A journey to collect 500 20th century novels by women
I’ve finished my first book of 2020! And…I don’t quite know what I think of it. Not a very exciting start to the year, huh? The book in question is Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest. I had read Lessing’s Golden Notebook some years back, which is considered her magnum opus. And, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t …
A whole new year of book reading! What shall I do with it? When I thought about what my book resolutions would be for 2020, I thought I should first be honest about how well I did with my resolutions for 2019. Last year I said I would resolve to 1) finally read some Ellen …
It seems inevitable that we book bloggers all spend the end of December and the beginning of January thinking about the last year in books. Goodreads and other apps make it so easy to round up our year in reading! I myself read 56 books, and 21 were from my 20th century “Women’s Library” (for …
Today is Veterans’ Day here in the U.S., and it certainly was an eventful one here. Brian was off work, since he’s a federal worker, but I had to go to work. He met me for lunch and was helpfully going to spend the afternoon re-framing a large poster I have of a Waterhouse painting. …
Hi there, friends in book-land. I do still have a blog, I promise! It’s just been, well, hibernating through the summer and fall. It would appear that buying your first house, moving, and adopting your first cat all take up a good deal of your time, and there’s not much left for blog-writing! But the …
Something funny happened to me when I was reading Ellen Glasgow’s Virginia. First of all, I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I don’t read summaries of books before I start them, so I try to go in with as little knowledge of the book as possible. So all I knew about this …
I was very intent using this blog post to continue my saga of going on and on about how wonderful Dorothy Canfield Fisher is, but then I took a road trip from Baltimore to Montgomery, AL (by way of the Florida coast) with my dad, and now all I want to talk about is Flannery …
Do I still remember how to write about books? I certainly hope I’m not too rusty. Especially because the book I want to write about is so, so dear to me now that I’ve finished it. And it’s the kind of book I really started this blog to discover – a novel written by a …
I had known, or at any rate was capable of knowing, that Toni Morrison was our greatest living writer prior to reading Paradise. But certainly I am not capable of denying it now. As I had mentioned before in my prior post, I had been dragging my feet about finishing the remaining Morrison books I …
I’ve been sitting around for days pondering what to say about Zora Neale Hurston’s debut, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. What to say about the beginning of a dazzling literary journey? What to say about this spectacular, clever, frustrating, hysterical, singular writer at the start of her career? I knew that Jonah’s Gourd Vine was partly autobiographical, …
