![]() If you’ve read my post on the series of books I read to try to understand my study-allergic teenager, you’ll know that I really care about school and my kid really does not. School is important not only for the content (basic math, chemistry, biology, physics, literature, grammar, foreign languages, sports) but also for the skills it requires young people to learn: communicating in writing, explaining your reasoning step by step, memorizing information, analyzing and synthesizing, problem-solving, planning, organizing, reflecting. Even if he goes on to study music, and forgets everything he knows about particle theory or Shakespeare, I want him to learn how to learn. And that’s where Cal Newport comes in. When I first saw his book at our school library, I groaned inwardly, “Great. More advice to stress out our already high-achieving prep schoolers.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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![]() Call me Ishmael. One of the most famous first sentences in English-language literature. And yet, while most people know that Moby Dick is the name of a white whale and that he was pursued by one-legged Captain Ahab, how many have the courage to sit down with all 641 small-font pages and follow the ship Pequod round the globe? I confess I didn’t. I needed the help of William Hootkins’ incredible audio recording (Naxos, 2005) to get me through it. It’s close to 25 hours long and it feels like I spent two or three months slowly listening to the dense prose, dipping into the Penguin Drop Caps edition when I had to return the audiobook to the library and wait for it to be available again. I don’t think this book could be published today. We don’t have time for long sentences or exhaustive treatments of a subject. We deal in slogans and sound bytes. Who sits by the fire with family and reads aloud from a book when there are lifetimes of YouTube videos to watch? So why does Moby Dick endure?
![]() If you want to write a certain genre, you’ve got to read all you can in that genre, at least 100 titles, says Heather Sellers in Chapter by Chapter. So, I googled lists of best historical fiction and The Red Tent by Anita Diamant was on most of them. It’s the story of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter by Leah, given only a chapter in Genesis 34. It’s a confusing account, since Shechem, son of Hamor, apparently rapes Dinah (no consent given?) but then takes her into his home, wanting to marry her. He is so desperate for her hand in marriage he agrees to Simeon and Levi’s deceitful condition that he and all the men of the city be circumcised. While Shechem and his men are recovering from the procedure, Simeon and Levi descend upon the town and slaughter every male and take the women, children, livestock and everything else for themselves. When confronted by their father Jacob about the trouble this has brought upon him, they justify their violence by saying “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?” And that’s all we know about Dinah. So how did Anita Diamant write 352 pages in her voice?
![]() When I was given the “R” title in the Penguin Drop Caps series I really had no idea what to expect. I was delighted by the rich azure cover, the cobalt page edges and the swirly gold cover initial embellished with an Indian motif, but all I knew about Salman Rushdie was based on an ad campaign in the Toronto subway system promoting some new book of his and the news that Muslim clerics had issued a fatwa against him. Because of the subway ads I assumed he was a Canadian writer. And because of the scary-sounding fatwa against his book The Satanic Verses I assumed he was promoting some kind of paganism that was offensive to Muslims. Wrong and wrong again. |
Carolyn JohnsonIn order to slow down my frenetic book-eating, I'm writing reviews of the books I read to better digest them. Bon appétit! Archives
August 2019
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