovary
December 31, 2020 I’ve read Charlotte Lennox's “The Female Quixote” (Kwicksoht), and I struggled through much of the first half, but the effort was well worth it. I flew through the last 100 pages. Lennox’s novel was inspired by Cervantes and later inspired Austen, two authors I’ve recently discovered, so I really wanted to read … Continue reading The Female Quixote
