My List of Books for 2007: Final Count

Methodology
My rule for fiction is you must complete the entire book. My rule for non-fiction, particularly ones that are split into multiple essays, is that you must finish at least 2/3rds of the book for it to count (basically have read most of the essays). As usual this year saw me reading a lot of [...]

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Early Thoughts on the Loss of My Age of Innocence

I really really really am not enjoying this book. I don’t mean to be an Edith Wharton hater—in fact, I really enjoyed her novella/short story “Madame De Treymes,” which we read earlier for my Edith Wharton and Henry James Seminar—but I am only sixty pages into The Age of Innocence and I wanted to gouge [...]

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A Portrait of Novel: A Review of Henry James

Henry James brings the “novel of manners” into the age of literary Modernism. This portrait of expatriates living abroad in Europe – specifically Britain and Italy – gives us detailed observations of societal conventions in transition. Serialized in Atlantic Monthly from 1880-81, this story portrays an age recovering from revolutions, while being on the verge [...]

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50 books! Hoorah!

Books:
1. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (novel)
2. South Park and Philosophy edited by Robert Arp. (Non-fiction)
3. The Sacred Monstrous: A Reflection on Violence in human communities by Wendy C. Hamblet (non-fiction)
4. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (novel)
5. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (novel)
6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony [...]

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Ficciones

Borges’ Ficciones is simultaneously frustrating, enthralling, off-putting, and on occasion brilliant. Vast worlds stretch out into the infinity of the imagination through the carefully chosen language that highlights Borges’s strength as a writer. People who live for wordplay will love Borges; people who love strong characters that they can relate to and feel an emotional [...]

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Bow before the Almighty 30!!!

I finally made it to 30 books completed for this year. Let’s chart how I am doing in relation to my stated reading goals for this year:
1) read over 50 books.
Only 20 more to go. I would like to reach this by the end of the summer and we’ll call it a good reading year. [...]

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Kelly Link: Girl Detective?

So I recently finished re-reading Kelly Link’s Short story collection Stranger Things Happen. I decided not to write my impressions of the re-read in its entirety and instead focus on one story. Most of the stories I was able to grapple with; in fact, re-reading them helped me get a better understanding of their underlying [...]

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William Kennedy’s Legs

Gangster stories offer its audience an infectious voyeurism into a world of money, booze, women, and glorified violence. Perhaps the allure of such stories is that they provide an escape into a world with values different than our own, but Legs by William Kennedy, a fictionalized account of real life Irish mobster Jack “Legs” Diamond, [...]

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Sunrise on my first Native American Literature Book

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko was my first foray into Native American literature, a work that certainly falls into the category of Magic Realism. I believe it is considered the finest work ever written within the Native American Canon. This tale combines Laguna Pueblo oral tradition in the form of mythical poetry interspersed throughout the [...]

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Because Trent demands I keep my promises…

Instead of posting the syllabi or giving brief thoughts on the classes so far, I will give brief reviews of the books we have read for ENG 545.
The Home Place by Wright Morris:
This was my first experience with the experiment form of photo-texts. Wright Morris combines black-and-white photographs with text to construct a story about [...]

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