August’s been a pretty good month reading-wise. I finished a novel and read another for the #2016classicschallenge – Ingrid Bachmann’s Malina and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – and a wide range of other books:Ingrid Bachmann: MalinaI picked up this book at my parent’s one weekend in July, and decided to read the novel as …
Tag Archives: reading journal
Black Children Matter
I basically inhaled Toni Morrison’s new novel God Help the Child because it left me breathless. It’s a short novel, but it is so rich in everything: Language, narrative perspectives, themes, settings, characters. The prose is poetic, not as in lovely-beautiful but as in dense with emotional and intellectual heft. Characters and themes are true …
J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories
I recently discovered this collection of short stories by J.D. Salinger in my parents’ basement. I wish I’d discovered it years earlier, for a simple egoistic reason: I might’ve enjoyed the book more before I sharpened my feminist-critical blades. Before I grew weary of male novelist tropes. (Passages of the text could easily be more …
Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn …
It is important to realize that this Playboy Ideal is a sign of low, rather than high, sexual energy. It suggests that the sexual flame is so faint and wavering that a whole person would overwhelm and extinguish it. Only a vapid, compliant ninny-fantasy can keep it alive. It’s designed for men who don’t really …
If you belong to the academy, it is all you can do to “keep up” with your ever-narrower specialty. An obsession with method, mirroring the culture’s obsession with “information,” buries ideas. If you resist specialization, you are drawn toward the hall of mirrors called “theory” – it becomes a full-time occupation to find your way …
CLARITY AND CHAOS 