Last year was a terrific reading year. The variety, the intensity, the pacing: all so satisfying. My read-o-lutions for 2018 are much as they were for last year: keep on reading on. Perhaps a little more emphasis on illustrations and translations would be good.
Every year, GoodReads does a nice job of summarizing my reading (I wish they hadn't been bought out by Amazon). This year comes up with 281 books or 68,124 pages. (How do I do it? I neglect many other potentially meaningful aspects of life.) The numbers alone might seem
Mavis Gallant's childhood was not entirely happy. She was not loved as she needed to be loved. It was a painful time. It is difficult to set that awareness aside in reading "The Rejection", even though the story makes it difficult to determine who has been rejected and who
Evidence of Mavis Gallant's wit is abound in this super short story. Tongue firmly wedged in cheek, readers marvel with the imagined writer of this short piece. A writer whose familiarity with French Crenellation is abundant. (Whereas the writer's observations left me doubting my own understanding of it, so I
What aspect of any single day makes for a good story? A rainy day or otherwise? "Foreign papers exaggerate; Stefan’s mother sent him such anxious letters from Berlin! He would write tonight and tell her not to worry. Nothing was as serious as it seemed from the outside. Moreover, his
