“Good writing can only be learned from good writing.” This book is a collection of lectures that Forster gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927. It grabs you immediately as he dismisses temporality and time periods in the discussion of the merits of novels and, instead, places all writers in the same room writing from some sort of shared humanity. “We may say that History develops, Art stands still” From that he sets out to deconstruct the novel, discussing it not as a set or […]
The Outsiders
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 […]
If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
My friend M. found the beginning of this book to be quite pretentious. And it is. It’s pretentious AF for the first 60 or so pages. And it’s hard to read pretention too. The first few pages, especially, seem to drag and serve no purpose other than to make you re-think your decision to read it. But, I’m here to tell you that, while the first part of The Marriage Plot is definitely pretentious, it’s pretentious for a reason. The pretention of Madeline and her […]