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Category Archives: Authors
Thoughts on the Silliness of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the Pleasures of Seeing It Anyway
Back in grad school I was part of a short-lived Shakespeare reading group. Four or five of us met on weekend mornings to read all or part of a Shakespeare play. We started working through the plays in alphabetical order, … Continue reading
Why Don’t I Know More About Italy? – And Other Thoughts (Actually Not That Many Other Thoughts) on Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero
When I was preparing to write this review, I realized that I needed a really good metaphor to describe what it feels like to read a work of social satire from a culture one doesn’t know well. The closest I … Continue reading
A Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle
Earlier this year I reviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new and highly-praised memoir Between the World and Me, and you can read my review of that book here. The Beautiful Struggle, published in 2008, is just as good. I read it in … Continue reading
Thoughts on Larry Watson’s Laura
Recently I learned that Larry Watson has written other books besides Montana 1948. I’m not sure why this surprised me, except perhaps is that when an author emerges, publishes one book, and then disappears, that one book is often something … Continue reading
Thoughts on Jack Thorne’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Believe it or not, this review contains few true “spoilers.” I do provide many details from the play, and if you’re a purist who doesn’t want to know ANYTHING about the play before you read it, you should stay away … Continue reading
A Review of The Year of the Gadfly, by Jennifer Miller (by Jill)
Bethany reviewed this book in 2015 (see her review here), and I remember thinking it seemed like an interesting read. When it turned up on Kindle Unlimited, I added it to my queue, and when I was bored in … Continue reading
Final Thoughts on Jonathan Lyons’ The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
The anti-intellectualism of early Christianity makes me genuinely angry. This anger dates back to my reading of Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason in the winter of 2012, but … Continue reading
Thoughts on T.C. Boyle’s Wild Child and Other Stories (by Jill)
I’ve read a few of T.C. Boyle’s short stories before, but never a whole collection of them. Wild Child and Other Stories was amazing. Each story, no matter how short, was a self-contained little universe. I wish I’d had … Continue reading
A Review of Ian Caldwell’s The Fifth Gospel
Fact #1 that I learned from Ian Caldwell’s The Fifth Gospel: some Catholic priests can get married. The protagonist of this book is Alex Andreou, an Eastern Catholic priest who lives in the Vatican with his five-year-old son. As an … Continue reading
Thoughts on Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think (by Jill)
I started a post on this book about a week ago and it seems to have vanished off my hard drive. That’s fine with me, actually, because it was going nowhere fast, and I’m hoping I can do a … Continue reading
Postcards From Purgatory 