Capital ‘L’ literature puzzles me as I often feel that it’s a giant waste of time while I’m in the middle, but then I get to the end and reflect on it, and I realize that having read the book was worthwhile. This sentiment couldn’t be more true than my feeling on finishing “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” On a surface perspective, I read 350 pages in which nothing really happened and the characters went nowhere. But on a deeper inspection, the pages roil with […]
Late to the Party
I’m literally years late to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, as I’ve avoided this book on principle for a long time. Not because of its content, but more to its hype and the fact that I’m usually not a huge fan of capital “L” literature. But it was selected by the members of the book club I’m proctoring, and after finishing it, I’m of two minds. On one hand I loved it and can totally get behind the hype. On the other, it left me wanting, and […]
“Love Is A Verb”
So the director from my MFA program wandered into my office last week and asked if I’d like to introduce an author for our university’s monthly book talks. H*ll yes, I would! Cue reading The Rending and the Nest so I don’t sound like an idiot when I go up to make the introductions. Since I’d never heard of Kaethe Schwehn before, I was worried that there was a very distinct possibility I might hate the book and then have to lie from a podium to an […]
Patent Wars
I really wanted to like this book, and there were definitely some great moments in it with visceral setting and interesting factoids, but it all fell a bit flat for me. “The Last Days of Night” is a fictional retelling of the patent wars between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse during the hey-day of America’s invention period. Moore chooses to tell this story from the Point of View of Westinghouse’s lawyer, Paul Cravath. It’s an ingenious way to tell a story riddled with scientific specifics and […]