I picked this up solely because I adored the title. The cover seemed calm and mysterious as it stood there on the library shelf. I wasn’t in the market for new books to read, but I thought “eh why not?” Unfortunately I never came to love we were liars. It was a pleasant enough read, short and light. I, however, was expecting a beautiful slow read about families and secrets and the special bonds formed when people grow up together. It wasn’t. Instead it was […]
Theology 101
All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances. ~ Tielhard de Chardin Another step along my literary walk of shame. How am I only just now reading this Pulitzer and National Book Award winner that Spielberg made into a movie starring Whoopie and Oprah? While it deals with hard subject matter (rape, incest, racism, misogyny — just like the […]
An American Horror Story
Our envy of others devours us most of all. ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn At one point in Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, a character reflects on jealousy and envy. As a child, she was familiar with jealousy — that feeling that someone else has gotten something that rightfully belongs to you. Envy, when it comes, is a new and unsettling feeling, a perception that somehow, one is lacking something. In The Bluest Eye, that something is beauty, beauty as defined by others, beauty […]
The more things change …
Maya Angelou’s first autobiographical installment, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is widely considered to be the best of her series of autobiographies. Nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, this work has been a staple of high school reading lists, and banned book lists, for several decades. It is a beautifully written recollection of Angelou’s childhood, from the time she and her older brother were sent alone by train to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother (Angelou was 5) until Angelou, […]