It took me awhile to find my way to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Mentions of the book kept following me around my digital space, popping up in must-read lists, referenced loosely in discussions tied to my absolute favorite Jane Eyre. It sounded intriguing in its Gothic ways, but was also on the fringe of my literary knowledge. I couldn’t place du Maurier in any historical context...
Yesterday I finished Rachel Joyce’s latest novel, The Music Shop, which in perfect Rachel Joyce fashion was a very intimate visit with its inhabitants. But as I was sitting here struggling to come up with something to say about its plot, I realized that the book was simply an experience, much like the music it employs to help tell its tale. Frank, music shop owner and vinyl aficionado, is a...
Finding the right book at the right time is one of those rare gifts from the universe, much like finding forgotten chocolate in my desk drawer, or seeing a rainbow on an especially desultory day. Starting 2018 with Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was one of those rare gifts, even doubly so in setting the tone for what I hope to be a year of plentiful literary wanderings...
I’ve been in a reading slump for awhile now, though it’s hard to say why it persisted for so long. Earlier in the summer I embarked on a necessary professional transition, which is to say I wasn’t happy in my position and I did the thing where you update your written list of credentials, send them off for consideration, and then hope you get to talk to someone else about...
The recommendation to read Laurie Frankel’s This Is How It Always Is came with a caveat: don’t ready anything about the book, not even the description on the book jacket, just start reading it. So, this is precisely how I proceeded, and having since gone back and read all these previously banned descriptions, I’m glad I avoided them. I don’t think they gave too much away...
As someone whose professional life exists in the almighty digital world, reading Doree Shafrir’s Startup felt a little too familiar. While I’ve never worked for a bona fide startup, I have dabbled in the agency world where terms like “gamification” and “market disrupter” were part of the daily buzz. If a company has to heavily promote a certain culture of free...
In preparation for reading Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester, I did my due diligence and put in the time to reread Jane Eyre. I honestly wasn’t expecting to get as much out of it as I did, and as someone who has been reluctant to reread in the past in the name of an ever growing wishlist of new things to explore, I severely underestimated the wealth to be found in studying a familiar...
After taking a week to reread Jane Eyre, I immediately dove into Sarah Shoemaker’s soon to be released (May 9th) book Mr. Rochester. As the title implies, Mr. Rochester aims to give voice to Jane’s difficult, and notably ugly, love interest, Edward Rochester. Mr. Rochester takes us through Edward’s childhood, from boarding school as a young boy, through an apprenticeship with a...
Every once in a blue moon you stumble upon a book that is so absorbing, so rich, you feel its aftershock long after you put it down. Life feels a little deeper, a little more illuminated, and your bar for exceptional writing is raised a few notches. Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles was one of these experiences for me. The Explosion Chronicles is a satirical history of Explosion, a...
What if? In a fantastic exploration of the implications of a single kiss, Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth asks us to consider how our lives become inextricably connected by one event, one relationship, or how this singular event fans out into decades worth of history in a way that makes it impossible to tease out individual threads. Commonwealth tells the story of the Cousins and Keatings...
Send this to a friend