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Great Expectations
Print PDF Despite my affection for Dickens, I’ve never re-visited the first of his novels that I remember reading: Great Expectations, first encountered under the excellent guidance of Meg Hawley in the ninth grade. After my lengthy streak of American … Continue reading
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Cloud Atlas
Print PDF Once again I’ve gone off my reading diet. After it was recommended by multiple friends, I decided to read Cloud Atlas, a 2004 novel by British author David Mitchell. Its status as a novel is questionable, as it … Continue reading
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Tom Sawyer
Print PDF In the pantheon of Southern literature, the names of Twain and Faulkner stand matched for first place. Thanks to an enjoyable high school experience with As I Lay Dying and an excellent honors seminar on Faulkner as an … Continue reading
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Moby Dick
Print PDF One can hardly undertake a program of American literature without confronting Moby Dick, the quintessential Great American Novel. Perhaps due to its daunting size, or to a dimly remembered aversion to Billy Budd in high school, I have … Continue reading
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Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Print PDF Last summer, I read The Whole Five Feet by Christopher R. Beha, an account of that author’s journey through the Harvard Classics. I was struck by the fact that the first work in that series was Benjamin Franklin’s … Continue reading
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Solar
Print PDF As previously noted, my reading plan for 2010 consists of a steady diet of classic Americana. Nevertheless, I could not resist the temptation presented by a new novel from Ian McEwan. While I don’t read a great deal … Continue reading
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The Ambassadors
Print PDF “Of course I move among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric.” This statement by protagonist Lambert Strether sums up the experience of reading The Ambassadors by Henry James. The book is a bundle of contradictions: simple in plot yet … Continue reading
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The Country of the Pointed Firs
Print PDF I had never heard of Sarah Orne Jewett until my friend Brian included her novella The Country of the Pointed Firs on his impromptu list of recommended American works. I don’t think that this work has attained anything … Continue reading
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The Last of the Mohicans
Print PDF I’m afraid that my foray into American literature is not off to an auspicious start. I have been defeated by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It isn’t a terribly long book, and I expected to … Continue reading
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Mosses from an Old Manse
Print PDF I’ve been thinking lately about how little I know about the literature of my own country. Of course I read Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd, and a few others in high school, and I took a seminar on Faulkner … Continue reading
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