I read The Joy Luck Club in college for a women’s literature course, and while it wasn’t my favorite book, it was certainly interesting. I do think Amy Tan gets pigeonholed quite a bit as a “Chinese” American writer, and while she writes about a heritage from China, it’s not exactly fair to think of the experiences she writes about as exclusive to Chinese-Americans, or even more broadly, Asian-Americans. I won The Opposite of Fate, a nonfiction collection, at my undergrad’s English Department annual Book […]
An acclaimed Arthur Miller play with mixed results
I never read The Crucible in high school, but The Chancellor’s taught it to his American Literature class before, and he’s talked to me about Arthur Miller and the ideas he wrote about in his plays. Plus, I’d seen the AWFUL adaptation that was quite thick on nakedness and a bit thin on thematic development, so I was curious to see how the play would stack up. And, let’s not forget that we’re living in a weird hybrid McCarthyistic/Nixonian era that I thought only existed […]
What happens when we fall? We rise strong.
We just got done with a rousing book club discussion of C’s pick, Brené Brown’s Rising Strong, which acts as a sequel to her highly-acclaimed Daring Greatly. I’m not one for self-help books, but Brown touches on something that most of us don’t think explicitly about and runs us through mental processes that affect our daily lives and self-worth. This book works best if you’ve already read Daring Greatly, because Brown talks us through the Roosevelt quote about lying facedown in the arena and uses […]
An interesting theological study of Harry Potter
I’ve been a fan of the Harry Potter books since I was a freshman in college (it’s amazing how going to college opened up my world in so many ways). I like to read and engage with the books at theoretical levels, and when I was taking an independent study, I encountered John Granger’s critical work on the novels. He writes from the perspective of a Christian academic who was at first skeptical of the novels and then became a fan after engaging with them […]
Kids making bad choices is a hard pass from me.
When I was a college student, my teaching mentors had young adult book recommendations for high school students. Let’s face it, high school English classes push classics but kids often read “easier” and more accessible picks. One of the classic young adult novels that my advisor and mentor teacher recommended was Paul Zindel’s The Pigman. I picked it up at a thrift sale and then promptly never read it until now. Sophomores John and Lorraine play a prank on an old man, and it goes […]
A truly wonderful book hangover.
Have you ever met a book and fallen so deeply in love that finishing is a kind of regret? Welcome to Make Your Home Among Strangers, which gave me a major book hangover and inspired me to plan my fall semester courses, a task that had me dragging me feet for a few weeks. The book is moving, but it had special poignancy for my profession, and it inspired me to do and be better for my students. Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel is set in […]
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