Recitatif by Toni Morrison
Technically, Recitatif is a short story – generously, it could be called a novella – but was released recently (I think) as a full book with an introduction by Zadie Smith, and so I’ll count it as a novel unto itself here. For the unfamiliar, this is a story where race is central to the plot – but never clarified. The story follows two girls, Twyla and Roberta, who were brought to room 406 at a sort of boarding school for children whose parents are unable […]
Beloved by Toni Morrison
I was just reading Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar, and she discusses Beloved briefly as a Madea story. This is true in the sense that the plot of Beloved involves Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman now ten or more years after the Civil War, living in a house in Ohio that is haunted by some sort of presence. Sethe too is a quite haunted woman. In a moment of abject fear and panic, some years earlier Sethe kills her infant daughter when she believes that she’s […]
Beloved by Toni Morrison
[TW: violence against children, racial slurs, depictions of slavery, abuse] BINGO – UnCannon In high school I took two AP English classes. In college, I took a Comparative Western Literature course. Toni Morrison was not on any of my reading lists for those courses despite the fact that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and that Beloved was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Perhaps, Morrison is not read more at […]
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
We Always Treat Women too Well by Raymond Queneau
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
I, Autohouse by Gish Jen
American Santa by Vanessa Hua
One More Hour by Carrie Brownstein and Corrin Tucker
My Therapist, My Lover by Cris Beam
Orphans of the Sky by Robert Heinlein
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Adichie
The Sense of an Ending – 4/5 Stars This is a reread from a few years ago, and in the reread I like it a lot better now than I did then. I do think the plot goes a little off the rails but the narration, the narrator, the character development are all alive and rich, and so beautifully and painfully rendered. There’s a lot of emotional tenderness, sadness, pain, anger, and spirit here. Our narrator is a man in his late fifties or early […]
Beloved by Toni Morrison
I feel like a little shit for rating this three stars in the middle of a slew of historical England romance novels that feature colonies as exotic backdrops but I think I can reasonably separate what I think is a moving story from my personal issues with style and choice of medium. I’ve wondered a lot at what we consider “high literature” and what makes for literature vs “easy reading.” I actively try and pick books from both sides of the coin, alternating between the […]
Jazz by Toni Morrison
CBR12 BINGO: The Roaring 20’s Have you ever gone to the movies, and as the credits roll, you can’t say that you loved the film or that you hated it, you just kind of think, “hmmm,” but for days after you find yourself pondering it, and visions of certain scenes and themes invade your thoughts, so eventually you come to realize that you’ve experienced something special? Jazz is like that. During the first few chapters, I appreciated the beauty of the language but couldn’t help […]
