Fiction

Summer is coming, and in our house, that means compiling summer reading lists and making too-tall stacks of books on bedside tables. My wife and I are compulsive readers and library-book-sale haunters. We plan dates to bookstores. We both majored in English, in undergraduate and graduate school, and even met and fell in love over our mutual love of books. So when I say that we make summer reading lists, what I really mean is that we put our kids in bed, pour ourselves a nice cold beer, and stand in our living room talking over each other, pulling books off of our shelves. We frantically search for favorite passages and vow to read and reread nearly every book in our collection. This year is no different.

I have already decided to reread Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and my wife says she wants to reread Moby Dick. Of course, not all of our summer reading will be so heavy, nor should it be. Light reading fare is best for those hot, lazy days that make the brain tick at a slightly slower pace. Read more

<!--[if gte mso 9]&gt; Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 &lt;![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]&gt; &lt;![endif]--> You know what my favorite song by the Cure is? It happens to also be the only listenable track that the sad Brits ever put down. It’s called “Killing an Arab.” And while that’s a completely abhorrent sentiment, I will say that the song comes as close to punk as the band would ever get. Anyway, the reason that the song is so enjoyable – to me at least – is the fact that it’s based upon a scene from the Albert Camus novel The Stranger.

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<!--[if gte mso 9]&gt; Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE &lt;![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]&gt; &lt;![endif]-->After hearing the name Saul Bellows on the lips of everyone from my uncle to random other literature geeks, I figured that I’d better just start at the beginning. The first two novelized works by Bellows – Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) – are generally perceived as the writer warming up to unleash more mature, focused and original works. But when Dangling Man is actually considered, the book does, in many ways, reveal a young and all too insightful writer. Read more

<!--[if gte mso 9]&gt; Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 &lt;![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]&gt; &lt;![endif]--> The style that Woolf developed over her career seems to have come to fruition in To The Lighthouse. In this novel Woolf hones her ability to move the narrative along while still focusing on the ideas that flow through her character’s minds. The way in which Lily Brisoce thinks and acts exemplifies an important aspect of Woolf’s style. As a result of this, a distillation of Woolf’s prose style can be ascertained from examining small sections of the inner-workings of Lily mind. Read more