When you have been thrilled by a book, and you discover that someone has written a letter about being thrilled with that same book, even if it was a hundred years ago, it invites a certain companionship. When that letter-writer is writing to the author of that collection, you feel
In the past few weeks, I’ve read a few books for this reading project; at this rate, I will easily read the 32 books I’m aiming for (representing the percentage of people in one American state, who voted in November 2020 on a bill which maintained the legal option to
The call for witnesses in The Stone Diaries resonates throughout Shields’ work: “Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the
Rereading Cat’s Eye while rereading Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Margaret Atwood emphasized the parallels between the narrator’s and author’s childhoods. I was a teenager when I read Cat’s Eye for the first time; I would have had no idea that Elaine’s childhood of lakes and insects was Peggy’s childhood
When variations on the 30-something-°-day populate the ten-day forecast, summer reading is ON. (That’s 80s and 90s, for those of us who still get hotter in °F.) Books like Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and Taylor Hale’s The Summer I Drowned rise to the top of
