If “This Old Thing” hadn’t been a square on Bingo this year I could have easily gone my whole life without reading any Jane Austen, and I still haven’t seen any of her film adaptions. I read a lot of classic American literature in high school and college, including Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, several Steinbeck novels, The Scarlet Letter and even Moby Dick but I don’t think I was ever assigned anything from the other side of the pond while a student. I picked Pride and Prejudice because it seemed […]
“But I do think that when we choose the easy path, where people or society reward us for being what they want us to be, against who we really are, a kind of death occurs. To the soul.”
I read Openly Straight last year and, while I thought the premise of going back into the closet strange, I loved the relationship between Rafe and Ben. Honestly Ben picks up right where Openly Straight ends with Ben is questioning things after he hooks up with Rafe. Ben has discovered Rafe knows he is homosexual and wasn’t just experimenting like Ben was which sends him into a bit of a tailspin. After winter break Ben discovers he was awarded the highly prestigious Pappas Award, complete with a much needed scholarship, and […]
“We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”
Continuing my unintentional trend of books about rich people in vacation homes: We Were Liars a story about a Kennedy-esq family, the Sinclairs, as told by the unreliable narrator Cadence (Cady) Sinclair Easton. “I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.” Two summers ago Cady, then fifteen, suffered some sort of accident that has left her suffering from amnesia and migraines. Prior to the accident Cady and her cousins shared happy summers at their family’s private island. Cady, the oldest grandchild in the Sinclair dynasty, is particularly […]
“This is a book about me, at what I hope is the beginning of the second half of my life and not the brief, final tenth.”
Hodgman’s essays are loosely threaded together by a common theme of travel/ vacationing but Vacationland is essentially a memoir about white, upper middle class male privilege. Hodgman acknowledges his privilege which makes this more entertaining than it could have been in someone hands. I listened to the audio-book which enhanced the experience. “Money cannot buy happiness, but it buys the conditions for happiness: time, occasional freedom from constant worry, a moment of breath to plan for the future, and the ability to be generous.” Hodgman grew up in […]