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...
Subtitle: An Introduction to Talking Cats and Moody Plants Earlier this week I started reading Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, and I have been captivated with it from the get-go. At first I was a little nervous, as the book promised to be a sweeping history of Explosion, the book’s fictional town (or city, or metropolis, depending on where you are in the story), and it took a...
In my experiences with physical endeavors (running and yoga), the most important lesson I’ve learned over the years is that being able to plow through anything is not the ultimate sign of development or maturity, it’s knowing when to pull back. I’m not sure why I’ve been so hesitant to apply this truth to my reading life as well. There’s always a certain guilt, or...
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...
There are few stories you have the pleasure to experience that you could inhabit indefinitely, and A Gentleman in Moscow was one of these all-encompassing literary worlds for me. The language, the structure of the book, where do I begin? A Gentleman in Moscow tells the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who is sentenced to house arrest in 1920’s Russia for writing a subversive poem, or...
Last night Mr. Brain and I finally got around to watching the movie adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s Room. I loved the book, marveled at the insight into Jack’s psyche, though as I read it some time ago, I had a lot of space between my reading and viewing experiences. Still, it’s not an easily forgotten story and I was very curious to see how it would play out as a movie. So much...
It should have been so easy to be happy. I have a book hangover. I loved Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot. I mean, I really loved it, and I feel sort of cheated that I didn’t get to say goodbye to its cast of characters and wish them all well before having to return this book to the library. I didn’t anticipate that I would like this book so much, and I almost didn’t...
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m dipping my toes back into the world of fiction, and after seeing You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott floating around on other reading lists, I thought I’d give it a stab. I recently watched 30 for 30: The Price of Gold, which chronicles the attack on Nancy Kerrigan through the ever so unreliable voice of modern day Tonya Harding, so I suppose I was...
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