Ruth is equal parts infuriating and hurting. Like Karin, in Alice Munro’s “Rich as Stink”, these girls are angered and confused by the connections they observe between the adults in their lives. In “Thank You for the Lovely Tea”, readers meet Ruth when she is desperate to be out of
My read-o-lutions for 2019 are much as they were for the past year: keep on reading on. (2018 was a great reading year!) Except more non-fiction, more poetry, more letters, more graphic novels and comics. More storybooks, writers' biographies and histories. The underlying theme? More. But not necessarily more
Once again, GoodReads has done a fine job of summarizing my reading (I wish they hadn't been bought out by Amazon). This year comes up with 336 books or 82,982 pages. (How do I do it? I mercilessly exploit my commutes and read as often as I can, including
We mean it kindly, when we say that a short story contains a novel. For many of us are novel-lovers, first or only, and, so, this seems a high compliment. What we are observing is how quickly an author can beckon us into the heart of a character, how
There have been many Christmases in Mazo de la Roche’s novels, too: not quite a hundred, but several. “Ninety-nine Christmases had been celebrated at Jalna. In its first Christmas Philip and Adeline Whiteoak had been young people and their three children infants. Now all those five were in their
