Around the World in 10 Books

One of the things I'm most grateful to my parents for is their push for me to travel. By the time I was sixteen, I had tramped all over the United States and visited six countries. Not bad, especially since we always lived in the same small town in Tennessee (which I love dearly). Still, …

Les Miserables: Do You Talk to Yourself?

Two days ago, I decided to tackle Les Miserables' 2435 pages of, well, misery. I had avoided the book before, thinking it was strictly a right of passage for theater kids, but when I realized it was written by Victor Hugo (author of one of my favorite books, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), my opinion changed. …

6 Sickening Moments in Classic Literature

If you've ever taken a course in creative writing, you'll know that being on this list is a compliment! A writer's main goal is to manipulate his reader's emotions. The writers on this list manipulated my emotions so effectively that they bypassed all secondary and tertiary emotions and tapped into one of my primary emotions, …

Harry Potter and the Power of the Heptalogy

JK Rowling's Harry Potter books claim 7 of the slots in the top 10 bestselling books of all times. That's a stupefying statistic if I've ever heard one! Rowling's writing is enchanting by its own right. If she had stopped at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the book still would have fared well with children. If she had wrapped Harry's …

The Age of Innocence: How a Pulitzer Prize Winner Breaks Rules

Wow! I hardly know where to begin praising Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Normally, there is one aspect of a book that stands out to me as its superlative. In this case, mastery is suffused across every page. Prose is beautiful. Pacing is efficient. Characters are deep and fresh. Because I would never be able to …

Song of Achilles: Imagery of the Gods

Have any of you had one of those moments when your senses are all in harmony? The colors and shapes around you, the feelings in your heart, the taste on your tongue, the sounds in the background, the scent in the air? I had one of those moments at approximately 12:48 AM, Friday night. I was in …

Peter Pan: Cold Medicine, Beastly Stuff

I recently moved into an apartment with a friend of mine who, equally to my detriment and delight, has excellent taste in literature. She has a bookshelf full of books, many of which I haven't read, in the hallway. I have caught a cold, and I think that lack of sleep due to reading until …