By now, you should know, I’m a Virginia Woolf fangirl. I love the way she expresses things, her sense of humor, the beauty of her prose. Orlando is something of a departure, a very tongue-in-cheek imitation of a biography. As I said in the review of the film above, it’s about a 16th century nobleman [...]
To the Lighthouse wasn’t quite as accessible for me as Mrs. Dalloway, but it has plenty of Woolfian flashes of brilliance. The story concerns a family and various friends vacationing in the Hebrides; in the first half, the children want to go to visit the local lighthouse, but it seems weather will prevent them. In [...]
This novel preceeded Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being by five years, and I can’t say it quite lived up to the later work, but it’s still very evocative and heartbreaking on its own. Through three different but thematically connected stories, Kundera examines the place of memory and forgetfulness within personal relationships, history, and especially [...]
by Italo Calvino
Calvino has been one of my favorite writers since I stumbled upon his book of pseudo-short stories, Invisible Cities, and Cosmicomics is similar in style and structure. It’s basically a series of vignettes based around personified mathematic principles. Yeah, I can’t wrap my mind around it either, and I’ve read it! It’s a [...]
by Zora Neale Hurston
I enjoyed this much-maligned last novel by Hurston best of all. In a turn that many critics have denounced, she sets this one among white people and focuses much more on the marriage relationship than on racism, or self-actualization, or any of the things that preoccupied her in her other novels. However, [...]
