The Trees by Percival Everett
The title “The Trees” most immediately references two ideas in this book. First, the family trees of white Southerners who suddenly find their crimes and their families’ crimes coming back to haunt them and even kill them. The second of course is as a symbol of lynching. In the novel we begin with a white family discussing the murder of one of their kin who is found dead and bound in barbed wire, his testicles cut off, and next to the body of a Black […]
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
I have been reading and in some cases rereading some Civil War history books recently (and in a way, I am always reading Civil War history) and part of what I am trying to think about is the story as a whole in a way that makes sense to me, but also some of the driving questions about the living aspect of the history. This book is a more conceptual history book in the sense that it takes on a topic about the war and […]
Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind by Harold Bloom
A kind of guide to Macbeth that I wonder how useful it actually is. The book itself clearly needs you to have read Macbeth and be familiar with the plot because while this book goes in order, it’s not particularly well-structured or seem all that concerned with guiding you through the text as a whole. Instead, Harold Bloom walks you through various lines, exchanges, speeches, and other things and gives you some line-readings, some close-reading, some historiography about certain elements, and occasionally some reference to […]
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
I first started reading this book in the spring of 2007. I know that because I had several hours of hall duty while administering state-wide tests when I was working at a school in Baltimore, so I brought this book to stand and read while for the most part I didn’t have any interaction with students. Over the course of the testing, I read about 150 pages of the nearly 600 pages. 600 pages is such a relative term as well all know. 600 pages […]
Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This is probably my favorite of the Taylor Jenkins Reid books so far. Carrie Soto appears early in Malibu Rising as the tennis star who crashes figuratively into one the character’s life. In this book she is the star and narrates almost the whole novel, minus the interpolation of media surrounding the tennis world from time to time. We begin with Carrie Soto, retired tennis star who holds the record the most Grand Slam titles, watching as her record is finally beaten by someone she never […]
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
I have read this book possibly two dozen times and each time I am still amazed by it and find more things to think about and talk about. If you’ve never read it, you should do so immediately. It is one of the most amazingly alive books in American literature. At the beginning of the novel we get a kind of collective narrative voice talking about Janie Woods (Killicks, Stark) coming back into town. The gossip is heated as we’re told that she ran off […]