You don’t know about me, without you have read a bit of this here blog, but that ain’t no matter. The blog was written by me, and I told the truth, mainly. There was things which I stretched, but mainly I told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe the Long-Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator. Mark Twain pulled that off for the entire length of Huckleberry Finn. I managed a paragraph…well, truth be … [Read more...] about Master of Dialect
Great Books
Cane
Jean Toomer’s Cane presents a problem for people who like to lump books into categories of comparable writers. It firmly sits in the realm of Great Books broadly defined, probably not in a narrow set of Great Books, though. But, if you like finer gradations, you have two options. First option: it belongs in the camp with people like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Langston Hughes. The book is included in, for example, the Library of America’s Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s. … [Read more...] about Cane
Haunted Minds
Haunted Houses.Did a chill go down your spine or did you yawn? The world seems to divide neatly between those who seek out ghostly tales of horror and those who most definitely do not. I am in the latter camp. So, why did I just read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, it is a truth widely acknowledge that this is the haunted house story par excellence. Not my normal cup of tea. But, one of my former students recommended it to me, and … [Read more...] about Haunted Minds
Equal Rights
It is easy to imagine Friedrich Nietzsche sitting in his study, writing away, merrily imagining the look of horror which will cross the faces of his readers when they come across the line he just penned. He obviously liked to shock people; the bigger the shock, the happier he was. But, alas, unlike his contemporary creator of scandalous bon mots, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche was not popular in the salons of the day. People never knew what the guy was mumbling about over there in the … [Read more...] about Equal Rights
The Ministry of Fear
Graham Greene once announced he wrote two types of novels: Literary and Entertainments. The latter was his name for spy novels or mysteries, pleasant ways to pass some time when you want a break from the usual contemplation of the struggles of existence, not wanting to become mired in a book helping you ruminate about such matters. To help in your book selection process, Greene’s The Ministry of Fear has a helpful subtitle: An Entertainment. When an author writes in two genres, these sorts … [Read more...] about The Ministry of Fear
Game of English Thrones
Fan fiction is a fascinating genre. Someone writes a book which becomes so beloved that fanatical readers cannot get enough of the characters and the world in which they live. Some of these fanatics start dreaming up new stories and other devoted fanatics gobble up these stories. Truth be told, fan fiction is not particularly well-noted for the quality of the prose or the stories. It is mostly juvenile writing with adolescent plots. A question which I had never pondered ere now is: Who is … [Read more...] about Game of English Thrones