And I am once again reminded that most of the time lit-fic is just not my thing. Willa Cather is good with words, but I just don’t get her writing. I chose this book as part of the Western challenge for Read Harder, and because I’ve owned it for years and years and years. It was a quick read, only 150 pages, and I read through it in a night. But I didn’t get very much out of it. A Lost Lady is about a […]
Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
This is a small novella. It reminds me so much of a few different Henry James stories (with the obvious splash of Edith Wharton). The time period of 1900 to about 1930 (before the full thrust of the Lost Generation and Modernism is in full steam) is a weird time in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Mark Tawin and Henry James cross over with Edith Wharton and Jack London. In the UK, Yeats, Joyce (I know I know Irish), Doyle cross over […]
And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives.
This is just a very good novel written by a very good writer at the top or near top of her game. Among other things, this novel feels very modern and less nostalgic than O Pioneers or My Antonia, the former of which I didn’t like and the latter I loved, and the result is charming and sad and funny. Doctor St. Peter is a college professor who, for circumstances beyond his control, is being removed from his longtime residence in order to make way […]
Bohemian Rhapsody
My students asked me the other day why we have different accents in the US. And I said that’s a complicated question but one of the answers is because different parts of the country were inhabited by immigrants from different parts of the world, for different reasons. They also didn’t believe me or conceive of the idea that even though cultures and ethnicities were quite old in Europe, a lot of countries were not. About a 75% chance I mention to them that the main […]