Freshman Reading — Your Help Needed

I teach at a small liberal-arts college in the northwest USA. One of the things we have here (as more and more colleges do) is an introductory course for first-year students, intended to give them a sense of college work, give them a bond with a small group of fellow students, give them a regular meeting [...]

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Sunday Salon: No Fear Classics

” If the classics are so damn good, why aren’t people lining up outside bookshops to buy them?” That’s the question Mark Bastable asks in this hilarious and insightful article at BiblioBuffet that I first discovered via Pages Turned. Go read it—now. It’s worth it. When you’re done, just click that handy back button, and you’ll find me waiting here. … [...]

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Read-a-Thon Updates!

Today is the big day! As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m not in for the whole 24 hours, but I’m going to read as much as I can today, updating on this post as I go. Unfortunately, I woke up sick last night. I remains to be seen whether it was just something [...]

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Animals Make Us Human (audio)

Sometimes a poor interview can ruin a perfectly good book. I heard animal science expert Temple Grandin interviewed on NPR several years ago. The interviewer focused almost entirely on Grandin’s personal experience as an autistic person and her observations of animals. I was left with the definite impression that Grandin had come up with an oddball theory—that [...]

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Read-a-Thon Time!

A day of nothing but reading. What could be better? How about reading with blogging friends around the world and for a cause? This Saturday, more than 300 book bloggers and others around the globe will be devoting the day to reading as part of Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-Thon. I participated last October (but missed the April [...]

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The House of the Spirits

One of the best books I’ve read this year is Love in the Time of Cholera. It swept me away in the most wonderful way. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende reminded me of that marvelous book, but it never quite stirred my soul. This book, Allende’s first novel, follows the fictional Trueba family [...]

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L.A. Confidential

There’s hardboiled fiction, which portrays crime and violence unsentimentally, and in which the detective is usually cool, cocky, and flippant, but relatively honest. Then there’s noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective at all, but a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator — something like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings [...]

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Sunday Salon: Fictional History

Last week, Jenny passed along this interesting Times Online article about the potential of historical fiction for the teaching of history by making it something more than dry dates. We decided that it would be fun to talk a bit about what we’ve learned from historical fiction and to share a few of our favorites. Teresa: [...]

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The Victory (Morland Dynasty #12)

Sea battles, cholera, illegitimate children, and a love that dare not speak its name. These are the elements that bring the drama to the 12th book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s ambitious Morland Dynasty series. This book covers some of the action at sea during the Napoleonic Wars, as one of the men of the family and [...]

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Down and Out in Paris and London

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it [...]

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