David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest. New York: Hachette, 2009. Kindle e-book. I had to do it. Sooner or later I had to see what the fuss was about. Also, as a teacher, I look for works that sound related to things we study in class. Last summer, for example, I read The Double Bind because … Continue reading Infinite Jest – Review
Virginia Woolf. Jacob’s Room. 1922; Amazon.com. [2004] Ebook. [Most public domain Amazon e-books are also found on Gutenberg.org] Virginia Woolf was known to experiment with narration. Jacob’s Room is one such experiment. It is a tough read, but it all comes together in the last chapter—at least, that appears to be the author’s intent. And … Continue reading Jacob’s Room – Review
Bernard R. Tanner. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey: A Reader’s Guide to the Gospels in The Great Gatsby. Lanham MD: U P of America, 2003. Print. The thesis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey is fairly plain and direct. Fitzgerald was a fan of James Joyce’s Dubliners and read Ulysses when it came out in 1922. He … Continue reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey – Review
Chris Bohjalian. The Double Bind. New York: Random, 2007. Print. This is a scary book. The prologue tells us of the brutal attempted rape of a nineteen year old college student in the Green Mountains of Vermont. The author may have named this girl Laurel to echo the Greek myth of Daphne who barely escaped … Continue reading The Double Bind – Review
David Pietrusza. Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius who Fixed the 1919 World Series. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. Print. Baseball as a Way to God mentioned in passing a man who was a fixture of the New York sports betting scene in the first three decades of the twentieth … Continue reading Rothstein – Review
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned. 1922; rpt. Amazon.com. 16 May 2012. E-book. Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a … Continue reading The Beautiful and Damned – Review
Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. 1915. Gutenberg.org. 26 Nov. 2011. E-book. I bit. The author of the book I recently read and reviewed, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, spoke so highly of The Good Soldier that I had to read it. Was it worth it? Yes. Very clever and pointed symbolism. Like … Continue reading The Good Soldier – Review
Chang-Rae Lee. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Print. This book was recommend to me by a fellow English teacher whom I respect a lot. I also heard Mr. Lee speak recently and, frankly, I thought I could identify with him. Yes, part of his story is that of a second generation Korean immigrant … Continue reading Review – Native Speaker